Exhaustion Is Not a Status Symbol
We set out to transform the world of work with agile, yet we've heard the Scrum sprint cycle described as a “hamster wheel,” an endless conveyor belt of backlog and sprint reviews that developers cannot escape. Join Melissa Boggs in a discussion about the pitfalls of a competitive culture and how we in the Scrum community, even with the best of intentions, could be accidentally responsible for continuing to spin the hamster wheel. Hero culture has been discussed before, but have we addressed our own potential culpability in creating it? We need to make sure that the principles and practices of Scrum are being used for good, not for evil. We'll explore the dangers of exhaustion as a status symbol—for our organizational culture, our teams, and ourselves. Discuss the specific risks of inadvertently creating a competitive, exhausted culture within an agile transformation and the ways in which we can leverage the agile values and principles in order to mitigate those risks. Come to take a look inward and assess your own attitudes and views about work-life balance.
Melissa Boggs is the Chief ScrumMaster for the Scrum Alliance. Together with the Chief Product Owner and the exceptional staff, Melissa seeks to fulfill the Scrum Alliance's vision of transforming the world of work. Since 2001, Melissa has embraced experiences in leadership, business, and product development. Her experience with applying, consulting, coaching, and training agile values and principles spans executive teams, software teams, marketers, and educators in domains such as healthcare, public education, e-learning, security software, government agencies, and communication technology. As a consultant and as an executive, she has consistently embodied the Scrum values, and additionally holds dear her personal values of Courage, Empathy, and Creativity. Melissa is a Certified Enterprise Coach (CEC), Certified Team Coach (CTC), Certified Agile Leader 1 (CAL1), Certified LeSS Practitioner (CLP), Kanban Management Professional (KMP I), and a Project Management Professional (PMP). She holds an MBA in IT Management and a B.S. in Information Technology from Western Governors University.