With the popularity of Scrum, ScrumMaster has become a de facto role on many agile projects.

In this thought-provoking session, we’ll explore the ScrumMaster role and its key challenges. We’ll discuss why teams end up with dysfunctional ScrumMasters, and how that hurts agile projects. We’ll explore common ScrumMaster anti-patterns, and why they occur. We’ll challenge the ScrumMaster role, compare it to other models, and address if agile teams really need a ScrumMaster.

This promises to be a lively and interactive session that may change your views on how to structure a Scrum team.

By now, your company has made the transition to Agile. “Sprints”, “backlogs”, and “retrospectives” are everyday words, but you’re also discovering the serious challenges that software agility brings to product management. The Product Owners, who have been scattered across multiple teams, are not cohesively aligned around the same prioritized set of corporate initiatives and strategies. In addition, there are cross-product dependencies that are not being effectively recognized and addressed. My company’s solution was to build a single, enterprise level, Unified Backlog.