What can you do, as a Scrum Master when the team is stuck in a pattern of negativity and self-destruction? Stephen explains the situation of a team that was in that situation, and what were the symptoms that characterized the problems the teams were facing. He discusses how communication suffers, how the us versus them dynamic emerged and how hard it was to help the team in that situation. We also discuss the techniques you can use to help the team get out of that pattern of self-destruction.
How can we help teams learn as Scrum Masters? What fails when they don’t? And what is the role of ceremonies like the retrospectives in Scrum? These and other questions are tackled in this episode. Stephen also discusses how the search for control can actually have a negative impact on the success of the team.
Organizations need to be supported every day in their agile journey. Mario Lucero shares his insights about that process. He mentions that inequality of teams and managers can threaten your agile adoption process and suggests a way to help organizations effectively adopt Agile.
Scrum masters help teams when they create an environment where teams can, and are willing to take ownership and responsibility for what they deliver. Teams that take ownership are then ready to start solving their problems.
Recruiting is not easy, but when you are recruiting for an offshore team you face even more problems. How to select the right candidate? The role of language in the relationship with the client, and how to handle multiple cultures are also topics in this episode.
Teams face cultural barriers, and remote stakeholders. In this offshore context recruiting is not easy.
Team dynamics are affected by many factors, including certain individual behaviors. Teams that exhibit some of the symptoms referred by Mario may be in trouble. We need to learn about those symptoms and have strategies to deal with those.
This story starts with an US based company acquiring a Latin American software development organization. Mario shares what happened after that, and what he learned from the experience, where distributed agile development was the main method of development.
How do we define and involve the right stakeholders? What are the tools we can use to find and involve them? How do help stakeholders find alignment and help the team?
Matt also shares a checklist he uses to evaluate his work as a scrum master.
Matt tells us how he defines success for the Scrum Master role. The key characteristics and how to link it all up to business value. He also mentions the technique he uses as a “barometer” of his success as a Scrum Master.
How can you find if a person you are recruiting is a “team player”. Matt explains his experience in one situation where he missed that aspect, and what he learned from that. He gives a recipe of how you can screen for team fit when recruiting Scrum Masters.
Matt explains how the focus on the negative can emerge from the harmless need for “venting” your frustration. Too much venting can have disastrous consequences on the team’s morale and motivation. He also offers an antidote for that negativity in this episode.
Matt tells us about a failed agile transition, and what he learned from that experience. He also talks about one of the biggest threats to agile transitions all over the world: the “shiny object syndrome” that affects many organizations today.
Matt also recommends a book: Scrum and XP from the trenches by Henrik Kniberg: http://www.amazon.com/Scrum-Trenches-Enterprise-Software-Development/dp/1430322640
If you thought that Jeff Kosciejew learned about being a great Scrum Master from his software industry experience you’d be wrong. Jeff learned a lot about being a servant leader, and a champion for a high-performance culture in his days as a Bank Manager. He shares his story of how his Scrum-like principles and values helped him create a superior Bank experience for his customers. He details how he was able to build a self-organizing team in his Bank branch and how he learned to be a servant leader. It’s all about people, people! :)
Jeff Kosciejew discusses the three key questions for defining success and shares how his experience as a musician informed the definition of success as a Scrum Master. A very inspiring story of how Scrum Masters can fundamentally affect their team’s performance and each of the team member’s well-being.
Jeff Kosciejew shares his own, hard-earned, experience on how to hire great people. Including how to know in advance what skills you need, using conversation as a way to filter out candidates that are a bad fit and the Agile Coaching Competency framework. His most important question in recruiting interviews is one he asks himself: “will this Scrum Master fit our culture?”
Lysa Adkins from the Agile Coaching Institute has been developing an Agile Coaching Competency framework. Read more about it at the Agile Coaching Institute site.
Jeff, also refers to Jason Little’s personal Agile Coach NPS, a way to evaluate your own impact in the team and organization you work for
The worst enemy of this particular team, according to Jeff Kosciejew, was the pattern of avoidance. Avoiding problems is one of the pitfalls that our teams deal with.
On this Fail Monday episode, Jeff Kosciejew shares his ideas on how to look beyond the teams as the focus of our work as Scrum Masters. He also shares his very colorful and diverse history, and how being a Bank Manager helped him become a better Scrum Master.
Peter discusses how “variation” can affect negatively the team, and what benefits can come from acting on, and reducing variation.
Peter refers to the book where he first read about the effect of variation on work. This book was Freedom from Command and Control by John Seddon (http://www.amazon.com/Freedom-Command-Control-Rethinking-Management/dp/1563273276)
Peter also shares a tip on how to get management to be aware of what is discussed by teams during the retrospective, in order to create trust between management and teams.
Peter shares his unusual idea on how measuring the use of the word Scrum can give you real insights to your success as a Scrum Master.
Peter tells us the story of a ScrumMaster that seemed like a good choice but was too shy to help the team grow. He explains how he views the role of the ScrumMaster, and especially what is needed to help them evolve.
Being a slave to the backlog, and just going through the motions without interacting with the other team members or stakeholders. This is further amplified in Death-march like projects.