11 years in IT - realised I love scrum mastery and team management - looking for advice / stories
Background
I'm currently in a fairly senior technical role within a team that, before I joined, had limited prioritisation of their work. Some time after joining I took the following responsibilities in addition to my technical ones:
* To monitor the backlog and group the tickets for each of our stakeholder teams
* To meet with each stakeholder team to help them articulate what they wanted us to do and prioritise their requests
* To meet with a few members of each team together to get the right priority across all the requests for the next sprint
The 'problem' I'm having is that I've found myself enjoying this more than my technical work! I've been waiting for the difficult meeting, the complaints, for something to go wrong or to find the thing I don't like... but so far I haven't. I mentioned to a colleague that if I could spend all my time doing the 3 above things it'd be my dream job, then she reminded me that "Scrum Master" is a job title.
She put me in touch with an experienced Scrum Master who directed me to this web site. I've done some soul-searching over the weekend and come to the following conclusions:
1. This isn't a "grass is greener" situation or feeling fresh from a change of scenery; I'm genuinely enjoying it because -
2. I'm loving supporting our stakeholders by actively involving them in the process and empowering them to tell us which requests are most important to them, and -
3. I'm loving supporting my team by making sure our tickets have everything needed for them to pick them up.
The Request(s)
What I'm looking for from the forum is 2 things:
1. Advice for what order an experienced IT professional who's half in the role already should approach the learning material. I'm going to work through all of it, but pointers for where to focus first would be appreciated.
2. Any and all stories of people who've transitioned from a more technical role into being a scrum master. What went great for you, what didn't, what hurdles did you have in making the move, what would you do differently knowing what you know now, and what advice you'd give to someone who's considering the move.
Thanks for reading, and to any and all replies.