After having the training, a few point that has stuck out in my
mind, and that I've observed on my own team:

The team decides what it
does and doesn't need to get done. Everyone else needs to get out of the way. If
the team isn't trusted to decide for themselves how to operate, then management
should fire the team and hire a trusted team. If management doesn't trust anyone
to operate in this manner, then they'll always have a crippled team not
operating at full capacity.

While operating on a very new scrum team, I
noticed that even after the team is "empowered". Some team members push for the
same business regulations that they were complaining before using scrum. After
living in a corporate world for so long, I think it can be hard to realize that
you can decide for yourself, and not wonder what a different sprint team is
doing, what a different project is doing, if managers will approve of it or not.


The single best thing you can do on any team (agile or not), is to
realize what you need to do to get your job done. Do that, and don't worry about
what others think. That will allow you succeed.

A large part of the role
of the scrum master and product owner is to "support the team". These are fairly
well understood roles. One aspect of their role, that I don't think is
discussed, is to make the team look good. I've heard a number of arguments, that
the team can't do what they want, because it politically won't convey to the
"company" that they are getting work done. If the scrum master and product owner
are excellent, they'll allow the team to operate in what works for them, and
present the team’s progress in whatever makes sense to management. In
programming terms, there should be a layer of abstraction between how the team
is functioning and how the team’s progress is reported to management. This
shouldn't be any lying, just a different perspective on the same
work.