My Master Plan for 2015

In my previous blog post, I took some time to reflect on my professional highlights of 2014. Luckily, there were quite some great highlights! In this blog post, I will describe my master plan for 2015. And of course, being an Agile coach, every change will be embraced warmly. The master plan is there to deviate from and hopefully, it will result in some new adventures in my already exciting journey!

It’s my intention to stay at Prowareness in the upcoming years, and by doing so; my personal mission statement can be achieved: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

The goals that I’ve set myself are:
 1. Become a Professional Scrum Trainer. Taking into account all the necessary qualifications, this won’t be an easy ride, but with the support of my buddy and Scrum trainer Stephan van Rooden and my enthusiasm for Scrum, it should be feasible.

2. Continue the success of the Mastership in Scrum sessions. For years the Mastership in Scrum session is one of the best-visited sessions. Together with my colleague Hendrik-Jan van der Waal I have the honor to be the ‘owner’ of the sessions in 2015. I’ll strive to make every monthly session memorable for the attendees by offering a platform where sharing knowledge is key.

3. Give the Scrum Master Advanced training at least once per quarter. This year I gave this training twice; in 2015 I want to double this at least. Given the positive feedback I received from previous training this should definitely be possible, all we need to do is some more promotion.

4. Give the Scrum Framework training at least every two months. This new training is the ideal preparation for professional Scrum training. In one day the participants will get to know all the highlights of the Scrum framework and hereby smoothly enter the professional Scrum training and increase their chances of becoming certified.

5. Write a whitepaper every quarter with the input of multiple colleagues. Recently I read the whitepaper ‘How do you estimate on an Agile project’ by Thoughtworks. The joint effort of multiple colleagues that took place to create this whitepaper gave me the idea to give this a try at Prowareness. Therefore next year I want to rally a team together that will write a whitepaper on a certain topic. The type of contribution might be diverse e.g.: blog posts, comics, sketch notes, everything will be combined into one whitepaper.

6. Write a blog post every week. My biggest passion is writing. The only problem so far was finding time to write. Luckily the problem was quite easy to solve: I only had to give it more priority. The last months I gave I put it on top of my list and the result was promising; I managed to write some nice blog posts. My ambition is to continue this next year and deliver one blog every week.

7. Become a domain expert in the role of Scrum Master and Leadership in an Agile organization. Considering myself an eternal student, becoming a domain expert is, therefore, a logical next step. The focus on the role of Scrum Master fits my ambition to become a Professional Scrum Trainer but also the homonymous advanced training. When I master the Scrum Master role I want to extend it to the area of leadership in an Agile organization. Becoming a domain expert will take a lot of reading, writing, and speaking: already looking forward to it!

8. Visit at least one seminar per quarter. Seminars: the ideal source of limitless inspiration! Every seminar, I end up with an extended reading list, new contacts, and lots of ideas to start with. Enough reasons to visit seminars regularly, the ones I have on my mind right now are Agile Coach Camp, Scrum Day Europe (can’t miss this one considering we’re the main sponsor), and XP Days.

9. Help colleagues achieve success with their own journeys. A nice saying is “help others achieve their dreams and you will achieve yours.” I truly believe this is true; therefore I strive to put as much effort as possible into helping others. But as a precondition you should at least have some solid foundation yourself, hopefully, have obtained that this year.

10. Contribute to refining the Trusted Advisor Framework and the Agility Ladder and put them into practice on my consultancy assignments. The Trusted Advisor Framework and the Agility Ladder are ideal to build a solid partnership with our customers and support building the foundation for a sustainable transition.

11. Help Team Midden grow as a region. At the start of 2014, Team Midden was founded. What followed was a challenging year with lots of ups and downs. The result, however, was ending up as a true team. I believe we managed to create a solid foundation, on which the new colleagues that will start in January can help us grow even further. My contribution is hopefully multidisciplinary: help new team members get up and running, find suitable assignments in the region, and of course, deliver some successful transitions on my own.

Reading all these goals you might wonder: where is the customer? Shouldn’t one of the goals be related to the customer? To me, the customer is intertwined with most goals. In all the activities I undertake, I strive to translate this into some (indirect) value for our customers. But the detailed activities on how to help our customers is a blog post on its own; to be continued 🙂

Originally published at www.barryovereem.com on December 30, 2014.