Trudy McCulloch

My name is Trudy McCulloch and I've been a software developer since 1994. I was first exposed to Agile and Scrum in 2012 when my department decided to try this "Scrum thing". I took the Scrum Master training, got my certification, and was placed as a developer in the very first team.  A couple of other development teams were soon formed and in addition to being a team member on that first team I had the opportunity to break ground and start up a team as a Scrum Master though I was also a team member on that second team as well. Yes, I know that's not how Scrum works but we work with what our companies dictate.  

The first team was formed only for a specific project so at the end of that project it was disbanded and I could focus on the team for which I was Scrum Master. My team quickly became recognized as high performing and I was asked to be the Scrum Master of an additional team which had been really struggling with a lot of their work coming back incorrect and their work moving slowly. I worked with the team to understand the problems and make changes within the team and I also coached the Product Owner and associated functional managers to the point where the team within a few months was being regarded as another high performing team.

As our department reduced in size, 3 Scrum teams which made up our department were consolidated into a single far too large team which I was asked to run. As you can imagine there are many challenges in working with a Scrum team which is very large in addition to being distributed across 3 countries on 2 continents but the team has become the one by which other teams in our area are measured. I've also been trying to coach a few other Scrum Masters in my area in how to coach their Team Members and Production Owners as well as associated functional managers to help their teams get past some of their struggles.