Badass Answers – Regulators, and New Scrum Masters

“How can a financial institution bring regulators along the Agile journey, to help them realize that Agile actually reduces risk?” – Julio Sanchez

Tough one. No quick fix. Finserv doesn’t like to shake up longstanding regulations and traditions. It’s a highly regulated industry.

The problem is that you have no levers to influence regulators. They don’t have to change, at least not just because you want them to

Influence will happen slowly and over time, but a lot of people read that to give themselves permission not to try. You have to make moves now or you will be behind the curve when it’s really important to make change. Here’s what you can do:

Build relationships – create meetup groups, create conversations, add people to LinkedIn

Making things – successes, innovations, high-performing teams, products, competitive differentiations – that draw attention to your cause. Nothing attracts attention like success. As you evolve, your success will demand changes to regulation, and that success is a form of leverage

Note that your successes and the increased visibility that comes with it will showcase the change that needs to happen, especially if you had to work around legislation and bend rules to get there.

“What’s the best way to transition into Scrum Master with a new CSM?” – Jon Wiggins

This is one of the things coaches are for

Let them do the job based on what they’ve learned

Get them to use Agile principles to self-inspect and adapt, to create and groom backlogs of improvements and to execute on experiments

Your job should be to teach them how to apply Scrum – which is never boilerplate – it is adaptive, and to show them those things that they cannot see (external feedback)

Hopefully the certification has given them training wheels and knowledge to apply. There are a great many things they can’t learn in those two days, and if they don’t already have them, you have to help them get them – like interpersonal skills, influence, grit, problem solving, logic, etc.