Aundrea once dreamed of being president. She put herself through college, getting a BA in Political Science and International Relations, her sights set on law school. But the Great Recession of 2008 led her to pursue a new dream. Little did she know that a completely different career in leadership was in the cards for her, and it all started with discovering agile and scrum.
Today she is the Business Transformation Director for a large defense contractor specializing in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance software. Her journey demonstrates that, despite market changes, agility is as important and urgently needed today as ever. People at every layer of an organization and in every walk of life can benefit from good agile practices and approaches, and Aundrea offers advice for individuals who want to bring that kind of positive change to their organizations.
From recession to reinventing a career
After obtaining her degree, Aundrea looked at the economic landscape and her personal situation and saw new career paths that she hadn't considered before. Law school was too expensive for her to bear the financial burden alone. Luckily, she had learned many valuable, job-ready skills.
"You write a lot when you're in political science," she says. Aundrea parlayed that experience first into an internship, then formal employment in corporate communications. That's how she became a corporate communication specialist at a video game company. Her job was to produce company newsletters and signage, but there was something she needed to understand first: how they actually built software.
The company was "a neat agile shop. The software that we built—the ease … and the speed that we built it [with], and the camaraderie that we had—it was really special." It wasn't until later that Aundrea realized how mature and high-performing those agile teams were. Watching them work, she became increasingly interested in agile and scrum. "I love the idea of camaraderie and sense of team, quick problem-solving, and impediment removal."
Others noticed her interest as well and invited her into a mentorship program where she could learn to be a scrum master while performing her other work duties. Aundrea "studied like a mad woman" and shadowed the team as much as she could to learn everything about their processes. Just like in college, she took her on-the-job education seriously—and thus excelled.
An opportunity to lead
When she joined her current employer a few years later, an agile transformation was already underway, and the company was still maturing its agile roles and abilities. Immediately Aundrea noticed something was missing: scrum masters.
The teams had product owners, but they needed someone who could support and coach the team like scrum masters do. When she asked around, she heard the same refrain: "Why am I going to hire a scrum master when I could hire another developer?" But she knew better: She knew how a well-oiled machine of a team operated and what they were capable of. She just needed to demonstrate the positive impact and value of scrum masters to the organization.
Aundrea set to work and saw great success.
"The first program that I touched, we saw a 40% increase in delivery within three months of me joining the program… Just taking basic good agile and scrum discipline and concepts, coaching and nurturing the team and building a sense of camaraderie. The team just crushed it."
After seeing what was possible, everyone came knocking on Aundrea's door asking for a scrum master. Before long, she was managing a team of scrum masters: a scrum master for scrum masters, if you will.
It was one thing to help disparate teams succeed in the status quo environment, but how do you turn that into a full-scale agile transformation?
As it happened, the company was looking to mature its business practices, processes, and work structure to meet extremely ambitious revenue targets. They needed someone to lead the charge of shaping the future organization and designing a roadmap to get there. A leader came straight to Aundrea and gave her their vote of confidence. Aundrea had been doing exactly this for years, influencing the organization to change, shepherding everyone along, and driving the company's agile adoption. She had demonstrated how capably she could build a business transformation program and, in the process, grow into the next level of her career as a leader.
"We need agile leaders now more than ever"
As a leader, Aundrea has high expectations for the agilists she brings onto her team. It isn't enough for a scrum master to just attend Certified ScrumMaster® training. That's just the beginning. Aundrea believes key competencies like facilitation and mentoring are critical to bolstering the practice of scrum and agility in general.
Her first exposure to these tangible skills was in the Certified Scrum Product Owner® (CSPO®) and the Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner training, skills learners can "take back into their organization and apply."
In the process of growing her employer's agile maturity, she arranged for nearly 100 people at her company to take the CSPO course to round out their agile training. A lifelong learner, Aundrea has seen first-hand the value of dedicated training on skills and tools that can be put to use the very next day.
One of these skills is influencing without authority. Scrum masters don't necessarily have authority but they have tremendous influence: They can model behaviors for collaboration, problem-solving, conflict resolution, and finding wins. Company leaders who seek to reap the benefits of agile and scrum must also model these and other agile behaviors.
In fact, agility has a lot to offer leaders. Leading today is a significant endeavor because the world is getting increasingly complex; the stakes are higher and higher. This unpredictability is exactly what agile was developed to address: delivering value in highly changeable and—dare we say—chaotic environments. Given that disruptive and changing environments are the norm, we can stand to see more, rather than less, agile leadership.
"Agile is not dead," says Aundrea. "We need agile more than ever. We just need good agile. Agile is going to be the thing that gets us through the chaos that is the world we live in right now. The idea of expert leadership is a fallacy. If anything's dead, I think it's that."
And she's right: while expert leadership sounds like a good thing, it implies that leaders alone can solve every problem.
With the complexity, speed, and opportunities we see today, no one can do everything alone, not even the best leaders.
Instead, Aundrea urges leaders to create a network of individuals with deep knowledge, skills, and humility—a team of people who can help leaders make tough decisions and grow the organization's agility using proven people-oriented approaches. It's not about fancy titles: do you really need a Chief Humility Officer? It's about creating a space at the top of the organization where learning is a key business differentiator. Where failing fast to learn faster is, if not applauded, at least embraced.
Done right, scrum mastering supports these outcomes, provided leaders empower and coach their teams rather than relying on traditional command-and-control. Scrum masters must help leaders "lead teams through collaborative problem-solving, supporting the people, and creating the working tested software as quickly as the market demands or your customers need it," says Aundrea.
The other thing that leaders need to do? Commit. "Agile. It's not easy," she says. "It's a culture change. And culture changes are hard, and you have to be prepared for it, and you have to be committed to it. If you can commit and you go in with the right goals, it's going to be hard, but you'll get there."
Make an impact—wherever you are
Aundrea is driven by making an impact. That's what motivates her most. That's why she is so passionate about helping agilists grow, especially scrum masters. "As a scrum master, you're uniquely positioned to make an impact in so many ways."
She may have had to set aside her aspirations to become president of the United States of America—for now—but Aundrea has found a way to make meaningful, impactful change right where she is.
She is helping the people around her make positive change as well. She believes in agile and scrum and is doing everything in her power and influence to enact her vision of an agile world with others.
Turns out: the path was long and twisty, but her dream of becoming a leader influencing bold positive change has come true.
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