In the spring of 2013, I left my title and position of Global Scrum Leader and Principal Consultant at the large global consulting company called Capgemini to embark on a new journey as Partner of Ken Schwaber and Director of the Professional Scrum Series at Scrum.org.
In the spring of 2016, I terminated that exclusive work too, thereby again leaving a position and a title. It’s a strange habit, I know. I renamed my one-person company to “Ullizee-Inc” and I started calling myself an “independent Scrum Caretaker”.
In July 2016, I started the Scrum Caretakers Meetup with the intent was to build bridges between my (since 2011) professional home country, the Netherlands, and my (still today) personal home country, Belgium. The idea was to connect people from my two home countries around Scrum. I call myself a connector for a reason. I was aiming at bringing people in person together, regardless of their expertise or titles, to exchange, share and develop ideas and thereby contribute to creating (more) market for Scrum in both regions. Despite my financial and personal investments, it plainly didn’t work. One of my struggles was that people seemed to rely much on what I brought in, rather than me facilitating and supporting. Too much. I call myself a connector for a reason. I also felt there was not enough ‘give and take’ at the sessions. Despite having trained and coached so many trainers and coaches, while I was at Capgemini as well as at Scrum.org, it seems I wasn’t able to motivate or inspire them to join or to actually contribute if they did join. My main observation was that they felt that they had to protect their market share, rather than joining me in my belief that it is more fruitful to build market together. I stopped spending time on the Meetup group. Until the pandemic hit…
Continue reading Scrum Caretakers Meetup: Shapeshifting 2025
