About
“And I must be an acrobat, to talk like this and act like that” — Bono, Acrobat
Very original, I must admit, naming this blog after a song lyric. Was MySpace all out of memberships? What, no pictures of cats? Believe it or not, the first name I chose for this blog was “The Cat Herder”. But, then I found out there were other blogs with that same title and my ego couldn’t handle that. I was always fond of that EDS Super Bowl commercial with the cowboys herding cats and then I read Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code, which had a great chapter on managing software developers. Rosenberg made the observation that managing software developers was much like herding cats. Although not an original observation, that chapter has more insights into this strange class of people known as software developers (of which I occasionally still consider myself a member of ;-)) than I’ve read anywhere else.
I don’t manage software developers for a living. I’m a Scrum Master. A what? Yes, you read that correctly, a Scrum Master. I don’t have authority over the teams I work with. I’m more of a coach, maybe a referee in some cases. The teams are self-managed. My job is to help remove obstacles for software development teams. Sometimes those obstacles are rather small like a developer who needs more memory for his development box. Other times the obstacles are large, like when the team doesn’t feel that they have the right knowledge and experience to perform their work. Trickier yet are those obstacles that don’t hit you or anyone else in the face like a well…obstacle. Examples of these not so obvious obstacles include the wrong mix of people on a team, underlying counter-productive company politics affecting teams, lack of innovation, etc. Along with helping the team remove these obstacles, I’m a change agent. Change is all around us these days and it doesn’t magically get any easier by slapping the label of “agile” on yourself or your processes.
Into the third paragraph of the “About” page and I still haven’t explained what the blog title means or why I chose it. Sounds about right to me. I chose the title mainly because I think my role as a change agent can be quite tricky. It’s not so much that I’m acrobatic in walking a hypocritical line as Bono’s lyric would suggest; rather I’m balancing the need for change with the reality that there is only so much change people can handle at any given time.
Maybe the real reason I chose the name of this blog is because I found that picture of the clown figurine on the tightrope. My six year old son, Ethan, often likes to torment me with, “You like clowns, don’t you Dad? You do, don’t you? You LOVE clowns!!!” He knows that my Grandmother bought me a war chest of glass clowns growing up. I’m still not sure why she did this. I don’t recall being particularly fond of clowns as a youngster. Maybe she was trying to give me career guidance at an early age? Hmmm…
It doesn’t seem very professional to write an about page consisting mostly of barely comprehensible garbage (or, as my son likes to intentionally twist the word into, gar-bah-gee), but that’s OK. I figure that leaves me plenty of room to move things up a notch or two in the future. How’s the saying go? “Under promise and over deliver.”