A nonprofit organization was recruiting volunteer scrum masters. I joined a project with that title, but then quickly realized that the particular project was not following scrum at all. Deep breath. Now what?

I took a step back and decided that being a scrum master includes the broader agile mission of enabling a team to work better in terms of people and relationships, processes, tools, whatever.

The project team was meeting weekly – and the meetings did not feel productive. There were about twenty people invited, of whom very few showed up. So I brought this up with the project lead to brainstorm ideas of how to make the meetings more efficient, productive, and worthwhile to attend.

The lead ended up making several changes. First, he realized that there were really two different outcomes we were trying to accomplish. He decided to alternate the weekly meetings between those two areas so as to better focus on each. Second, we created and published a meeting agenda the day before each meeting so that members could start thinking ahead of time about the items on it and could anticipate what we were going to spend time on and prepare. And third, for each meeting he explicitly invited the key people he really wanted to be present for that one.

The lead was very happy with how all of this went. He did not hesitate at all to endorse my skills on LinkedIn when I moved over to a different project and team.

Again, being agile includes enabling and supporting groups to work better in terms of persons and relationships, processes and policies. Any speed bump, inefficiency, or ineffectiveness is fair game for an agilist / scrum master to take on.