About this podcast episode

Angela Johnson shifted her career from project management to a waterfall delivery method to adaptive, agile approaches.

Today, Angela and Bill share stories and examples of how to make a common role change: that of a project manager shifting their career to that of a Scrum Master.

Here is what you will learn:

✅ Defining the project manager and Scrum Master roles

✅ Understand the stances of a Scrum Master

✅ What you need to unlearn to be successful

✅ Focus areas for your personal development

✅ How to recognize agile anti-patterns

Transcript

(transcripts are auto-generated, so please excuse the brevity)

You’re a project manager, looking to transition into this new Scrum Master role what are some of the things that you need to think about and do?

Bill Raymond: Sometimes we have to touch the stove to realize what hot means. When we were doing that in-person work and they would play the Imperial March from Star Wars, you know, you’d hear this dun dun, dun. Oh yeah, Darth Vader, Scrum Master. Probably not, you know, probably not. And I was really spending more time on technical tasks and documents and those sorts of things.

Intro: Welcome to the Agile Inaction Podcast with Bill Raymond. Bill will explore how business disruptors are adopting agile techniques to gain a competitive advantage in this fast-paced technology driven market.

Remedies for a Scrum Master with a waterfall hangover

Bill Raymond: Hi, and welcome to the podcast. Today I’m joined by Angela Johnson, certified Scrum trainer and author of the Scrum Master_ Files_.

Bill Raymond: Hi Angela, how are you today?

Angela Johnson: Hi Bill. I’m doing well.

Bill Raymond: Great. I am looking forward to this conversation. We’re going to talk about remedies for a Scrum Master with a waterfall hangover. I’m going to be interested to learn about this, but before we get started, could you share a little bit about yourself?

Angela Johnson: Absolutely. I help people change the way they do work with this thing called Scrum, so I’m licensed by the Scrum Alliance to deliver, anything really the Scrum Alliance offers. Popularly, that’s the certified Scrum Master credential.

Angela Johnson: I have a small team based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We have a bit of a side hustle where we offer space for people who are holding business meetings and events, not just like our own training classes, but companies who’ve really let their own space go, but want a place together.

Angela Johnson: So we have West End Conference Center in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis, St. Paul. And I’ve owned the company for going on my 13th year this year. So a bit of an entrepreneur as well as being passionate about using my skills to help people become Scrum Masters.

Collaborative leadership team

Bill Raymond: Can you talk a little bit about your company?

Angela Johnson: Absolutely. So Collaborative leadership team was founded in 2010. I honestly started off as kind of an army of one, just to have an entity to kind of pass through my own work. And I started just getting busy. And one of the things that always resonates with me is, how do you better teach teamwork if you aren’t part of a team?

Angela Johnson: So I had to build a team of my own. And so we are this small mighty Scrum team here in Minnesota, helping all kinds of companies make this transition. Software, departments are popular software companies popularly use Scrum and agile. We have the benefit of bringing this to all kinds of companies that wanna change the way they do work.

Angela Johnson: So we have a lot of non-software organizations that we work with as well.

About Angela’s career shift

I wanna get into this story about remedies for a Scrum Master with a waterfall hangover. But let’s get started first with a little bit about your shift in your career.

Angela Johnson: Absolutely. I kind of fell into all this technology stuff. You know, coming out of college I was really like, I don’t really know what I wanna do. When somebody talked me into working on a help desk, and the theory that the company had was, we need people with people skills, we can teach the technology stuff.

Angela Johnson: And for some reason I picked up the programming and database skills very easily and in leaving the call center and finding out what people can make in the greater software world who have database skills. That became my career for a while. And I just kind of burned out on tuning databases, fixing databases.

Angela Johnson: So I fell into teaching, which I’ve always had a passion for, but the Oracle organization I was working for at the time said, hey, you’d be really good at managing these projects. So we’re going to have you manage, these software development projects. And they asked me to get my PMI credential, the project management professional credential.

Angela Johnson: So I have done lots of waterfall in my career, whether you call it SDLC, project management waterfall, and for me personally, I use the phrase hangover cause that’s kind of how it felt. I felt like we’re discouraging change we’re trying to be very administrative and putting out status reports and managing folks with Gantt charts.

Angela Johnson: And when I wanted to make this change to agile, more specifically Scrum, it took a while. It wasn’t really intuitive because the longer you work a particular way, that can become very permanent. And so I would say, you know, it took a good couple of years before, I’m like, oh, I’ve been doing it kind of backwards.

Angela Johnson: That’s why I refer to it as a bit of that fog, right? That hangover hanging on.

The Project Management Role

Bill Raymond: Yeah. I can totally understand that, you know, as a project manager, and I wanna say I continue to be a project manager to this day. There’s a lot of projects that I work on that are absolutely worth following that strict methodology that you’re referring to, and I believe in that. But also I know that when we’re working on especially extremely complex projects where you don’t know exactly how you’re going to implement things such as software development, using an adaptive approach like Agile is certainly much more efficient, I think.

Bill Raymond: And I kind of wanna get a little bit more into that. Can you just talk, you kind of talked a little bit about your role as a project manager, but can you step back and maybe talk about project management and a little bit of the history of that and what it might look like to be in a project management role.

Angela Johnson: Absolutely. And one of the things I point out to people, none of these things are bad and none of these things are good. You know, I tend to be pretty colorful with my anecdotes and my phrases such as waterfall hangover, but I always respect people for their choices. When people say, I would like to use project management, I want to be a project manager, great, you have the gift of free will.

Angela Johnson: That’s your choice. Scrum is just a different choice on the menu. So I think sometimes when people meet someone like me, who has chosen to only work in an agile or a Scrum way. It can come across as a judgment and I never want that to be the case. I respect people for their choices because I like you, Scrums not always the greatest choice on the menu. It’s not always the greatest thing since slice bread.

Angela Johnson: Project management. By definition, projects are temporary. Start and an end, they’re a temporary endeavor, whether you look in the project management, body of knowledge or the dictionary.

Angela Johnson: And so when you’re talking about somebody having to manage that, there’s all kinds of moving pieces and it’s all about discouraging change once we have signed off on things like project charters and requirements documents and those sorts of things. So it’s, in my opinion, in my experience, very administrative.

Angela Johnson: it can be very administrative for a project manager to execute on all those deliverables. That’s not to say that a project manager doesn’t have to engage in soft skills as well because there is an element of facilitation when it comes to meetings or conversations and those sorts of things. But there is also a heavy deliverable component that project managers are responsible.

Angela Johnson: And quite frankly, I always kind of felt like the scapegoat, a little bit. You know, it’s like things were going wrong. It’s like, oh, they called the project manager and said, what is going on? You felt like your head was on the block. And then when things were going well, what an amazing team. We have the dream team.

Angela Johnson: It’s like, okay, get all the pain, no glory.

Bill Raymond: I can understand where you’re coming from there, because very often the project manager role does not, they’re not empowered typically to make many decisions. What they’re there for is to make sure that everyone’s working on what they need to be working on. That they’re managing scope and budget and time.

Plan and planning

Angela Johnson: And one of the things that I share with mystudents that are really trying to figure out what’s different between project management in Scrum or why are those Gantt charts not applicable in Scrum? What was helpful for me is really learning a lot of the history. And so one of the things I point out is that Gantt charts were invented in World War I, the person who invented that, artifact, so to speak, Henry L. Gantt, so it’s named after him, of course.

That became the popular way to show the plan. And in the United States military, that was a popular artifact. Well, along came Dwight D. Eisenhower years later, and he has this wonderful quote that if anybody searches for Eisenhower quotes you can find “ the plan is useless, but the art of planning is indispensable”.

Angela Johnson: So, from Eisenhower’s point of view, he is like, the plan stale the minute it comes off the printer. The planning is the more important part so that we can adapt. So the respond to change over following a plan in the Agile manifesto was inspired by that Dwight D. Eisenhower quote. So when we talk about agility, adaptive ways of working, Scrum in particular embracing change the Gantt charts never were about that.

Angela Johnson: They were all about discouraging change. So it’s a very different way of thinking about some of these things compared to project management.

Bill Raymond: Oh Absolutely. And I guess it’s probably worth mentioning right now, you just talked about the Gantt chart and the history of it. If anyone listening to this podcast right now has not seen a Gantt chart, it kind of starts at the top. It’s, think of an Excel spreadsheet, there’s a lot of lines on the left that list out all the tasks that need to be done. And then to the next column is a start date and a finished date and duration. And that draws lines connecting all of them. And if you look at it, it kind of looks like a waterfall. It starts at the top with one or two lines and just keeps going from left and right. And that’s where waterfall comes.

Angela Johnson: And when people say, I don’t know what a Gantt chart is, I usually say, bless you. You know, it’s like you have nothing to unlearn. We’re starting with a clean slate and not a hangover.

The responsibility of a Scrum Master

Bill Raymond: Right. And I think that’s actually a good transition for us here because when we talk about the project management role, very often as organizations start to adopt agility, they also adopt some form of a framework. And that framework is very often something called Scrum. And there’s many other types of frameworks, but they all have a fairly similar process where you’re doing this work in a more iterative approach.

If you’re coming from a role of a project manager, very often the role that you transition to is that of a Scrum Master. And it’s not a one-to-one match between what you might have been doing and what the Scrum Master does. And I think that’s why I was really interested in speaking to you because we do hear in this podcast from project managers saying, I have this new Scrum Master role and I’m a little confused by it.

Bill Raymond: And so I think it’s really going to be useful for anyone that’s taking on this new role to understand what the differences are. Maybe you could talk shortly about the responsibility of a Scrum Master.

Angela Johnson: Absolutely. And one of the words I use a lot in the explanation is different. Because as stated previously, I never want anybody to feel, oh, one thing is bad, one thing is good, one is better than the other. Cause that’s not true. These are just different choices. And so if you think about the umbrella term of agile, like you said, there are very different choices.

Angela Johnson: There’s different frameworks inside that. Well, just like sports, there’s different choices. There’s baseball, there’s American football, we call it soccer, but the Europeans would say, no, no, no, that’s football. You know, but, so there’s very different roles. There’s very different responsibilities, yet they’re all sports.

Angela Johnson: So when a project manager says, where do I fit? I try to caution people away from that line of thinking, and it’s what do you want to do? So talk to me about the aspects of project management that you enjoyed or enjoy, or more specifically, the things that you don’t wanna do. Because the first thing you have to understand is that a Scrum Master has zero deliverables.

Angela Johnson: Zero status reports, zero charts and graphs. So my little phrase there is always get your hands off the team’s work. Get your hands off the product owner’s work, and that throws some people for a loop. Well, what if we wanna know about the schedule, the scope, all that happy stuff. Product owner, it’s right there in the name.

Angela Johnson: Product owner, they own anything to do with the product. So the Scrum Master adopts different stances that really tap into all those soft skills, facilitation, coaching, guiding, and in this case potentially teaching or instructing. And there’s three parts to the Scrum Master set of accountabilities. It’s not just the developers. It’s not just the people doing the work that the Scrum Master is providing that kind of care and feeding and guidance for.

Angela Johnson: It is also the product owner and then the greater organization on the Scrum team’s behalf. So it’s a lot, if performed as intended, but the individual in question has to be willing to kiss their Gantt charts to goodbye. They have to be willing to let the team do the work, let the product owner do their work, right? And not put their hands all over it because that actually disempowers those people.

Angela Johnson: It contributes to a condition called learned helplessness. If we start taking the ball away from our players, and so that’s not something we’d want a Scrum Master to do. So that shift can really throw people for a loop, especially if as a project manager, they’re like, well, wait a minute. I do put my hands all over different deliverables.

Angela Johnson: I do have this administrative aspect of my job. Not anymore if it’s in Scrum Mastery. Right. If you’re going to be a Scrum Master.

Challenges you might face when making that transition from project manager to Scrum master

Bill Raymond: Well, that’s great. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. Maybe you could talk about what it’s like when you’re a project manager making that shift to the role. What are some of the challenges? I mean, you already mentioned some of them, but maybe we could get down to some of the more details of the challenges that you might face when you’re making that transition.

Angela Johnson: Yeah, writing is a big one, my friend. Writing is a tough one. And I have seen many a project manager transitioning to Scrum Master get their pad and pen out or get their keyboard out to start taking notes and it’s like, what are you doing? Well, I have to write this down. For who? Well, I might wanna refer to it later.

Angela Johnson: Why? Because if it’s for the team, they are supposed to be capturing things for themselves. And as a people geek, I get really into the brain science behind this stuff. And there’s a brain science principle that demonstrates people who write things down learn the most about the subject. So if we think about creating software, or building products, or creating services in companies, we don’t want a role like Scrum Master who’s supposed to be neutral.

Angela Johnson: They’re supposed to be objective knowing the most about it. That doesn’t make sense. Don’t we want the people building the product or service to know the most about it? Well, the way that they do that is through that knowledge acquisition of writing things down. And then you’ll have that former project manager say, yeah but, what if I wanna take a note for something to follow up on later? I coach those folks on writing it and showing exactly what they wrote to the team. Like if it’s going to be following up on an impediment, for example, very briefly writing that note, but transparently showing it to the team and then putting the pen back down.

Angela Johnson: Because if they’re busy writing heads down, looking at a page or their face or their eyes are averted to a different screen, they’re missing the job. How are they going to neutrally facilitate? How are they going to help people through the conversation if they’re not paying any attention? And so one of the things I had to do with a teammate of my own that was struggling because he had transitioned from a business analysis role, he’s like, I’m used to writing.

Angela Johnson: What do I do with my hands? And I’m like, put ‘em in your pockets. You know, I’m like, we’ve gotta cultivate a new set ofskills here. And so if you need to put them in your pockets to get comfortable not being the one writing, and to force you to watch faces, to watch eyebrows, to listen actively for where to jump in.

Angela Johnson: Because facilitation, literally means making easier, helping people accomplish their goal and objective, not being the know-it-all about the subject. So it’s more about that servant leadership stance. So those are some of the real tactical things I see. That’s, you know, hence my phrase, get your hands off the team’s work.

Angela Johnson: I’m like, put the pen down, step away from the keyboard. We’ve gotta focus on a whole different set of activities.

Let’s talk a little bit about what some of those activities are.

Angela Johnson: Active listening is a big one. In my classes, when we do a little bit of role playing of the Scrum Master potentially facilitating neutrally during a refinement conversation, people at first also notice they wanna jump in and offer their own opinion. And so I point out it’s not about you, it’s about the stakeholders giving their input, the developers who are going to do the work, giving their input.

Angela Johnson: And so you’re not supposed to be thinking and spending all your brain power on ideas you have. You’re supposed to be thinking about, is everyone else getting an opportunity to contribute? Are more people trying to talk all at the same time? And it would be really useful for you to jump in as the neutral facilitator and stack the conversation to help.

Angela Johnson: Oh, first Bill, then Angela. So now you just served the group and made it easier for people to be heard. You also can add value by making sure that the person was done talking before we move on to another stakeholder because sometimes people will ask a question when there’s really an idea behind the question, and her product owner isn’t supposed to be neutrally facilitating because they are opinionated.

Angela Johnson: It’s their product. So a talented facilitator can also say, well Bill, did that bring up another idea or did that address the question? Or did you already give your input and then we can move on to the next person. And so in order to be able to do that, we have to pay attention and actively listen.

Angela Johnson: And when people notice or see me demonstrate that, and they get a chance to practice it for the first time in class, they’re like, oh, that’s so hard. I wanted to jump in and give my opinions. That’s why we practice, right? That’s why we practice. Because it is a different set of accountabilities than just writing or taking notes or, and I’m not trying to say that those things aren’t important in different ways of working, but in this way of working, it’s all about people doing for themselves an empowered team of developers, an empowered product owner, and so on.

Bill Raymond: So if we talk about that, we’re listening a lot, but also oftentimes when we’re in these meetings, as you said, the Scrum Master does play a role in helping to close impediments. Now, as a project manager, one of the things that I would do is say, I’m taking that on. Let me help you close that issue. I’ll go and talk to all of these people and then I’ll come back to you and tell you how we’re resolving it. How would a Scrum Master handle closing an impediment like that?

Angela Johnson: Pretty similarly with a little bit of a twist on the way to intervene because the product owner is really responsible for pulling together who, what, why. Setting that product goal and those sorts of things. The developers own the how or the solution. So depending on what the impediment is, we always wanna let people solve impediments for themselves if they can.

Angela Johnson: But one of the things I will ask as a Scrum Master, so this isa coaching question, listeners can just write down and steal from me. I will literally say, would it be a better use of my time to chase that down? Because if it’s something super technical and it makes sense for the developers who are doing that work to follow that up because they really wanna know what that resolution is.

Angela Johnson: Absolutely. But what if the developer says, you know, my machine isn’t working and there’s a department, you know, here at the company that has to intervene. I don’t have access to take care of this myself. I can pair with somebody else. Let me chase that down as the Scrum Master. It’s a better use of my time to go check all that administrative kind of things, red tape to get you your new machine, because your job is the Scrum Masters, is to keep the producers producing. So, hey, I heard you say you can pair with a teammate today to get that done, or you have a backup solution to keep working. I’ll go chase this other thing down. Or likewise with a product owner, if they’re running into trouble with getting a stakeholder on their calendar or getting some sort of answer about a vendor that’s intervening on their product. Hey, product owner, why don’t you do what you can do?

Angela Johnson: Let me chase down that organizational impediment.Being a project manager and having been in the project management business for many years, one of the things that I’ve noticed about myself and many of my peers is that we kind of have this hero mentality, where we feel like we should be just taking on all of these things and sorting them out.

Bill Raymond: Someone says something, we immediately take ownership of it, and I think that’s something that’s can be hard to do if you’re coming from that world.

Angela Johnson: Absolutely. Sometimes it’s better to let the people involved chase something down. And especially if it’s super specific and you would just, you know, waste more time trying to translate or get lost in translation because we don’t want the Scrum Master to fall into the trap of being a go-between or any sort of oh, you have to go through me to get to the team.

Angela Johnson: Because we do encourage individuals and interactions. We do encourage business people and developers working together daily. And that was me just quoting two different lines from the Agile manifesto.

Angela Johnson: So we do wanna make sure that we’re more of a conduit and not necessarily a go-between.

If you’re a project manager and you’re familiar with everything that we talked about earlier, managing Gantt chart scope, quality time, budget, those are some of the things that you worry about all of the time, and now you’re making the shift to a Scrum Master.

What are some core concepts that we need to realign in our mind?

I always advise people skills, people skills, people skills. A talented Scrum Master needs, oh yeah, people skills. And so I had somebody literally say this to me in a workshop recently. He says, well, what if I don’t really like working with people? And I said, thank you for your honesty, that would be a very self-aware exercise to go through before pursuing the job.

Bill Raymond: Become an author.

Angela Johnson: Right. Exactly. I’m a big proponent of education, so why don’t we educate you on the role and then if you come out of this workshop with, you know, now that I know more about these people skills, this is not the role for me. That is just as valuable in my opinion, as saying, this is the role for me.

Angela Johnson: So I think it’s a worthwhile exercise for individuals to take stock of what they like doing and more importantly, what they do not like doing. Because a lot of this role is helping people when there’s times of conflict. Helping people when there’s uncomfortable confrontations, that’s the time to roll up your sleeves, potentially put on your black and white stripes and grab your whistle.

Angela Johnson: It is not the time to abandon the team because there are people who have said, I don’t like intervening when there’s confrontation. Scrum Master may not be the role for you. You may wanna look at something else. So I think it’s a worthwhile exercise really with any job pursuit to take stock of the things that do make you happier, that do give you energy, and then equally as important to make a list that says, Hmm, these are the things that I would not wanna do that would not make me happy on a daily basis.

Angela Johnson: And then see where that lines up, because if the stars align more so to some of the project management skills, there’s their answer. Or if it aligns more, like it did for me, with the people stuff. There’s your answer. And one other thing about what you said about budget as a card carrying project manager, who managed multimillion dollar Oracle projects, I have to ask people to get real honest about what that meant.

Angela Johnson: And for me, in my experience, it meant tracking the budget, tracking scope changes, tracking schedule, reporting out. That’s not the same as being empowered to cut scope. Those are two different things. Tracking versus being the one saying, we are not doing this, because people will say, well, isn’t the product owner then just a project manager if they own the scope, the schedule and the budget?

Angela Johnson: It’s like, no, because the product owner is empowered, they have authority. They don’t need to ask for permission to spend money, they don’t need to ask for permission to cut scope. So tracking and being empowered are two different things. And that sometimes I think people don’t understand that nuance.

Bill Raymond: Right. That’s really good advice. Thank you.

The transition to the Scrum Master role

Bill Raymond: So let’s talk about that formal transition then. You’re a project manager, you’re looking to transition into this new Scrum Master role in particular, what are some of the things that you need to think about and do?

Bill Raymond: I would educate yourself, and I don’t think that I did that enough. When I took my first Scrum Master role, I was like, how hard could it be? This is just like project management, right? And I jumped in and I think at the time I was probably inadvertently reinforcing, anti patterns. But sometimes we have to stumble before we walk perfectly.

Bill Raymond: Sometimes we have to touch the stove to realize what hot means. I mean, we’re experiential learners as adults. I knew I was being a bit too much command and control, as a Scrum Master and really treating it more as a project management function. When there was a team I was working with as their Scrum Master, they would hear me coming around the corner.

Bill Raymond: So this is clearly pre covid, when we were doing that in-person work and they would play the Imperial March from Star Wars, you know, you’d hear this dun dun, dun. Oh yeah, Darth Vader, Scrum Master. Probably not, you know, probably not. And I was really spending more time on technical tasks and documents and those sorts of things.

Bill Raymond: The book that gave me my aha moment was written by Ken Schwaber, who’s one of the co-creators of Scrum. It is called _Agile Project Management with _Scrum. And when I bought that book, I’m like, hey, this is for me, I’m a project manager who is interested in learning more about agile, and I’m looking to become a Scrum Master.

Bill Raymond: And as I read his book, he of course beats you up for 200 pages to tell you there is no such thing, right? There is no project manager in Scrum. This is different. This is different. I had my aha moment, through his use of the word different. I did have a little meltdown before I got there because I kind of envisioned myself out of a job.

Bill Raymond: I kind of envisioned myself with a cardboard sign that said, we’ll manage your projects for food until I got it. And I’m like, oh, different, that means I get to choose. I like helping people through conflict, I like helping people work through the conversation more proactively. I like problem solving. I like chasing down impediments.

Bill Raymond: I think I’m really going to give this Scrum thing a try. The other thing besides that book that maybe half my aha moment, is one of the members of the team that would play said Imperial March, really called me on the carpet one day and I needed it. He was one of those people that I think all of us would call that hero you described earlier, because he would finish things, he would help team members out, he would pull in more tasks and I kept calling him a rockstar and I kept doing that in front of the other team members. So he pulled me aside one day and he said, could you please stop doing that? And I’m like, why? I’m giving you a compliment. I’m trying to build you up here, isn’t that what a Scrum Master does?

Bill Raymond: And he is like, this is a team. There is no I in team. This is we. And it’s really detracting from that sense when you call me out as an individual. And it was like big aha moment. I don’t think, without those failures I would’ve had the aha moment, however, as an experiential learner, you know, that first attempt in learning, that was my fail.

Bill Raymond: I needed that to go, ah, Scrum Mastery is something different. Rather than me making my assumption that, oh, this is just a different way to do project management, because it wasn’t.

And that I guess, goes right into the concept of psychological safety of people think that someone else is more important on the team, or maybe seen as better than they may not speak up as much, they may not offer as much value, because they’re concerned that there’s some other people that are seen as maybe more important than them.

Angela Johnson: Right. And a Scrum Master really has to be tuned in. That’s why I say they need those people skills to become that people geek to really tune in and get people to work together. Do people feel safe asking each other for help working together, or are they feeling that they’re, you know, being called out and that kind of thing?

Angela Johnson: Because this is really based on a metaphor for team sports, Scrum rugby, like huddle scrimmage. So we have to make sure that people are playing nicely together too. So a Scrum Master really has to get to know their players. They really have to invest in a lot of that time outside of just the events.

Bill Raymond: Now, I guess as we’re wrapping up this podcast, I’d like to know are there any good takeaways that you’ve learned that you’d like to share with someone that’s a project manager taking on the new role that maybe you haven’t discussed so far?

Bill Raymond: The big thing is choice. So do you want the job? Educate yourself on the job and then decide if you want it. You may need somebody giving you feedback, because you may not even notice that you inadvertently slip into the old mindset. So I would really make sure that they have someone that they, you know, they look up to, that can mentor them or somebody that they have that is more experienced, who can coach them, but really get their hands on anything they can to educate themselves and decide if they want it. In-person classes, I do really encourage people to do role play and some instructors don’t do it anymore, and I believe in it. Because if they can’t get a little taste of the job in a safe setting, like a training class, where the bar’s real low, nobody’s getting fired, it’s not impacting anybody’s job, then how are they going to know?

Bill Raymond: Because I think it’s, the stakes are too high to throw somebody into a job without that kind of experience. So maybe they wanna try it in a volunteer setting also, or job shadow and things like that. Anything that can get them that little taste of it, before the stakes are higher in a company, with a job and a salary and all those sorts of things.

How can you reach out to Angela?

This has been a great conversation with you today, Angela Johnson. If anyone wants to reach out to you and discuss this any further, would they be able to do that?

Angela Johnson: Absolutely.

Bill Raymond: How can they reach you?

Angela Johnson: LinkedIn is where I tend to hang out on social media. When your name is Angela Johnson, about 32,000 of those come up on LinkedIn, so a little tip to find me easily is just put in Angela Johnson Scrum and I pop right up.

Bill Raymond: Perfect. And do you have a website or a place that people can go to learn more about you and what you do?

Angela Johnson: For sure. Our company is Collaborative Leadership Team. That is a mouthful, but if you type in collaborativeleadershipteam.com, you’ll find us, or we have an abbreviated url you can try Co-leadteam.com works as well.

Bill Raymond: Perfect. And of course, we’ll make sure that your LinkedIn profile and your website are available on the agileinaction.com website and also, of course, if you’re listening to this in a podcast app right now, just scroll down to the description, the details, and you’ll see the links there as well.

Bill Raymond: I’ll also put the Ken Schwaber book in there that you mentioned, so that if anyone wants to get started on this role, you can learn about how to unlearn project management and work in the role of a Scrum Master.

Bill Raymond: Angela Johnson, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much.

Angela Johnson: Thanks for having me.

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Outro: Thank you for listening to the Agile and Action Podcast with Bill Raymond. Subscribe now to stay current on the latest trends in team, organization, and agile techniques. Please take a moment to rate and comment to help us grow our community. This podcast is produced in affiliation with Camber Mast, L L c, and our executive producer is Rayma Daon.

Outro: If there is a topic you would like Bill to cover, contact him directly at bill.Raymond@agileinaction.com.