Sustainability - 5 ideas for more sustainable Scrum Masters

This blog is about how you can work sustainably as a Scrum Master and set yourself concrete goals. What sustainability can mean for you as a Scrum Master and how it can help you.

What does sustainability mean as a Scrum Master?

I am often asked in training sessions or by customers: "How can I provide sustainable advice as a Scrum Master?" This topic is also close to my own heart. I want to build scrum teams sustainably and enable them to manage themselves. For me, "sustainable development" means building the Scrum team...

1. ... can do without me as Agile Coach exist
2. ... continues to improve
3. ... learns the Scrum values to live
4. ... has all the skills to build the product or knows how to acquire them (cross-functional)
5. ... lives Scrum and complements Scrum with good practices that are useful for the Scrum team

It has helped me to define exactly these 5 goals for myself and thus define what sustainability means to me. You can do this on your own or together with your Scrum team. I then looked for ideas to help me achieve these goals. I stumbled across the following literature, which I would like to share with you.

5 ideas for more sustainability

Here are my personal recommendations for you to create more sustainability as a Scrum Master:

1. "Sustainable Pace" from Scrum.org:
   This article provides an overview of why sustainable pace is important and how you can ensure that your team is not overloaded.
2. "The Art of Agile Development: Sustainable Development" by James Shore and Shane Warden: This book devotes an entire chapter to sustainability in the agile development process and offers concrete tips for achieving a sustainable pace of work.
3. "Agile and Scrum: 7 Best Practices for Sustainable Agile Development" by Agile Alliance:
   This article contains seven best practices that you can use to ensure that your team remains successful in the long term.
4. "The Agile Mindset: How to Create Sustainable Organizational Change" by Scrum Alliance:
   This article discusses how you can foster an agile mindset within your organization to achieve sustainable change

Conclusion and outlook

Which article has helped you or do you have any others? I believe that if you set yourself fixed goals as a Scrum Master and define sustainability for yourself, this will help you to be a better Scrum Master.

Sustainability for Scrum Masters another book tip

Of course, the list of helpful ideas doesn't end with these 5 recommendations, it's just a start. I am currently reading another book on this topic by my colleague Sabine Canditt “Small steps. Big impact. With agility to more sustainability." In case you don't want to read it, Sabine is with my colleague Rafael in the next wibas Podcast which will be published next week.

Do you have any recommendations for me? Then please leave a comment.