Zach shares his journey as a Scrum Master and how important it is to get a pair in your own journey. Apprenticeship for Scrum Masters is not a new idea, but it is an important part in our toolbox for learning as Scrum Masters.
About Zach Bonaker
Zach Bonaker is Benevolent Trouble-Maker from San Diego. He’s an agile coach who specializes in bringing lean thinking to organizations and teams over varying sizes across the country. Zach builds relationships to help transform people, systems, and structures towards safer and faster ways of delivering high quality software. When he isn’t thinking about next-generation agile ideas, Zach can be found enjoying the sunny west coast weather and connecting with people all around the world. Follow Zach Bonaker on Twitter, and connect with Zach Bonaker on Linkedin.
In this episode Dennis explains the difference between two tools that he uses at the organizations he works with. He explains how he uses these tools to measure System Health and System Productivity.
About Dennis Mansell
Dennis did not start his working life as a developer, but as a sailing yacht skipper and owner of a sailing school and he still trains yacht-racing teams. He always supplemented his sailing job with application maintenance, web development and project management. He has since settled down: based in Amsterdam with his wife and son. Now he works as a full-time Scrum Master and Agile Coach for companies ranging from start-ups to the Dutch governmental institutions. His linkedin and twitter: @dennmans.
Dennis tells us how he uses a technique known by Henrik Kniberg – happiness index in his daily work. He also explains how important it is to understand what people inside of the team say; he believes that part of a Scrum Master role is to create a good environment within the team. If there are many things being said in a negative way the Scrum Master has a lot of things to do in order to improve the team performance.
About Dennis Mansell
Dennis did not start his working life as a developer, but as a sailing yacht skipper and owner of a sailing school and he still trains yacht-racing teams. He always supplemented his sailing job with application maintenance, web development and project management. He has since settled down: based in Amsterdam with his wife and son. Now he works as a full-time Scrum Master and Agile Coach for companies ranging from start-ups to the Dutch governmental institutions. His linkedin and twitter: @dennmans.
Dennis tells us a very interesting story from his sailing activities. He explains to our audience how it is important to build an environment of collaboration and most importantly an environment where “things” happen even if the most important persons in the team are not present.
About Dennis Mansell
Dennis did not start his working life as a developer, but as a sailing yacht skipper and owner of a sailing school and he still trains yacht-racing teams. He always supplemented his sailing job with application maintenance, web development and project management. He has since settled down: based in Amsterdam with his wife and son. Now he works as a full-time Scrum Master and Agile Coach for companies ranging from start-ups to the Dutch governmental institutions. His linkedin and twitter: @dennmans.
Dennis discusses that most of the times when we start to work as a team, we simply put people together expecting that everything will work. We even forget to ask if people do actually want to work together. In this episode he explains how that can go wrong.
About Dennis Mansell
Dennis did not start his working life as a developer, but as a sailing yacht skipper and owner of a sailing school and he still trains yacht-racing teams. He always supplemented his sailing job with application maintenance, web development and project management. He has since settled down: based in Amsterdam with his wife and son. Now he works as a full-time Scrum Master and Agile Coach for companies ranging from start-ups to the Dutch governmental institutions. His linkedin and twitter: @dennmans
Dennis explains us how most of his learnings came from failures. In his story he explains how he lost a project because he spent only 10% of the total budget. As an outcome, spending just this small part of the budget led Dennis to loose his job.
About Dennis Mansell
Dennis did not start his working life as a developer, but as a sailing yacht skipper and owner of a sailing school and he still trains yacht-racing teams. He always supplemented his sailing job with application maintenance, web development and project management. He has since settled down: based in Amsterdam with his wife and son. Now he works as a full-time Scrum Master and Agile Coach for companies ranging from start-ups to the Dutch governmental institutions. His linkedin and twitter: @dennmans.
In this episode Dmytro describes how the system impacts the teams and the software deliveries. He explains that in order for the teams to deliver a great quality they must be part of a system, which allows them to experiment and develop features without the daily pressure.
About Dmytro Orlyk
Dmytro have an overall 4 years of experience in PM. His latest project has been shown to the Google company. He is an Agile Expert with a strong knowledge of Scrum, Kanban and XP. Few of the engineers that inspire me are Martin Fowler and Chris MacConnell. He can be found in linkedin.
Dmytro explains that being part of a successful team is part of a Scrum Master success. After all, it is his job to create successful teams. Dmytro also gives us some good tips: in order for Scrum Masters to continue improving, they should develop themselves in areas where they feel they are not so strong. They could take some time to analyze their weakness and take some training to tackle those areas.
About Dmytro Orlyk
Dmytro have an overall 4 years of experience in PM. His latest project has been shown to the Google company. He is an Agile Expert with a strong knowledge of Scrum, Kanban and XP. Few of the engineers that inspire me are Martin Fowler and Chris MacConnell. He can be found in linkedin.
Dmytro explains how Scrum Masters should be leaders in order to be good change managers. Their work should not be limited to the job: a good scrum master and a good leader is involved in many other activities within the community.
About Dmytro Orlyk
Dmytro have an overall 4 years of experience in PM. His latest project has been shown to the Google company. He is an Agile Expert with a strong knowledge of Scrum, Kanban and XP. Few of the engineers that inspire me are Martin Fowler and Chris MacConnell. He can be found in linkedin.
Dmytro explains that one of the big reasons for team failures appears when a management put extra people into an ongoing project that is late. He mentions this approach was proven many years ago to not be the right approach, yet many teams suffer from this mistake.
About Dmytro Orlyk
Dmytro have an overall 4 years of experience in PM. His latest project has been shown to the Google company. He is an Agile Expert with a strong knowledge of Scrum, Kanban and XP. Few of the engineers that inspire me are Martin Fowler and Chris MacConnell. He can be found in linkedin.
Dmytro explains us how technical debt can be one of the reasons for teams to fail. One of the tips that he gives us is to make sure the team has extra time during the sprint to tackle issues that were not planned in the beginning and will appear during the sprint.
About Dmytro Orlyk
Dmytro have an overall 4 years of experience in PM. His latest project has been shown to the Google company. He is an Agile Expert with a strong knowledge of Scrum, Kanban and XP. Few of the engineers that inspire me are Martin Fowler and Chris MacConnell. He can be found in linkedin.
Agile Retrospectives, in Pedro´s opinion, are a great way to help teams to understand how they interact with the company system. They are a great tool to identify dependencies, interactions and even politics.
About Pedro Gustavo Torres
Pedro Gustavo Torres is an Agile Coach @ SONAE, in Porto, Portugal.
He started his agile quest in 2010. He’s a seasoned Scrum Master, Agile Coach and Trainer. He also has experience acting as a Scrum Product Owner. He’s passionate about scrum, agile and all the practices that can help teams deliver early value to their customers. He is also quite techie and a gadgets fan. You can find him in linkedin. He writes his learning’s on his blog. His twitter: @_pedro_torres
"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts”, Albert Einstein says. The Scrum Master role contains many things that do not allow success to be measured… For Pedro a success is to watch himself at the mirror and see himself smiling. When he reaches a daily meeting and he sees that the team is smiling, happy and having fun on a positive, that is the success!
About Pedro Gustavo Torres
Pedro Gustavo Torres is an Agile Coach @ SONAE, in Porto, Portugal.
He started his agile quest in 2010. He’s a seasoned Scrum Master, Agile Coach and Trainer. He also has experience acting as a Scrum Product Owner. He’s passionate about scrum, agile and all the practices that can help teams deliver early value to their customers. He is also quite techie and a gadgets fan. You can find him in linkedin. He writes his learning’s on his blog. His twitter: @_pedro_torres
Every Scrum Master should be a change agent… Unfortunately, many companies see the Scrum Master as a secretary or a team organiser. The Scrum Master as a change agent can help the organisation, especially the senior management, with the mindset transition. Roadmaps in Agile do not make so much sense; Agile Portfolio Management is a better approach in order to help the company to be more successful and that is a huge mindset change that can be initiated by Scrum Masters.
About Pedro Gustavo Torres
Pedro Gustavo Torres is an Agile Coach @ SONAE, in Porto, Portugal.
He started his agile quest in 2010. He’s a seasoned Scrum Master, Agile Coach and Trainer. He also has experience acting as a Scrum Product Owner. He’s passionate about scrum, agile and all the practices that can help teams deliver early value to their customers. He is also quite techie and a gadgets fan. You can find him in linkedin. He writes his learning’s on his blog. His twitter: @_pedro_torres
Ego is one of the common problems that can cause teams to self destroy. If team dynamics are not well handled it´s quite easy to see brilliant developers becoming “prima-donas”; they feel they are like a god on the earth. At the end, it does not matter who does the work, what matters is a team´s outcome. When there are such “divas" on the team they feel that everyone should be thankful for having them on the team.
About Pedro Gustavo Torres
Pedro Gustavo Torres is an Agile Coach @ SONAE, in Porto, Portugal.
He started his agile quest in 2010. He’s a seasoned Scrum Master, Agile Coach and Trainer. He also has experience acting as a Scrum Product Owner. He’s passionate about scrum, agile and all the practices that can help teams deliver early value to their customers. He is also quite techie and a gadgets fan. You can find him in linkedin. He writes his learning’s on his blog. His twitter: @_pedro_torres
Pedro explains us how he learned more with failures than with success. In his opinion, a good Scrum Master must have the ability to deal with failure well, because failure is the only road for learning. He believes that failure is so important the he would rather hire someone that has gone through several failures and learned several lessons than someone that was always successful. In his opinion, people that are always successful learn as much as the ones that fail often and have the ability to learn from their mistakes.
About Pedro Gustavo Torres
Pedro Gustavo Torres is an Agile Coach @ SONAE, in Porto, Portugal.
He started his agile quest in 2010. He’s a seasoned Scrum Master, Agile Coach and Trainer. He also has experience acting as a Scrum Product Owner. He’s passionate about scrum, agile and all the practices that can help teams deliver early value to their customers. He is also quite techie and a gadgets fan. You can find him in linkedin. He writes his learning’s on his blog. His twitter: @_pedro_torres
System thinkers need tools and techniques to help them focus on the system and not get blindsided by the shiny symptoms that cross our attention every single day. Ryan shares some of the tools he uses to help him see the system at play.
About Ryan Ripley
Ryan Ripley loves helping people do great work. He is a servant leader at heart and is passionate about fostering safety and trust in the workplace. Ryan created the Agile for Humans podcast to put the focus back on the individuals and interactions that make agile work.
You can link up with Ryan Ripley on LinkedIn and connect with Ryan Ripley on Twitter.
Ryan also hosts a popular Agile podcast: Agile for Humans. Be sure to check it out!
How we measure success in our roles as Scrum Masters must include some metrics, and must include interaction with the team and stakeholders we work with. Ryan explains his approach and the tools he uses to measure his own success.
About Ryan Ripley
Ryan Ripley loves helping people do great work. He is a servant leader at heart and is passionate about fostering safety and trust in the workplace. Ryan created the Agile for Humans podcast to put the focus back on the individuals and interactions that make agile work.
You can link up with Ryan Ripley on LinkedIn and connect with Ryan Ripley on Twitter.
Ryan also hosts a popular Agile podcast: Agile for Humans. Be sure to check it out!
Ryan has gone through many change processes as a leader and as a participant. In this episode he shares some of his insights, including one critical insight that he still uses today to shape his approach to change management.
About Ryan Ripley
Ryan Ripley loves helping people do great work. He is a servant leader at heart and is passionate about fostering safety and trust in the workplace. Ryan created the Agile for Humans podcast to put the focus back on the individuals and interactions that make agile work.
You can link up with Ryan Ripley on LinkedIn and connect with Ryan Ripley on Twitter.
Ryan also hosts a popular Agile podcast: Agile for Humans. Be sure to check it out!
When we try to help teams we often forget that just because people work in the same area or are nominally called a “team” they may not be a real team. In this episode Ryan relates the story of a team that imploded because of the anti-patterns inherent to teams that aren’t really teams.
We also refer to the Super-Chicken Ted talk that explains some of the anti-patterns that destroy team’s effectivity. We also talk about the book Get Rid or Performance Appraisals by Luis Goncalves.
About Ryan Ripley
Ryan Ripley loves helping people do great work. He is a servant leader at heart and is passionate about fostering safety and trust in the workplace. Ryan created the Agile for Humans podcast to put the focus back on the individuals and interactions that make agile work.
You can link up with Ryan Ripley on LinkedIn and connect with Ryan Ripley on Twitter.
Ryan also hosts a popular Agile podcast: Agile for Humans. Be sure to check it out!
The transition from Project Manager to Scrum Master is never an easy one. Ryan describes his own journey and how he overcame his own delusion of control. During this episode we also introduced the book The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Lencioni.
About Ryan Ripley
Ryan Ripley loves helping people do great work. He is a servant leader at heart and is passionate about fostering safety and trust in the workplace. Ryan created the Agile for Humans podcast to put the focus back on the individuals and interactions that make agile work.
You can link up with Ryan Ripley on LinkedIn and connect with Ryan Ripley on Twitter.
Ryan also hosts a popular Agile podcast: Agile for Humans. Be sure to check it out!
The systems view of the Scrum Master work is not limited to one system. We work with the teams which are one system, but we also work with the team of teams. How the teams interact and cooperate is a system in itself. Enabling cooperation between Scrum Masters can be a very effective way to work with the larger systems.
About Jiri Sitina
Jiri works at GoodData. He is currently based in Prague and helps GoodData’s engineering teams to work better, cooperate more, keep on improving and enjoy what they are doing.
You can connect with Jiri Sitina on LinkedIn and link with Jiri Sitina on Twitter.
How we define success for our role as Scrum Masters is very often linked to how we see the role and the evolution of the role. Jiri talks about different approaches to the role of Scrum Master and reminds us that we should not be satisfied with being the “Scrum mum”.
About Jiri Sitina
Jiri works at GoodData. He is currently based in Prague and helps GoodData’s engineering teams to work better, cooperate more, keep on improving and enjoy what they are doing.
You can connect with Jiri Sitina on LinkedIn and link with Jiri Sitina on Twitter.
Small steps can lead to big changes. As Jiri says, there’s no point in going against the big wall of large steps in change, it is often disappointing and prone to failure. Identifying the pain points and then taking one step at a time can lead to amazing results.
The book Lean Change Management by Jason Little is referred to as a guide to understand effective change management.
About Jiri Sitina
Jiri works at GoodData. He is currently based in Prague and helps GoodData’s engineering teams to work better, cooperate more, keep on improving and enjoy what they are doing.
You can connect with Jiri Sitina on LinkedIn and link with Jiri Sitina on Twitter.
Retrospectives are one of the key ceremonies for teams. Well prepared and executed retrospectives can take a team from ordinary to extraordinary and can help teams avoid the anti-patterns that so often lead to difficult problems down the line.
One of the resources that Jiri uses when preparing his retrospectives is Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives.
About Jiri Sitina
Jiri works at GoodData. He is currently based in Prague and helps GoodData’s engineering teams to work better, cooperate more, keep on improving and enjoy what they are doing.
You can connect with Jiri Sitina on LinkedIn and link with Jiri Sitina on Twitter.