Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
Great Product Owners have empathy for the customer, the organization and the team. As Ali describes it: it’s key to be human! Even if knowledge of the product and the business is very important, knowledge can be acquired, but the skill of empathy is not easy to acquire.
This company that Ali worked at used to hire graduates as Product Owners. Inevitably, with their lower salaries came a whole host of other problems. The PO’s would not have experience on the product, or the process of developing products and would focus on the wrong things. In this segment, we also discuss how to help Product Owners focus on value and impact.
Are you having trouble helping the team work well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.
About Ali Asl
Ali is an experienced and accomplished Independent Agile Coach, Trainer and Scrum Master focused on supporting organizations and teams in the application of Agile values and principles to deliver quality and value.
You can link with Ali Asl on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
Ali’s focus, as a Scrum Master, is to get the team to be autonomous, and run their own Sprints. In Ali’s opinion, a good team can self organize and self manage, and he uses that as his own success measure. In this segment, we refer to #NoEstimates.
Although Ali uses many different retrospective formats, he likes the simpler formats like Mad/Sad/Glad or the Good/Bad/Ugly movie retrospective. He likes the simplicity of the 3 categories, which helps him focus on asking probing questions. In this segment, we refer to the Prime Directive of Agile Retrospectives.
Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches - Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!
About Ali Asl
Ali is an experienced and accomplished Independent Agile Coach, Trainer and Scrum Master focused on supporting organizations and teams in the application of Agile values and principles to deliver quality and value.
You can link with Ali Asl on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
Ali had been in that organization for 9 months. When he started, the team was too large (40 people), and he had to help split and reform the team. In this episode, we explore the steps and techniques Ali learned about helping teams re-form after splitting a team that is too large.
In this episode, we refer to Portfolio Kanban, as a technique to help coordinate work in multiple teams.
About Ali Asl
Ali is an experienced and accomplished Independent Agile Coach, Trainer and Scrum Master focused on supporting organizations and teams in the application of Agile values and principles to deliver quality and value.
You can link with Ali Asl on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
In this company, there was one developer who was considered the “hero” by everyone. Junior developers felt intimidated, and the management further promoted the view that this person was a “hero”. Even the Product Owner no longer acted as the Product Owner. Ali noticed that the team was deferring too much to the “hero”, who had become arrogant in their ways of communicating. Ali had to help move the “hero” to another team, and started a process of rebuilding the team again. Listen in to learn what you can do, to help recover a team after an “hero” anti-pattern.
In The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom by Don Miguel Ruiz, Ali found a book that helped him shape his way of thinking and acting as a Scrum Master. Even if this is not an Agile book, it shares important lessons for personal growth.
How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she’s supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people! Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta!
About Ali Asl
Ali is an experienced and accomplished Independent Agile Coach, Trainer and Scrum Master focused on supporting organizations and teams in the application of Agile values and principles to deliver quality and value.
You can link with Ali Asl on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
This team was stuck in a pattern where they used over-time and holidays to work on releasing their software. Ali was puzzled as to how to help the team. Over time he learned what was needed to help that team establish healthy boundaries to the demands their manager and Product Owner wanted to put on them!
About Ali Asl
Ali is an experienced and accomplished Independent Agile Coach, Trainer and Scrum Master focused on supporting organizations and teams in the application of Agile values and principles to deliver quality and value.
You can link with Ali Asl on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
This PO was able to defend the team in front of others, and also helped the team clarify their questions so that they didn’t have any doubts about their performance. He helped the team with reports and red-tape related tasks and focused on enabling the team to deliver. Finally, great PO’s know how to collaborate with the Scrum Master to help the team succeed.
When Product Owners think they “own the team”, they might change the team’s priorities according to their own personal preferences. When this happens, they might start changing priorities every sprint, micro-manage the team and even bring conflict to the team. In this section, we also talk about a PO that insisted that the team release on a Friday (a well-known anti-pattern). In this segment, we discuss how Scrum Masters can avoid these anti-patterns by deliberately building a great rapport with the PO.
Are you having trouble helping the team work well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.
About Bert Heymans
Bert is a long time Lean Management aficionado and project management tool specialist, along the way he fell in love with business analysis and teaching business analysis techniques. In 2016 he founded Lean Coffee Ghent and has been at it since.
You can link with Bert Heymans on LinkedIn and connect with Bert Heymans on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
Have you “nudged” the system in the right direction? Bert asks us. Have people in the team, and around the team become the best version of themselves? We discuss these and other questions that Bert asks himself when evaluating his own performance as a Scrum Master.
Bert calls himself a “Lean Coffee Traditionalist”. He explains how the format works and why the format works so well in all kinds of contexts and teams. We discuss the origins of Lean Coffee and link to a video by Jim Benson presenting the format he created.
Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches - Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!
About Bert Heymans
Bert is a long time Lean Management aficionado and project management tool specialist, along the way he fell in love with business analysis and teaching business analysis techniques. In 2016 he founded Lean Coffee Ghent and has been at it since.
You can link with Bert Heymans on LinkedIn and connect with Bert Heymans on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
Bert shares a story of a change that affected a small team, of 6 people. As this story starts, we hear that the team was working within the Scrum framework, but they had a testing column in their board what was always full/busy. Bert started to help the team figure out why that was, and what they could do to get out of that anti-pattern. They discussed Theory of Constraints, Single Piece Flow, and Work in process limits (WIP limits), and decided to try and impose a limit to the number of items in the testing column. This proved to be a huge change for the team, and Bert shares some tips on how we can help teams going through similar changes.
About Bert Heymans
Bert is a long time Lean Management aficionado and project management tool specialist, along the way he fell in love with business analysis and teaching business analysis techniques. In 2016 he founded Lean Coffee Ghent and has been at it since.
You can link with Bert Heymans on LinkedIn and connect with Bert Heymans on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
Bert was working in a team where one of the team members behaved like a bully. They evaded taking responsibility for work and were always pointing to other people’s mistakes. As Scrum Masters, we must be ready for meeting certain people that are, as Bert describes, “uncoachable”. We also learn about what happened to that team, and how to avoid having our teams “dominated” by the behavior of a bully.
In this section, we refer to the “Peter principle”.
In Antifragile by Taleb, Bert learned concepts that he is able to apply at work, like for example: “via negativa”, the idea that taking away things and not doing what is not necessary is often better than “naïve intervention”. This becomes a key concept for Scrum Masters, as it helps us meet teams where they are, understanding their context, and looking for simpler solutions than introducing more rules and processes.
How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she’s supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people! Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta!
About Bert Heymans
Bert is a long time Lean Management aficionado and project management tool specialist, along the way he fell in love with business analysis and teaching business analysis techniques. In 2016 he founded Lean Coffee Ghent and has been at it since.
You can link with Bert Heymans on LinkedIn and connect with Bert Heymans on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
When we work with teams that are under pressure of a tight deadline, it’s not so easy to find the right level of transparency with the clients and stakeholders. On one side we should protect the team, on the other side, the team needs to be open with the stakeholders to be able to find a solution when it seems the projects are going over the schedule and budget! In this episode, we explore some of the lessons Bert learned about finding the right level of transparency between the team and the clients and stakeholders.
In this episode, we refer to XP Explained by Kent Beck, and the concept of Single Piece Flow, a key part of Lean Thinking.
About Bert Heymans
Bert is a long time Lean Management aficionado and project management tool specialist, along the way he fell in love with business analysis and teaching business analysis techniques. In 2016 he founded Lean Coffee Ghent and has been at it since.
You can link with Bert Heymans on LinkedIn and connect with Bert Heymans on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
It is possible to help Product Owners improve their game, and as Scrum Masters, we should be ready to coach those PO’s that want to get better. In this segment, we share the story of a PO that was able to recover from some key anti-patterns and become a great PO!
In this segment, we talk about two different types of Product Owners. One had a strong technical background, and the other one didn’t. We discuss how these different types of background can negatively impact the performance of the PO. We also discuss the role of the Scrum Master in fostering and maintaining a good communication practice between PO and team!
Are you having trouble helping the team work well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.
About Allison Zimmerman
Allison believes that all people have the power to succeed when they work together. As a teacher-turned-scrum master, she has spent the last five years helping enterprise teams build on their strengths to deliver customer value. She also serves as a Scrum Master Community of Practice leader, supporting growth and development of scrum masters across many teams.
You can link with Allison Zimmerman on LinkedIn.
When considering the Retrospective format to use Allison invites us to consider what the teams are asking for, as well as what they are not asking for. But when a conversation about performance and team collaboration is necessary, Allison suggests we use the High Performance Tree model from Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins.
In this segment we also refer to the models ORID and OODA, which help us consider what might be the right topic for the team, as well as facilitate the conversation around that topic.
Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches - Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!
About Allison Zimmerman
Allison believes that all people have the power to succeed when they work together. As a teacher-turned-scrum master, she has spent the last five years helping enterprise teams build on their strengths to deliver customer value. She also serves as a Scrum Master Community of Practice leader, supporting growth and development of scrum masters across many teams.
You can link with Allison Zimmerman on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
Allison was helping a group of scrum teams. The group of teams felt they had some issues that needed to be resolved. Allison then helped the teams explore the issues they were struggling with, and find the motivation to address the root causes they found in their analysis. Allison describes a process that can help you, not only find the root of the problem, but also create the necessary motivation to take action at the team level!
In this episode, we refer to Brené Brown and her “approach with curiosity” mantra.
About Allison Zimmerman
Allison believes that all people have the power to succeed when they work together. As a teacher-turned-scrum master, she has spent the last five years helping enterprise teams build on their strengths to deliver customer value. She also serves as a Scrum Master Community of Practice leader, supporting growth and development of scrum masters across many teams.
You can link with Allison Zimmerman on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
This team did not have a clear focus or vision of what the stakeholders wanted to deliver. The team leaders did not trust the team to deliver what was being asked of them. On top of that, the PO and the team did not have a good working relationship. Not surprisingly, all of these factors led the team to isolate themselves, and started to think that it would take more than 2 years to deliver even the “MVP”. Why did this happen? As Allison started to look into it, she found that the team was organized around one “hero” role. This person was the only one that was able to work with some critical parts of the product. Listen in to learn how a team can get into this anti-pattern.
In Everything I Know About Lean I Learned in First Grade by Martichenko, Allison found how a teacher’s day can show many examples of how Lean can be applied in our organizations. In this segment, we also refer to Coaching Agile teams by Adkins and The five dysfunctions of a team, Lencioni.
How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she’s supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people! Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta!
About Allison Zimmerman
Allison believes that all people have the power to succeed when they work together. As a teacher-turned-scrum master, she has spent the last five years helping enterprise teams build on their strengths to deliver customer value. She also serves as a Scrum Master Community of Practice leader, supporting growth and development of scrum masters across many teams.
You can link with Allison Zimmerman on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
Allison’s team loved her work. They even had a nickname for her. Allison worked hard everyday to protect the team from interference, interruption and all manner of disturbances. Everything seemed to be going great, until something unexpected happened that revealed to Allison that Scrum Masters can be going wrong, even when everything around them seems to tell them they are doing the right thing! Listen in to learn what was that mistake, and how to make sure you don’t fall prey to the same temptation!
About Allison Zimmerman
Allison believes that all people have the power to succeed when they work together. As a teacher-turned-scrum master, she has spent the last five years helping enterprise teams build on their strengths to deliver customer value. She also serves as a Scrum Master Community of Practice leader, supporting growth and development of scrum masters across many teams.
You can link with Allison Zimmerman on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
This Product Owner had come from a Marketing Background, and had no experience with Scrum or as a PO. However, the PO was great at facilitation, and listening to the team and stakeholders. People felt heard, and understood by the PO, who was open minded!
This Product Owner had come from a business background, and was focused on getting a promotion “out of the PO role”. The PO was using Scrumn as a means to further their own career, and that left the Scrum Master and team bitter about the way in which they were treated!
Are you having trouble helping the team work well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.
About Shahin Sheidaei
Shahin Sheidaei is an Agile, Lean and Success Coach,International Speaker, Transformation Expert, and Entrepreneur.
Shahin is a passionate organizational designer focusing on organizational performance, and is also founder and principal coach at Elevate Change Inc.
You can link with Shahin Sheidaei on LinkedIn and connect with Shahin Sheidaei on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
Even if Scrum Masters can focus on “working themselves out of a job”, the fact is that not many teams can get to that level, and even the ones that can get there, it’s not easy to find out when is the right time to step back. In this segment, we talk about what it means for a team to be self-sufficient, and how Scrum Masters can evaluate if the team is ready to be given more autonomy.
Shahin starts by sharing a key lesson about making the Retrospectives adjust to the team, and their mood, instead of asking the team to adjust to the Retrospective format we prepared in advance.
In this segment, we talk about the 5 Why’s Retrospective, and some of the caveats we must take into account when facilitating that kind of Retrospectives.
Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches - Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!
About Shahin Sheidaei
Shahin Sheidaei is an Agile, Lean and Success Coach,International Speaker, Transformation Expert, and Entrepreneur.
Shahin is a passionate organizational designer focusing on organizational performance, and is also founder and principal coach at Elevate Change Inc.
You can link with Shahin Sheidaei on LinkedIn and connect with Shahin Sheidaei on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
Shahin joined a company to work with teams. However, when he joined, he quickly realized that the issues the teams were facing were not caused by the teams themselves. When Shahin tried to work with leadership, he realized that he would not be very successful if he continued to push in that direction, so he backed out and looked for other ways to influence leadership. Listen in to learn how Shahin was able to help leaders understand what needed to be done, and how he setup the work with the leadership team.
About Shahin Sheidaei
Shahin Sheidaei is an Agile, Lean and Success Coach,International Speaker, Transformation Expert, and Entrepreneur.
Shahin is a passionate organizational designer focusing on organizational performance, and is also founder and principal coach at Elevate Change Inc.
You can link with Shahin Sheidaei on LinkedIn and connect with Shahin Sheidaei on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
Shahin was working with a group of Scrum Masters. As he started to observe the work of the Scrum Masters, he observed a pattern that he could not understand. The team lacked energy. In an effort to help the team, and the Scrum Master, Shahin and the Scrum Master started to do some small changes to the meetings and Scrum ceremonies, but the needle didn’t move. Eventually the Scrum Master left the organization. Later on, Shahin met some of the team members and learned the real pattern that had been going on in that team, a dark pattern that we must be aware of! Listen in to learn what the pattern was, and how you can be ready for it!
The book Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen is a book that Shahin still goes back to even after having read it many years ago. It’s a book that can help starting Scrum Masters to be ready to host great Retrospectives for their teams, especially when they don’t yet have a large number of tools to use in those ceremonies.
In this segment, we also refer to The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. A book that Shahin describes as a story telling book that brings a perspective of the whole organization performance, a perspective that we don’t often have as a Scrum Master
How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she’s supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people! Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta!
About Shahin Sheidaei
Shahin Sheidaei is an Agile, Lean and Success Coach,International Speaker, Transformation Expert, and Entrepreneur.
Shahin is a passionate organizational designer focusing on organizational performance, and is also founder and principal coach at Elevate Change Inc.
You can link with Shahin Sheidaei on LinkedIn and connect with Shahin Sheidaei on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
Shahin was working in a company where a consultant was brought in to reorganize the organization. As part of that, the role of Scrum Master was considered redundant. This prompted a rethink for Shahin, who had to find a different role, where he could do the work that needed to be done: the Scrum Master role. Listen in to learn a key lesson that Shahin learned about how to present and discuss about the role of the Scrum Master with leadership.
About Shahin Sheidaei
Shahin Sheidaei is an Agile, Lean and Success Coach,International Speaker, Transformation Expert, and Entrepreneur.
Shahin is a passionate organizational designer focusing on organizational performance, and is also founder and principal coach at Elevate Change Inc.
You can link with Shahin Sheidaei on LinkedIn and connect with Shahin Sheidaei on Twitter.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
About Mickey Alon
Mickey Alon is the founder and CTO of Gainsight PX, the Product Experience Platform. He is a serial entrepreneur focused on designing, building and launching innovative products that help drive business outcomes. Mickey co-authored Mastering Product-Led Growth - a book on building product-led growth strategy. He’s held several executive positions at other companies, including being the CEO and co-Founder at Insightera.
You can link with Mickey Alon on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
A great Product Owner finds a balance between helping, and attending to the customer needs, and what the team needs to succeed. Great Product Owners also build relationships with the team and their stakeholders. Even if a great PO might not be technical, they are able to create a common language with the team, so that both can inform each other and come to decisions that help the team succeed in the ultimate goal of delivering customer value!
In this segment, we discuss several Product Owner anti-patterns. We start with the problem that many people in the role don’t have a deep enough understanding of the role, and it’s expectations, even if they are quite clearly defined in the Scrum Guide. From that lack of understanding many patterns can emerge, from not being able to contain/manage the scope to lack of understanding that the PO is there to help the team succeed, and not to be a “demanding tyrant customer” to the team! Listen in to learn about some of the critical anti-patterns that emerge when people don’t understand the PO role sufficiently well.
In this segment, we refer to the Coach Your PO e-course, which outlines some of the aspects to cover with PO’s and how to do it.
Are you having trouble helping the team work well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.
About Nousheen Manzoor
Nousheen believes that the future of leadership is kindness and empathy, and the same goes for any role which involves individuals and teams, like the Scrum Master role!
You can link with Nousheen Manzoor on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
Velocity can be a tempting metric for Scrum Masters to follow, but that’s no measure of success as Nousheen reminds us. In this segment, we talk about how important it is to create an environment where the team itself can work on improving their performance, and how to include 3rd party (e.g. a client) feedback in your own assessment as a Scrum Master.
In this segment, we talk about the WADE Matrix retrospective format, which can be used as an in depth reflection and a closure technique for a project that just ended. In this segment, we also talk about some techniques you can use to help a team create a lot of ideas in a retrospective, even if they are usually silent.
Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches - Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!
About Nousheen Manzoor
Nousheen believes that the future of leadership is kindness and empathy, and the same goes for any role which involves individuals and teams, like the Scrum Master role!
You can link with Nousheen Manzoor on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
Nousheen was working with a team at the client’s site. Based on what the client wanted to achieve, they suggested that the client change their processes, and instead of working with a collection of Excel spreadsheets, the team suggestd the client use JIRA, and a process defined in JIRA instead. As soon as they presented their ideas, Nousheen sensed massive resistance from the client. This was a clear sign that a new approach to the change was required. Listen in to learn about the approaches that Nousheen and the team put in place to help the client, and get the client onboard.
In this episode, we refer to the book Lean Change Management by Jason Little.
About Nousheen Manzoor
Nousheen believes that the future of leadership is kindness and empathy, and the same goes for any role which involves individuals and teams, like the Scrum Master role!
You can link with Nousheen Manzoor on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.
Nousheen started working with this team in the middle of the project. At the time, the team had one month to go live. However, Nousheen noticed that the team was demotivated, and there was a lot of blaming behavior happening in the team meetings. In this episode, we discuss how teams can sometimes push themselves beyond what’s acceptable, and forget about self-care and sustainability.
In this segment we talk about the Three Amigos meeting, a method to help teams prepare the requirements/User Stories in time, and with the right perspectives.
The book Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer tells the story of how very experienced people can fail. The book explores the disaster that occurred in Mount Everest on 10–11 May 1996, and how good intentions, and the desire to “achieve the summit” (literally) created a complex set of factors that ultimately led great people to make some very bad decisions. It’s a book filled with lessons for Scrum Masters, even those that work with great teams!
How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she’s supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people! Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta!
About Nousheen Manzoor
Nousheen believes that the future of leadership is kindness and empathy, and the same goes for any role which involves individuals and teams, like the Scrum Master role!
You can link with Nousheen Manzoor on LinkedIn.