As a new Scrum Master in IT, how can I make my understanding of technical terms easier?

So here’s a trick I use….

I offer to type up all of the whiteboards and ideas into AzureDevOps, Jira etc.

Now I know a bunch of agile coaches and scrum masters will throw their hands up in the air and say we shouldn’t do that, but I find I remember stuff (and learn better) when I write things down. And it starts to build a mental model for me around the organisation.

And it also gives you a chance to bring transparency into the backlog – so for example no acronyms, put in roles not people’s names, and so on.

Then when you refine the backlog – whether with a troika pattern or the whole team – you have a chance to reflect back what you understood and confirm things.

There’s a couple of other advantages too

– getting stuff wrong “in public” with the team is going to show people that it’s okay to get things wrong, misunderstand and ask dumb questions. This matters a lot. You are “walking the talk” on psychological safety and making yourself vulnerable. Vulnerability builds trust, and without trust, you cannot have an effective coaching relationship.

– reflecting things back to the team can actually expose gaps in thinking, holes in logic, and expose mistakes (a mistake is a planning error); so in that sense it can actually help the team build a better product too

While YMMV (see what I did there?) I spent some time workings as a Scrum Master for the military here, and it was the ONBLY way I could survive the alphabet soup they dispense. We even had an Acronym Finder on the website, and different branches of the military that used the same acronym for different things.

So – typing up stuff was how I learned quickly..