browngeek

I once asked a friend - “What is the goal in life for people?”
Its a rather open-ended question with no real answer. Being the philosopher he was, he tried to answer it -
“People want to leave behind a mark. Some sort of a legacy to remind others of their existence. Most people reproduce offspring for that purpose. Other people leave behind their contributions to society.”

I also believe that there are smaller, incremental impacts you can make. Often times, these are unintentional. I was pleasantly surprised recently to find out that I had left one. No, not a child.

I was practicing the Scrum methodology at my previous job. My intention was to introduce the agile software development process there. The scrum team consisted of 6 members. I was the “Scrum Master”. We had 30-day sprints. We diligently conducted the daily scrum meetings, prepared the task-plans and had demos each iteration. Although team was pretty excited about Scrum, the response from my managerial peers was lackluster. We had just completed the 5th iteration when I resigned my job to pursue other opportunities. And I was quite sure that that would be the end of Scrum there.

Fast forward 8 months. I recently met a couple of the original Scrum team members (now friends) for lunch. I almost spit out the soup when they mentioned in passing that they were still doing the 30-day iterations. There was no Scrum Master, but the daily scrum meetings, the huddles, the demos, the refactoring, were still going. Being agile just clicked and they never stopped. Whats more, the managers, impressed by the team’s perseverance, are wanting to adopt Scrum for other projects.

It was quite a surprise. I had left behind a mark. Unintended.

Moral of the story: Passion is contagious. It leaves behind a mark.