We are neither Jira administrator nor gate keepers

I was having dinner with few hard core developers (yes!!! they eat, breath and drink technology) yesterday and as per them they don't need any scrum master/lean delivery agent/ agile coach/ manager in their team. They don't see the value of having them.

They have a board, they do daily morning standup and collaborate beautifully with customers/domain experts/sales people and above all deploy in production 3 times a day.  So thought of summarizing our role for them. 

What we are not:

• We are neither gate keepers nor quality control representatives
• We are neither managing team members nor their schedule
• We are neither there to schedule meetings for team nor to make sure they show up on time
• Our job is also not to facilitate meeting for team 
• We are neither a lead developer nor a project manager
• We are not responsible for their personal development as well
• We are not Jira administrator as well

Now! you must be thinking, what we do, Am I right?

WHAT WE ARE!!!! 

• We are people who observes events and behaviors for long period of time to provide focus and direction for improvement. We look for what is possible in a given scenario. This is not always seen from the Visual board, one has to observe and pay attention to it.
• We should be able to understand a situation to come up with actions out of them. 
• We should be able to cultivate trust-factor between management and team about each other capability and involvement. 
• We should be able to suggest an improvement focusing on whole vs. part. Development is just one piece of entire puzzle.
• We are there to ensure, we fail as fast as possible and organization should be ready to experiment and pivot. Imbibing this culture sometime takes months if not years. It is not processes that drives improvement but it's people's initiative.  
• We should provide right information at right time to help team or organization take good decision faster. 
• We should help team to identify fastest way to deliver value
• We should take responsibility for improvement ideas
• We should separate observation from learning, to apply them appropriately. Leading using long-term thinking is our trait, by making small sustainable improvement over time in culture, technology and leadership. 
• We should make sure people have curious mindset. Any thing they try is an experiment. Try for a period of time and evaluate the result. 
• We should be able to learn from outcome, which is more meaningful and valuable than checking off improvement actions. 
• YES! We are their to help team / guide team / coach team if we feel the need of it.

GOSH!! I knew, I can do it. We are like bee on the wall, nobody can see us but are there :). I am sure this list is can be extended by many other colleagues of mine. Please feel free to do so.

Cheers!

Manisha