Most Important Skills For A Scrum Master Or Program Manager At A Film Studio

When sitting in program management, and to some degree as a scrum master, you're meant to consider the big picture of everything. Within the scrum team, the focus is on what the whole squad needs to deliver. Within the program management office, it's understanding how different work streams interact.

They're not siloed; they all have dependencies and work together. Listening is critical, and there are many ways to do it. A challenge for me on this project, which is finance and tax-related, is that I'm neither an accountant nor a finance professional.

When meetings get very technical on accounting or tax requirements, I need to separate the detail. No one will ask me whether something is retained earnings or goodwill, and I don't know what those are. What I need to pull from the discussion is where they're encountering a problem.

Is it a lack of time with necessary stakeholders? Is it a dependency on another squad or squad member? This allows me, as a scrum master or within the broader program, to help remove blockers. So, listening is one key skill.

Within that, I mentioned the big picture view. At the program management level, you have to think of the whole picture. The beauty of well-staffed and thoughtful work streams is that subject matter experts can focus on retained earnings or goodwill and accounting problems.

You, on the program side, can think about how their work supports the broader project deliverable. The third thing is good organization. Scheduling meetings and following through on administrative skills, which likely go back to my early career as an assistant, helps. Just good organization aids prioritization, and that prioritization intersects with the big picture.

Now, I would also add something I've personally worked on as I've become more experienced. Project and program managers tend to be tactical and focused on what needs to happen. However, when communicating about deliverables, it's important that your language remains neutral.

One personal goal I've set is to talk about things in terms of deliverables. Instead of saying someone didn't get back to you, frame it as, "We have this deliverable; is there an update? Has the squad responded?" This avoids singling people out.

Communication can be political and uncomfortable, especially coming from a program manager. You, or more often your boss, are sometimes put in the position of having to have uncomfortable conversations. The more you can focus on the deliverable and the work, rather than the person, the easier those conversations become.