In our work as Scrum Masters we must always be aware of the larger system and its impact on how the teams function and perform. There are many tools we can use to detect the wider factors to team performance. We talk about the Causal Loop Diagram, a tool that uncovers the wider systemic factors that influence team performance, but in this episode we talk about an insight that can potentially transform how we see our job as Scrum Masters.
About Melissa Lang
Melissa has worked in many diverse jobs over the last 20 years: ethnomusicologist, cook, IT project manager, agile coach. In all of those jobs, her main focus has been on strengthening team work and facilitating communication. As a dedicated agilist for 10+ years Melissa has worked at a range of companies, from start-up to multi-national corporation. Currently she is coaching teams from Barcelona and Hamburg at Xing AG where she has been employed since December 2011.
You can connect with Melissa Lang on Twitter and link with Melissa Lang on XING or LinkedIn.
The definition of success for us as Scrum Masters must take into account the fact that our work is never really over. The work we do does not end when the team is productive and happy, but rather it moves elsewhere. There’s always something to fix. Melissa explains why and gives examples in this episode.
About Melissa Lang
Melissa has worked in many diverse jobs over the last 20 years: ethnomusicologist, cook, IT project manager, agile coach. In all of those jobs, her main focus has been on strengthening team work and facilitating communication. As a dedicated agilist for 10+ years Melissa has worked at a range of companies, from start-up to multi-national corporation. Currently she is coaching teams from Barcelona and Hamburg at Xing AG where she has been employed since December 2011.
You can connect with Melissa Lang on Twitter and link with Melissa Lang on XING or LinkedIn.
Big re-organizations are the day-to-day reality in large companies. These changes present specific challenges to our work as Scrum Masters. Melissa shares with us an experince she had on how to make the quick change over fast and painless for the teams. Do you need to reorganize your product organization? This is the episode for you.
In this episode we mention the Podcast by Jim and Michelle McCarthy: The McCarthy Show.
The Core Protocols, also by the McCarthys and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs are other references you may want to read up on. Melissa’s blog on this experience can be read here.
About Melissa Lang
Melissa has worked in many diverse jobs over the last 20 years: ethnomusicologist, cook, IT project manager, agile coach. In all of those jobs, her main focus has been on strengthening team work and facilitating communication. As a dedicated agilist for 10+ years Melissa has worked at a range of companies, from start-up to multi-national corporation. Currently she is coaching teams from Barcelona and Hamburg at Xing AG where she has been employed since December 2011.
You can connect with Melissa Lang on Twitter and link with Melissa Lang on XING or LinkedIn.
As we work with multiple teams we are bound to encounter teams that have critical conflicts. Teams that can’t be helped with the tools we’ve learned so far. That’s the time when we need to explore new approaches, learn new tools and techniques. In this episode we talk about how to handle critical conflicts inside the team and what tools we can use in those situations. We mention the following books: Critical Conversations and The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team.
About Melissa Lang
Melissa has worked in many diverse jobs over the last 20 years: ethnomusicologist, cook, IT project manager, agile coach. In all of those jobs, her main focus has been on strengthening team work and facilitating communication. As a dedicated agilist for 10+ years Melissa has worked at a range of companies, from start-up to multi-national corporation. Currently she is coaching teams from Barcelona and Hamburg at Xing AG where she has been employed since December 2011.
You can connect with Melissa Lang on Twitter and link with Melissa Lang on XING or LinkedIn.
In our journeys as Scrum Masters we learn a lot about teams, people skills, coaching, listening. But we end up forgetting that in the end our role is to help the business. Melissa shares with us one such story and what she learned from that experience that helps her still today.
About Melissa Lang
Melissa has worked in many diverse jobs over the last 20 years: ethnomusicologist, cook, IT project manager, agile coach. In all of those jobs, her main focus has been on strengthening team work and facilitating communication. As a dedicated agilist for 10+ years Melissa has worked at a range of companies, from start-up to multi-national corporation. Currently she is coaching teams from Barcelona and Hamburg at Xing AG where she has been employed since December 2011.
You can connect with Melissa Lang on Twitter and link with Melissa Lang on XING or LinkedIn.
We often use this tool everywhere. We even learn this tool as part of our journey to become a good Scrum Master. It is so important that we even use this tool every day. What is this tool? Listen in and find out.
About Dominik Ehrenberg
Dominik is a Scrum Master at Infineon Technologies AG in Germany. Agile practitioner since 2008, he started in the industry as a software developer in web development and later became a Scrum Master.
You can link with Dominik Ehrenberg on LinkedIn and connect with Dominik Ehrenberg on Twitter.
Scrum Masters can achieve a successful outcome for their work if they are ready to ask the right questions from themselves. Whether we have a check-list of ask a Scrum Master colleague to serve as a sparring partner the key is to ask the right questions from ourselves!
About Dominik Ehrenberg
Dominik is a Scrum Master at Infineon Technologies AG in Germany. Agile practitioner since 2008, he started in the industry as a software developer in web development and later became a Scrum Master.
You can link with Dominik Ehrenberg on LinkedIn and connect with Dominik Ehrenberg on Twitter.
Teams can get used to “the way things are around here” and fail to recognize that they are stuck in a rut. Asking the right questions can help teams get out of the rut and learn that they must learn to question even what “feels natural” in order to improve.
About Dominik Ehrenberg
Dominik is a Scrum Master at Infineon Technologies AG in Germany. Agile practitioner since 2008, he started in the industry as a software developer in web development and later became a Scrum Master.
You can link with Dominik Ehrenberg on LinkedIn and connect with Dominik Ehrenberg on Twitter.
Teams that know their problems but fail to do anything about them are applying the Inspect & Ignore anti-pattern and will very likely get stuck in that partner for a long time! To avoid this pattern we must invest a lot into retrospectives and learn how to effectively motivate teams to take ownership of their methods of work.
In this episode we refer to the book Agile Retrospectives by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen.
About Dominik Ehrenberg
Dominik is a Scrum Master at Infineon Technologies AG in Germany. Agile practitioner since 2008, he started in the industry as a software developer in web development and later became a Scrum Master.
You can link with Dominik Ehrenberg on LinkedIn and connect with Dominik Ehrenberg on Twitter.
Sometimes we fail in very simple things like helping people understand what Agile is all about, and one instance where this happens is when teams “switch” from Scrum to Kanban. Well, the problem is that Kanban is not a process. It does not set roles are steps. In fact Kanban is about “starting where you are”, not setting a new process. In this episode we talk about how to avoid this kind of failures.
About Dominik Ehrenberg
Dominik is a Scrum Master at Infineon Technologies AG in Germany. Agile practitioner since 2008, he started in the industry as a software developer in web development and later became a Scrum Master.
You can link with Dominik Ehrenberg on LinkedIn and connect with Dominik Ehrenberg on Twitter.
In order for us as Scrum Masters to understand the systems we work within we must use concrete tools that help us understand the dynamics in play around us. Why don’t teams deliver what is expected. Can we be sure that the source of the impediments comes from inside the team? What expectations from the team regarding external help are not being met? What are the corporate policies that affect our work? Pawel shares 2 tools we can use to explore and understand the system.
About Pawel Kalinowski
Pawel Kalinowski, works with agile software development companies - currently he works with one of the largest software houses in Europe specializing in Python & JavaScript. With a background in capital markets & hedge fund industry, he knows quite a lot about risk management, which he applies in running software development projects.
You can connect with Pawel Kalinowski on twitter and link with Pawel Kalinowski on LinkedIn. You can also follow Pawel Kalinowski’s blog.
As Scrum Masters we developed our soft skills, our coaching skills, our conversation skills. But the teams we work with are still directly affected by the technology choices they make. As Scrum Masters we must be able to understand what teams go through to be able to help them tackle the key technical problems they must solve to be productive. That’s the topic we talk about in this episode: how to learn the hard skills.
About Pawel Kalinowski
Pawel Kalinowski, works with agile software development companies - currently he works with one of the largest software houses in Europe specializing in Python & JavaScript. With a background in capital markets & hedge fund industry, he knows quite a lot about risk management, which he applies in running software development projects.
You can connect with Pawel Kalinowski on twitter and link with Pawel Kalinowski on LinkedIn. You can also follow Pawel Kalinowski’s blog.
Most of the time we work with one or two teams, but sometimes we work in a larger context, where many other people are involved. How to organize a workshop for 50 people? That’s the topic we talk about in today’s episode.
About Pawel Kalinowski
Pawel Kalinowski, works with agile software development companies - currently he works with one of the largest software houses in Europe specializing in Python & JavaScript. With a background in capital markets & hedge fund industry, he knows quite a lot about risk management, which he applies in running software development projects.
You can connect with Pawel Kalinowski on twitter and link with Pawel Kalinowski on LinkedIn. You can also follow Pawel Kalinowski’s blog.
When problems affect our teams, it is often very easy to focus on the problems and the reasons why it is hard or nearly impossible to change those problems. However, that is rarely the case. In most cases we have influence over the situation, even if indirectly. In fact we always have 3 types of influence over the multiple aspects of any problem: Direct influence or the things we can directly affect and/or change; indirect influence or the things we can work on with other people’s help; and finally no influence on certain things. When we act deliberately to define the aspects we can influence we are able to identify many aspects that we have impact on.
About Pawel Kalinowski
Pawel Kalinowski, works with agile software development companies - currently he works with one of the largest software houses in Europe specializing in Python & JavaScript. With a background in capital markets & hedge fund industry, he knows quite a lot about risk management, which he applies in running software development projects.
You can connect with Pawel Kalinowski on twitter and link with Pawel Kalinowski on LinkedIn. You can also follow Pawel Kalinowski’s blog.
There are many possible reasons for teams to fail to deliver the work stakeholders expect. However, the team - with the help of the Scrum Master - should recognize that there are impediments that can be influenced, if not solved with their own efforts. In this episode we talk about the importance of identifying what we can influence and working with the stakeholders to create involvement and therefore influence them.
In this episode we mention some important books to help us understand and achieve a good collaboration with clients. Crucial Conversations is a book about having important conversations when stakes are high and emotions cloud our judgement. How to win friends and influence people is a classic that will help Scrum Masters manage their relationships with stakeholders.
About Pawel Kalinowski
Pawel Kalinowski, works with agile software development companies - currently he works with one of the largest software houses in Europe specializing in Python & JavaScript. With a background in capital markets & hedge fund industry, he knows quite a lot about risk management, which he applies in running software development projects.
You can connect with Pawel Kalinowski on twitter and link with Pawel Kalinowski on LinkedIn. You can also follow Pawel Kalinowski’s blog.
Coaching is one factor that affects team performance, but there are many other factors that affect teams and those other factors may be more impactful than our work as coaches. Listen to this episode to find out what factors influence team performance far beyond the work of a coach or Scrum Master.
In this episode we mention High performance team coaching and Richard Hackman’s book Leading Teams.
About Nikos Batsios
Nikos helps teams and organisations to grow strong in understanding the agile values and principles and applying various practices in their working context. Believing that great teams can achieve astonishing results. Nikos focuses on creating an environment of high quality and humane-relationships, that will further unleash the potential of individuals, enable teams to reach high performance and cooperate towards the same and shared organisation purpose.
Seeing satisfied, high performing teams that exceed their own and their organizational goals, is what motivates Nikos, and makes him want to continue serve them! He is passionate about agile coaching, motivated by learning and experiments.
Connect with Nikos Batsios on Twitter and link with Nikos Batsios on LinkedIn.
Happy teams are more productive, and therefore we should strive to find the conditions that allow teams to be happy. However, that’s only one success factor. There are many more success factors and Nikos reminds us of those as well as sharing his own checklist for Scrum Master success.
About Nikos Batsios
Nikos helps teams and organisations to grow strong in understanding the agile values and principles and applying various practices in their working context. Believing that great teams can achieve astonishing results. Nikos focuses on creating an environment of high quality and humane-relationships, that will further unleash the potential of individuals, enable teams to reach high performance and cooperate towards the same and shared organisation purpose.
Seeing satisfied, high performing teams that exceed their own and their organizational goals, is what motivates Nikos, and makes him want to continue serve them! He is passionate about agile coaching, motivated by learning and experiments.
Connect with Nikos Batsios on Twitter and link with Nikos Batsios on LinkedIn.
There’s not only one way to achieve any arbitrary change in an organization. Nikos refers to the Lean Change Method, an Agile approach to change management that relies on what we’ve learned in the Agile space to create an approach to Change Management that enables us to be adaptive and learn quickly also in a change process.
We refer to the book Lean Change Management by Jason Little.
About Nikos Batsios
Nikos helps teams and organisations to grow strong in understanding the agile values and principles and applying various practices in their working context. Believing that great teams can achieve astonishing results. Nikos focuses on creating an environment of high quality and humane-relationships, that will further unleash the potential of individuals, enable teams to reach high performance and cooperate towards the same and shared organisation purpose.
Seeing satisfied, high performing teams that exceed their own and their organizational goals, is what motivates Nikos, and makes him want to continue serve them! He is passionate about agile coaching, motivated by learning and experiments.
Connect with Nikos Batsios on Twitter and link with Nikos Batsios on LinkedIn.
There are many sources of influence in how one team behaves, and the most important source of influence is the environment or system in which the team exists. In this episode we discuss the Fear of Failure anti-pattern. An anti-pattern that is caused by the expected interactions between team members: one of the key system conditions (expectations).
About Nikos Batsios
Nikos helps teams and organisations to grow strong in understanding the agile values and principles and applying various practices in their working context. Believing that great teams can achieve astonishing results. Nikos focuses on creating an environment of high quality and humane-relationships, that will further unleash the potential of individuals, enable teams to reach high performance and cooperate towards the same and shared organisation purpose.
Seeing satisfied, high performing teams that exceed their own and their organizational goals, is what motivates Nikos, and makes him want to continue serve them! He is passionate about agile coaching, motivated by learning and experiments.
Connect with Nikos Batsios on Twitter and link with Nikos Batsios on LinkedIn.
Self-organization is one of the principles in Scrum, and a tool for teams to reach a high-level of performance. However, not all teams are ready for self-organization or ready to overcome problems when expected to self-organize. In this episode Nikos shares a story of the problems he sees with teams that are pushed to self-organize before they are ready.
In the Episode we mention a few Self organization presentation. Here’s one that you can read in slideshare: The Dolt’s guide to self-organization by Jurgen Appelo
About Nikos Batsios
Nikos helps teams and organisations to grow strong in understanding the agile values and principles and applying various practices in their working context. Believing that great teams can achieve astonishing results. Nikos focuses on creating an environment of high quality and humane-relationships, that will further unleash the potential of individuals, enable teams to reach high performance and cooperate towards the same and shared organisation purpose.
Seeing satisfied, high performing teams that exceed their own and their organizational goals, is what motivates Nikos, and makes him want to continue serve them! He is passionate about agile coaching, motivated by learning and experiments.
Connect with Nikos Batsios on Twitter and link with Nikos Batsios on LinkedIn.
As we explore what are the system conditions, we need to have a guide, a map of sorts that helps us understand and read the system we are exploring. That guide or map is our set of questions. The questions that guide us to understand better the system we are part of. In this episode we hear what are those questions that Nirmal uses in his own work.
About Nirmaljeet Malhotra
Nirmal is a passionate agilist with over 16 years of experience in the software industry and 8+ years of experience in agile. He love to experience the challenges that come with different roles. Nirmal has been a Developer, Business Analyst, Project Manager, Product Manager, Delivery Manager, Scrum Master and Agile Coach. In his current role, he works closely with the leaders of large corporations in helping them strategize and plan for their agile adoption and transformation initiatives. Additionally, he also works with development teams to help embrace the simple idea of continuous improvement. His most recent passion is in the area of Product Management where he leverages the idea of design thinking as a method for practical, creative resolution of problems and creation of solutions, with the intent of an improved future result.
You can connect with Nirmaljeet Malhotra on twitter and link with Nirmaljeet Malhotra on LinkedIn. You can also follow Nirmaljeet Malhotra’s blog.
Great Scrum Masters understand that their role is to help teams and individuals evolve, and not teach them despite their own journey. Everyone needs to understand the core of Agile values and principles before moving on to be self-sufficient. Great Scrum Masters are able to bring conversation back to reflecting on how the core values of Agile and Scrum apply to a particular situation.
Nirmal refers to Marshall Goldsmith as a coach he often refers to get inspired in his own work.
About Nirmaljeet Malhotra
Nirmal is a passionate agilist with over 16 years of experience in the software industry and 8+ years of experience in agile. He love to experience the challenges that come with different roles. Nirmal has been a Developer, Business Analyst, Project Manager, Product Manager, Delivery Manager, Scrum Master and Agile Coach. In his current role, he works closely with the leaders of large corporations in helping them strategize and plan for their agile adoption and transformation initiatives. Additionally, he also works with development teams to help embrace the simple idea of continuous improvement. His most recent passion is in the area of Product Management where he leverages the idea of design thinking as a method for practical, creative resolution of problems and creation of solutions, with the intent of an improved future result.
You can connect with Nirmaljeet Malhotra on twitter and link with Nirmaljeet Malhotra on LinkedIn. You can also follow Nirmaljeet Malhotra’s blog.