Welcome back to the final part of my journey to becoming a Scrum Master.

Just to recap, my professional career journey started with working for various organizations in different technical roles. Thereafter, I focused on my career in project management and agile project delivery. As mentioned in the last blog, I had started my pursuit in having an online presence in the form of website, YouTube channel and other ways in order to reach the wider IT professional community.

For the final part of my journey, I wanted to share few of my thoughts around future emerging technologies and how as a scrum master or a project manager one can be prepared, be relevant and marketable.

This blog is a 5-part series that I will go over my professional career life journey, highlighting my thought process, what options were available and what decisions I took (good & bad!) that got me to this point.

Let's Start.

For me, I want to continue to be a scrum master and help/coach people by using the online content that I had created. I have always enjoyed being a scrum master because it is all about working with people, seeing products being developed incrementally and finally having them deployed into production. This approach bonds the project teams and encourages everyone to do their best to achieve a common goal.

Looking into the near future, what kind of technologies and working environments do I foresee and how can one be prepared and ready?

Digital Transformation

Transformation Programs will gain momentum as the desire to have the legacy applications moved off the ageing mainframes to more up to date platforms like cloud computing. Over the years, major cloud providers like Google, Amazon and Microsoft have worked really hard to make cloud platforms to be secure and offer variety of options. Also many skilled people are now available in the market that have key skills in cloud computing making it easier for the organizations to embark on this challenging transformational journey!

As a scrum master, what skills one should posses for cloud computing?

First of all understanding what cloud capabilities exist will help you to hold a meaningful discussions and drive workshops to achieve the desired results. Some of the cloud capabilities are: cloud architectures (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), scaling, pipelines, orchestration and DevOps to mention few.

Secondly, understanding the risks and impacts of moving legacy applications to the cloud, taking into consideration the security aspects and the data traffic volumes for example.

Blockchain & Cryptocurrency

There's going to be a lot of cryptocurrency push as many organizations start to see the value of blockchains. The banks and other financial institutions will definitely be amongst the first to start offering customized products and services that will leverage the blockchain technology. Lets take an example.

An insurance policy for your car may not be based on annual forecast but on demand. For example, the customer could simply call the insurance company and say "Hey!  Could you please provide me an auto cover for my journey from home to work?"

As a scrum master, what skills one should posses for blockchain technology?

Having basic understanding of the blockchain technology is important followed by knowledge of terms used, for example Block, Blockchain, Digital Identity, Cryptocurrency etc.

Open Banking

The other big trend that I can think would be useful to know is the Open Banking. The concept of opening banking is that consumers and small businesses will be able to share financial information electronically in a secure, and with full consent with financial institutions and financial technology companies.

Let us use an example to illustrate this.

Say you wanted to apply for a new product or service from another bank that you are not a customer. In this case, you are able to request your bank, where you are a customer, and ask them to send your information (eg. proof of address, copy of a driving licence or even employment letter) to the other bank - saving you time and effort!

As a scrum master, what skills one should posses for Open Banking?

One thing for sure is to understand the basic concept of open banking and the importance of digital ID. So in future it will not be necessary to carry your driving licence as an example, as technologies like face-recognition will be sufficient to identify you - amazing!

The other challenges that the financial institutions will face is how to share customer information with other institutions on the request of their customers? This will not be an easy task. A whole new secure channels will be needed to encrypt and decrypt customer information and at the same time keeping the Personally Identifiable Information (PII) protected from possible cyber attacks.

With the arrival of 5G, many ideas and concepts will now be possible. The Smartphones have almost made laptops and desktops redundant as people are able to do most of the work on their Smartphones, like online banking, internet browsing or even online shopping.

With these new ideas and concepts will emerge new talent and startups. People will design and build applications or services that will do more than one thing and run on Smartphones - i.e. like the Super Apps that allow, for example, texting, chat, video chat, banking, online shopping or even transfer currency globally.

As a scrum master, one must stay connected with what's happening in the emerging technologies space and also to keep updating the appropriate training and certifications.

It has been an honor to share with you all my professional career journey and I hope it has provided some insights into what I believe are the key pillars, namely to continue seeking knowledge, pursue your ambitions, and to help others.

As a final note, thank you for being with me on my journey of How Did I Get Here? My Journey to Becoming a Scrum Master.