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Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches

Every week day, Certified Scrum Master, Agile Coach and Business Consultant Vasco Duarte interviews Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches from all over the world to get you actionable advice, new tips and tricks, improve your craft as a Scrum Master with daily doses of inspiring conversations with Scrum Masters from the all over the world. Stay tuned for BONUS episodes when we interview Agile gurus and other thought leaders in the business space to bring you the Agile Business perspective you need to succeed as a Scrum Master. Some of the topics we discuss include: Agile Business, Agile Strategy, Retrospectives, Team motivation, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, Backlog Refinement, Scaling Scrum, Lean Startup, Test Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Paper Prototyping, QA in Scrum, the role of agile managers, servant leadership, agile coaching, and more!
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Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast: Agile storytelling from the trenches
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Now displaying: June, 2015
Jun 30, 2015

There are many reasons for teams to disintegrate, but there is one ingredient that, when missing can cause that process to start much faster. In this episode Daniel explains the setting, the context, and the project that led his team to disintegrate due to the lack of that fundamental ingredient for any team.

Special call to all Dubai agilists: Daniel is relocating to Dubai and is looking to connect to local agilists. If you fit the bill, then reach out to him on twitter: Daniel Nielsen on Twitter.

About Daniel Nielsen

Daniel is a developer turned Scrum Master turned Agile Coach, with an increasing focus on the coach part. Over the last 10+ years, his interest in how teams work and how we interact as individuals has only grown. He has worked in both small and large companies and tried to cope with the complexities in both worlds.

You can reach out to Daniel Nielsen on Twitter, and link with Daniel Nielsen on LinkedIn.

You can also read his blog in Danish at QED.dk

Jun 29, 2015

Working with a well-versed distributed team is not an easy task for a Scrum Master, but transitioning a team from co-located to distributed? That’s even harder. Daniel explains what he learned as a Scrum Master when he was faced with just that situation.

Special call to all Dubai agilists: Daniel is relocating to Dubai and is looking to connect to local agilists. If you fit the bill, then reach out to him on twitter: Daniel Nielsen on Twitter.

About Daniel Nielsen

Daniel is a developer turned Scrum Master turned Agile Coach, with an increasing focus on the coach part. Over the last 10+ years, his interest in how teams work and how we interact as individuals has only grown. He has worked in both small and large companies and tried to cope with the complexities in both worlds.

You can reach out to Daniel Nielsen on Twitter, and link with Daniel Nielsen on LinkedIn.

You can also read his blog in Danish at QED.dk

Jun 26, 2015

Whether you use the Lean Waste approach, Dan Pink’s autonomy-mastery-purpose or any other model what is important is that you use some models to understand the system that affects the team’s performance.

Sebastian shares several models that you can use to assess and measure those system conditions that many of us forget to take into account.

This episode also includes a long reading list:

About Sebastian Schürmann

Sebastian has an extremely strong work ethic, a great passion to his work, unwavering desire for excellence, and unabated willingness to share his rich knowledge.

Driven by his strong work ethic, he takes several key roles: as scrum master, agile coach, mentor, as protector of the young development teams, after all, a humble leader who takes risks and responsibilities at extremely critical moments, creates a vision which the other follow by heart - with excellent outcome.

You can find Sebastian Schürmann on twitter, and link with Sebastian Schürmann on LinkedIn.

You can find Sebastian Schürmann’s website, and his blog.

Jun 25, 2015

There are many KPI’s to measure your work and success as a Scrum Master, but what is a successful organization. Sebastian shares the definition of a successful organization, and how that can help you define success for your work as a scrum master.

In this episode we also have KPI’s galore, and why numbers are not always the best way to measure your success as a Scrum Master.

About Sebastian Schürmann

Sebastian has an extremely strong work ethic, a great passion to his work, unwavering desire for excellence, and unabated willingness to share his rich knowledge.

Driven by his strong work ethic, he takes several key roles: as scrum master, agile coach, mentor, as protector of the young development teams, after all, a humble leader who takes risks and responsibilities at extremely critical moments, creates a vision which the other follow by heart - with excellent outcome.

You can find Sebastian Schürmann on twitter, and link with Sebastian Schürmann on LinkedIn.

You can find Sebastian Schürmann’s website, and his blog.

Jun 24, 2015

Very often we fail to use tools and methods that are already available to help us succeed at the recruiting process. In this episode Sebastian shares two tools/methods he uses when recruiting people, plus tips on how to evaluate good developers.

About Sebastian Schürmann

Sebastian has an extremely strong work ethic, a great passion to his work, unwavering desire for excellence, and unabated willingness to share his rich knowledge.

Driven by his strong work ethic, he takes several key roles: as scrum master, agile coach, mentor, as protector of the young development teams, after all, a humble leader who takes risks and responsibilities at extremely critical moments, creates a vision which the other follow by heart - with excellent outcome.

You can find Sebastian Schürmann on twitter, and link with Sebastian Schürmann on LinkedIn.

You can find Sebastian Schürmann’s website, and his blog.

Jun 23, 2015

Talking about self-destructive behaviours may make people feel they are being judged, and Sebastian prefers to stay away from judgements. Instead, he wants to focus on behaviours that affect the team and must be addressed. Sebastian also shares with us a sabotage technique that is sometimes used by team members and teams in their work.

The sabotage technique is also available in the Simple Sabotage Field Manual a document used by a precursor to the CIA to explain how individuals could sabotage countries, factories and other potential targets. Are you aware of all the sabotage behaviors your team can perform on itself?

About Sebastian Schürmann

Sebastian has an extremely strong work ethic, a great passion to his work, unwavering desire for excellence, and unabated willingness to share his rich knowledge.

Driven by his strong work ethic, he takes several key roles: as scrum master, agile coach, mentor, as protector of the young development teams, after all, a humble leader who takes risks and responsibilities at extremely critical moments, creates a vision which the other follow by heart - with excellent outcome.

You can find Sebastian Schürmann on twitter, and link with Sebastian Schürmann on LinkedIn.

You can find Sebastian Schürmann’s website, and his blog.

Jun 22, 2015

There are many failures in the career of all successful Scrum Masters, and Sebastian shares with us 4 major failures that helped him develop his craft as a Scrum Master.

Being a Scrum Master is a discipline in itself, and we must learn that discipline by focusing on the contribution of that discipline to the team and the organization.

About Sebastian Schürmann

Sebastian has an extremely strong work ethic, a great passion to his work, unwavering desire for excellence, and unabated willingness to share his rich knowledge.

Driven by his strong work ethic, he takes several key roles: as scrum master, agile coach, mentor, as protector of the young development teams, after all, a humble leader who takes risks and responsibilities at extremely critical moments, creates a vision which the other follow by heart - with excellent outcome.

You can find Sebastian Schürmann on twitter, and link with Sebastian Schürmann on LinkedIn.

 

You can find Sebastian Schürmann’s website, and his blog.

 

Jun 19, 2015

Impact Mapping, a technique popularized by Gojko Adzic transformed how Karol thinks about software and product development.

About Karol Sójko

Developer, software architect and a team leader. Karol is a big fan of Behavior Driven Development and open source software. In his everyday work he tries to share his experience and actively participate in development and spreading a good word about open source projects like Symfony, Behat or PhpSpec. He is also fascinated by the process of making teams work better and tweak their productivity. After hours he is one of PHPers meetups organizers in Poland.

Karol is the author of To-Do: Team!: Simple productivity techniques for improving your team & making software that matters

 

You can connect with Karol Sójko on twitter, and subscribe to his helpful tips on how to get your team to the next level.

 

Jun 18, 2015

One single hour of self-development can transform your game. How? This is what Karol explains in this episode as he explains the process he uses with his teams.

About Karol Sójko

Developer, software architect and a team leader. Karol is a big fan of Behavior Driven Development and open source software. In his everyday work he tries to share his experience and actively participate in development and spreading a good word about open source projects like Symfony, Behat or PhpSpec. He is also fascinated by the process of making teams work better and tweak their productivity. After hours he is one of PHPers meetups organizers in Poland.

Karol is the author of To-Do: Team!: Simple productivity techniques for improving your team & making software that matters

You can connect with Karol Sójko on twitter, and subscribe to his helpful tips on how to get your team to the next level.

Jun 17, 2015

Bosses or leaders? Which type of people do you hire. All people we hire must at some point make a decision, to work for the team or work despite the team. This is the difference between bosses and leaders, and you should consider this when recruiting Scrum Masters.

About Karol Sójko

Developer, software architect and a team leader. Karol is a big fan of Behavior Driven Development and open source software. In his everyday work he tries to share his experience and actively participate in development and spreading a good word about open source projects like Symfony, Behat or PhpSpec. He is also fascinated by the process of making teams work better and tweak their productivity. After hours he is one of PHPers meetups organizers in Poland.

Karol is the author of To-Do: Team!: Simple productivity techniques for improving your team & making software that matters

You can connect with Karol Sójko on twitter, and subscribe to his helpful tips on how to get your team to the next level.

Jun 16, 2015

The life of a startup is very different from working on a large corporate environment. This influences your work as a Scrum Master. In this episode Karol shares what he learned from that experience, and a technique he learned then that he now applies everywhere.

About Karol Sójko

Developer, software architect and a team leader. Karol is a big fan of Behavior Driven Development and open source software. In his everyday work he tries to share his experience and actively participate in development and spreading a good word about open source projects like Symfony, Behat or PhpSpec. He is also fascinated by the process of making teams work better and tweak their productivity. After hours he is one of PHPers meetups organizers in Poland.

Karol is the author of To-Do: Team!: Simple productivity techniques for improving your team & making software that matters

You can connect with Karol Sójko on twitter, and subscribe to his helpful tips on how to get your team to the next level.

Jun 15, 2015

Karol shares his story of how a project went from perfect to disaster. From engaging and motivating to unfocused, “pet project” and un-interesting for the team. His experience made a big difference for his career, and has influenced his work as a team lead and Scrum Master.

SPECIAL GIVEAWAY INCLUDED: listen to the end of the episode for a giveaway that will help you get a free copy of Karol’s book: To-Do: Team!: Simple productivity techniques for improving your team & making software that matters

About Karol Sójko

Developer, software architect and a team leader. Karol is a big fan of Behavior Driven Development and open source software. In his everyday work he tries to share his experience and actively participate in development and spreading a good word about open source projects like Symfony, Behat or PhpSpec. He is also fascinated by the process of making teams work better and tweak their productivity. After hours he is one of PHPers meetups organizers in Poland.

Karol is the author of To-Do: Team!: Simple productivity techniques for improving your team & making software that matters

 

You can connect with Karol Sójko on twitter, and subscribe to his helpful tips on how to get your team to the next level.

Jun 12, 2015

Retrospectives are a systems thinking tool that can help you understand how teams are affected by the wider system. Ben explains his views on how to build that into the way you host and facilitate retrospectives.

About Ben Linders

Ben Linders is an Independent Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement, based in The Netherlands. Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives & What Drives Quality.

You can follow Ben Linders on Twitter, and connect with Ben Linders on LinkedIn.


You can find Ben’s Agile self-assessment in his web-site, and find more about his work and upcoming workshops.

Jun 11, 2015

Is the team working as a team? Or are they working in isolation, and come together only occasionally to “report their work”? And how can you build an environment where teams can come together and work as teams?

In this episode we also mention the book Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen.

About Ben Linders

Ben Linders is an Independent Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement, based in The Netherlands. Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives & What Drives Quality.

You can follow Ben Linders on Twitter, and connect with Ben Linders on LinkedIn.


You can find Ben’s Agile self-assessment in his web-site, and find more about his work and upcoming workshops.

Jun 10, 2015

Mindset and beliefs when recruiting Scrum Masters are good indicators of the suitability of the candidates to the job at hand. Ben Linders explains why, and how to build that into the recruiting interview.

In this episode we mention Ben’s blog post on how sometimes it is better to do nothing.

About Ben Linders

Ben Linders is an Independent Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement, based in The Netherlands. Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives & What Drives Quality.

You can follow Ben Linders on Twitter, and connect with Ben Linders on LinkedIn.


You can find Ben’s Agile self-assessment in his web-site, and find more about his work and upcoming workshops.

Jun 9, 2015

Agile is not a process, and that is an important realization that all teams should reach at some point. But how to get them to that realization? How to help team members understand that Agile is not a set of recipes that you follow blindly?

About Ben Linders

Ben Linders is an Independent Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement, based in The Netherlands. Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives & What Drives Quality.

You can follow Ben Linders on Twitter, and connect with Ben Linders on LinkedIn.


You can find Ben’s Agile self-assessment in his web-site, and find more about his work and upcoming workshops.

Jun 8, 2015

How do you handle people that are not team players? We hear often that our role as Scrum Masters is to help the team collaborate. How can we do that if some team members are not team players? Ben explains how he was able to detect that in one team and what he did about it.

In this episode we mention the book Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams & Projects, by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies, a book that can help you get a project or a team started in the right way.

Ben also mentions one of his blog posts on how to help teams form with the use of Futurespectives for team chartering.

 

About Ben Linders

Ben Linders is an Independent Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement, based in The Netherlands. Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives & What Drives Quality.

You can follow Ben Linders on Twitter, and connect with Ben Linders on LinkedIn.

 

You can find Ben’s Agile self-assessment in his web-site, and find more about his work and upcoming workshops.

Jun 5, 2015

How do you help the whole organization evolve and improve? Easy, says Claudio. Here’s his recipe:

  1. Look at the whole value stream (from concept to cash!)

  2. Find out what impedes flow in that value stream

  3. Use PopcornFlow to learn, and solve those flow bottlenecks

  4. Rinse and repeat.

Claudio also adds, that when we look at the whole value stream we see how important the role of management really is, because management is the function responsible to make flow happen at the value stream level.

About Claudio Perrone

Claudio is an independent Lean & Agile management consultant, entrepreneur and startup strategist. You may know him for the amazing cartoons he creates for his presentations or, perhaps, for A3 Thinker, a deck of brainstorming cards for Lean Problem Solving. These days he focuses on PopcornFlow, a brand-new continuous evolution method for personal and organisational change.

You can connect with Claudio Perrone on twitter, and see Claudio Perrone on LinkedIn. These days Claudio is focusing on his latest work: PopcornFlow, a method by which you can Learn how to establish a continuous flow of small, traceable, co-created, explicit change experiments. For you, your team, your organization.

Jun 4, 2015

What does it mean to be more Agile? Claudio has a very concrete definition of agility that you can start using today to measure how agile is your team. His definition: the more experiments you run, the more agile you are. After all experiments lead to learning, and learning leads to adaptation. Evolve as quickly as a virus, not as an elephant!

About Claudio Perrone

Claudio is an independent Lean & Agile management consultant, entrepreneur and startup strategist. You may know him for the amazing cartoons he creates for his presentations or, perhaps, for A3 Thinker, a deck of brainstorming cards for Lean Problem Solving. These days he focuses on PopcornFlow, a brand-new continuous evolution method for personal and organisational change.

You can connect with Claudio Perrone on twitter, and see Claudio Perrone on LinkedIn. These days Claudio is focusing on his latest work: PopcornFlow, a method by which you can Learn how to establish a continuous flow of small, traceable, co-created, explicit change experiments. For you, your team, your organization.

Jun 3, 2015

Sometimes recruiting for what people already know is the right approach. But is that always the right approach? Claudio suggests that sometimes you should rather focus on potential and he explains why.

About Claudio Perrone

Claudio is an independent Lean & Agile management consultant, entrepreneur and startup strategist. You may know him for the amazing cartoons he creates for his presentations or, perhaps, for A3 Thinker, a deck of brainstorming cards for Lean Problem Solving. These days he focuses on PopcornFlow, a brand-new continuous evolution method for personal and organisational change.

You can connect with Claudio Perrone on twitter, and see Claudio Perrone on LinkedIn. These days Claudio is focusing on his latest work: PopcornFlow, a method by which you can Learn how to establish a continuous flow of small, traceable, co-created, explicit change experiments. For you, your team, your organization.

Jun 2, 2015

Daily meetings fail for many reasons, and Claudio has an idea of why it happens regularly. The 3 questions in the Scrum daily just can’t work in all situations. Claudio discusses some ideas on how to improve the questions the team asks in the daily meeting and gives a few tips on how to improve the Scrum board to make work more visible and focus the team on Flow.

We also discuss a promising framework to help teams understand the “why” of every story they develop. This is a framework developed based on the work by Clayton Christensen (Innovator’s Dilemma), and tries to define the content of products from a different perspective: the job to be done that customers hire the product for. Watch Clayton Christensen present the idea of jobs to be done on youtube. Or listen to the Jobs-To-Be-Done radio podcast if you want to know more about this promising framework.

About Claudio Perrone

Claudio is an independent Lean & Agile management consultant, entrepreneur and startup strategist. You may know him for the amazing cartoons he creates for his presentations or, perhaps, for A3 Thinker, a deck of brainstorming cards for Lean Problem Solving. These days he focuses on PopcornFlow, a brand-new continuous evolution method for personal and organisational change.

You can connect with Claudio Perrone on twitter, and see Claudio Perrone on LinkedIn. These days Claudio is focusing on his latest work: PopcornFlow, a method by which you can Learn how to establish a continuous flow of small, traceable, co-created, explicit change experiments. For you, your team, your organization.

Jun 1, 2015

Change can be made cheap and easy with the right method that develops a culture of continuous improvement in the team and ultimately the organization. Claudio’s method: PopcornFlow is a an approach to help teams get out of the rut of no-improvement. The method consists of 7 steps:

  1. List the problems and observations

  2. Create options by asking questions like: what could we do now to improve?

  3. Define possible experiments in the form of: Action, reason (why?), expectation, duration)

  4. Select and commit to run one of the experiments you listed

  5. Implement and follow-up the execution of the experiment you selected

  6. Review the results once the experiment is completed

  7. Define what your next steps are given what you learned from that experiment

Understand the gap between expectations and reality, and start the process all over again.

You can find out more about Claudio’s method at: PopcornFlow.com.

About Claudio Perrone

Claudio is an independent Lean & Agile management consultant, entrepreneur and startup strategist. You may know him for the amazing cartoons he creates for his presentations or, perhaps, for A3 Thinker, a deck of brainstorming cards for Lean Problem Solving. These days he focuses on PopcornFlow, a brand-new continuous evolution method for personal and organisational change.

You can connect with Claudio Perrone on twitter, and see Claudio Perrone on LinkedIn. These days Claudio is focusing on his latest work: PopcornFlow, a method by which you can Learn how to establish a continuous flow of small, traceable, co-created, explicit change experiments. For you, your team, your organization.

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