It happens. Some of our best people are also quite strong minded and want to do things their way, because hey, it worked in the past! This is a problem for the team to develop in a cohesive and collaborative mode of work. However this does not be an impossible problems for us Scrum Masters. Adolfo walks us through how he solved such a situation.
In this episode we refer to the book Crucial Conversations by Patterson et al., a guide to handling difficult, but necessary conversations in our teams.
About Adolfo Foronda
Adolfo Foronda has been a front end developer, content management, and ux specialist since the early 90's. He’s worked with a number of silicon valley startups, financial institutions, and is the founder of Nerd Stalker Media and the Nerd Stalker podcast. Adolfo is a rabid advocate and constructive critic of Agile.
You can link with Adolfo Foronda on LinkedIn and connect with Adolfo Foronda on Twitter. Adolfo’s work can be followed on Nerd Stalker media.
It is tempting, and sometimes even possible to change many things starting from a small group. But if you are working in a large multi-national organization don’t forget the old adage: “the tail can’t wag the dog”. Small wins are necessary, but not sufficient to help change take hold in larger organization.
In this episode we refer to the book Start with Why by Simon Sinek
About Adolfo Foronda
Adolfo Foronda has been a front end developer, content management, and ux specialist since the early 90's. He’s worked with a number of silicon valley startups, financial institutions, and is the founder of Nerd Stalker Media and the Nerd Stalker podcast. Adolfo is a rabid advocate and constructive critic of Agile.
You can link with Adolfo Foronda on LinkedIn and connect with Adolfo Foronda on Twitter. Adolfo’s work can be followed on Nerd Stalker media.
In order for us to understand that organization we work with, we must start with a model. There are many models out there. One of my favourites is Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo of Happy Melly. However there are many more models and they all have different and interesting perspectives. Rajaraman recommends we learn to use the Integral Theory model by Ken Wilber. A model that helps classify organizations and understand their behaviors.
About Rajaraman Kannan
Rajaraman is a Pragmatic Enterprise Agile Coach who is passionate about serving teams and organizations with humility and gratitude in their transformation journey. He is Compassionate and Empathetic about problems faced by people and helps them to understand and deal those problems in a better way.
You can link with Rajaraman Kannan on LinkedIn and connect with Rajaraman Kannan on Twitter.
Being a team player is something we expect team members to be. To learn to collaborate and help each other when necessary. Rajaraman asks us to consider our work as part of the team. He asks us and explains why it is so important to be a team player even in our role as Scrum Master.
About Rajaraman Kannan
Rajaraman is a Pragmatic Enterprise Agile Coach who is passionate about serving teams and organizations with humility and gratitude in their transformation journey. He is Compassionate and Empathetic about problems faced by people and helps them to understand and deal those problems in a better way.
You can link with Rajaraman Kannan on LinkedIn and connect with Rajaraman Kannan on Twitter.
Planning is one of the difficult problems to solve. When should we plan up front? When is planning up front too much? What should we include in the planning? Everything, if not, then how much?
In this episode Rajaraman shares the journey of a team and how they went from no planning to Agile planning. A change that many teams have to go through.
About Rajaraman Kannan
Rajaraman is a Pragmatic Enterprise Agile Coach who is passionate about serving teams and organizations with humility and gratitude in their transformation journey. He is Compassionate and Empathetic about problems faced by people and helps them to understand and deal those problems in a better way.
You can link with Rajaraman Kannan on LinkedIn and connect with Rajaraman Kannan on Twitter.
Rajaraman was working on a project where one of the team members was dominating all the conversations and unable to take in other people’s views. He tells the story of how that person slowly changed his approach to help the team overall perform better. We mention the tool “design an alliance” for coaching based on Lyssa Adkins work.
About Rajaraman Kannan
Rajaraman is a Pragmatic Enterprise Agile Coach who is passionate about serving teams and organizations with humility and gratitude in their transformation journey. He is Compassionate and Empathetic about problems faced by people and helps them to understand and deal those problems in a better way.
You can link with Rajaraman Kannan on LinkedIn and connect with Rajaraman Kannan on Twitter.
Some organizations only pay lip service to Agile and Scrum. They use the language, but their intention is not to adopt Agile or Scrum, but something else. Rajaraman tells us a personal story of such an organization and what happened to him. In the end his advice is clear: don’t waste time working for an organization that does not want you.
In this episode we refer to the book Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins and Michael Spade.
About Rajaraman Kannan
Rajaraman is a Pragmatic Enterprise Agile Coach who is passionate about serving teams and organizations with humility and gratitude in their transformation journey. He is Compassionate and Empathetic about problems faced by people and helps them to understand and deal those problems in a better way.
You can link with Rajaraman Kannan on LinkedIn and connect with Rajaraman Kannan on Twitter.
When trying to understand the system we work within there are some valuable tools that we can take. In this episode we cover some of those tools. We talk about the book Visual Meetings and discuss how to make Retrospectives more fun.
About Manthan Gogari
Manthan describes himself as a passionate Agilist who thrives on collaboration to deliver successful IT projects that help business achieve the promised benefits.
You can link with Manthan Gogari on LinkedIn and connect with Manthan Gogari on Twitter.
The price of admission to the Scrum Master community is learning about servant leadership. To serve those that we are working with, to enable their success. The key question that helps us practice servant leadership is: “how does the team function when I’m not there?” But that’s just the start of the journey. Listen in to learn about the journey to success that Manthan has found for himself. In this episode we refer to the Tuckmann model of team growth and Woody Zuill’s MobProgramming idea that is taking the world by storm.
About Manthan Gogari
Manthan describes himself as a passionate Agilist who thrives on collaboration to deliver successful IT projects that help business achieve the promised benefits.
You can link with Manthan Gogari on LinkedIn and connect with Manthan Gogari on Twitter.
Reducing the delivery/release time in an organization or team is perhaps one of the first changes we will face as a Scrum Master. In fact, that’s probably the first problem we all face: from an unreliable to a reliable release cycle. How do we get there? Manthan shares his own story, of how he helped a team go from an 8 month to a 3 week delivery cycle.
About Manthan Gogari
Manthan describes himself as a passionate Agilist who thrives on collaboration to deliver successful IT projects that help business achieve the promised benefits.
You can link with Manthan Gogari on LinkedIn and connect with Manthan Gogari on Twitter.
Planning a Sprint of a series of Sprints is one of the critical activities for Scrum teams. Manthan shares with us 5 tools that he uses in planning to help teams understand the task at hand and engage with each other in a productive and collaborative way. Avoid common team collaboration anti-patterns with these 5 tools.
About Manthan Gogari
Manthan describes himself as a passionate Agilist who thrives on collaboration to deliver successful IT projects that help business achieve the promised benefits.
You can link with Manthan Gogari on LinkedIn and connect with Manthan Gogari on Twitter.
It is only when we accept our failures that we are ready to learn. And we are finally ready to learn there’s 2 things we must do. First we must reach out to people that can help. Only by reaching out we will be able to get the help we need. Second and most important, we must learn to collaborate, to listen, learn and cooperate with the people that can help us. Learning from others is a very effective way to get over our failures.
About Manthan Gogari
Manthan describes himself as a passionate Agilist who thrives on collaboration to deliver successful IT projects that help business achieve the promised benefits.
You can link with Manthan Gogari on LinkedIn and connect with Manthan Gogari on Twitter.
Chaos is scary, it is hard to deal with, but we can do it if we learn to live in and even thrive in Chaos. Anand shares with us his view of why Chaos is necessary for learning and tips on how to navigate and thrive in Chaos.
About Anand Murthy
Anand is an Agile Coach helping Philips to transform into SAFe, the scaled agile framework. He loves working with People who say NO to Agile transformation and believes that you can only learn when there is some level of chaos. He was also awarded the Agile coach of the year award in july 2016. Three important reasons why Anand is an Agile Coach a) he loves Agile 2) he loves Agile and 3) he loves Agile ..
You can link with Anand Murthy on LinkedIn and connect with Anand Murthy on Twitter.
The work of a Scrum Master is hard, and not easy to learn quickly. To reach success we must go through our own path of failures and grow our knowledge step by step. However, there are some things we can learn from the failures of others. In this episode we learn about Anand’s journey and his 3 keys to success as a Scrum Master.
About Anand Murthy
Anand is an Agile Coach helping Philips to transform into SAFe, the scaled agile framework. He loves working with People who say NO to Agile transformation and believes that you can only learn when there is some level of chaos. He was also awarded the Agile coach of the year award in july 2016. Three important reasons why Anand is an Agile Coach a) he loves Agile 2) he loves Agile and 3) he loves Agile ..
You can link with Anand Murthy on LinkedIn and connect with Anand Murthy on Twitter.
Strong, self-centred Egos can create many problems for organizations. In this episode Anand shares with us a story of what Egos can do to stall change and what we can do about it. He also shares his own model for bringing change to an organization.
In this episode we refer to the book Switch, by the Heath brothers. A must-read for all involved in change processes.
About Anand Murthy
Anand is an Agile Coach helping Philips to transform into SAFe, the scaled agile framework. He loves working with People who say NO to Agile transformation and believes that you can only learn when there is some level of chaos. He was also awarded the Agile coach of the year award in july 2016. Three important reasons why Anand is an Agile Coach a) he loves Agile 2) he loves Agile and 3) he loves Agile ..
You can link with Anand Murthy on LinkedIn and connect with Anand Murthy on Twitter.
Management isn’t an easy art or profession. We all build our own framework of what is expected, and can be expected from management and managers. Anand has defined his own acronym for what management is about: MBA, or Measurement, Behavior, Actions. Listen in to find out why he chose those 3 words and what they mean in practice.
About Anand Murthy
Anand is an Agile Coach helping Philips to transform into SAFe, the scaled agile framework. He loves working with People who say NO to Agile transformation and believes that you can only learn when there is some level of chaos. He was also awarded the Agile coach of the year award in july 2016. Three important reasons why Anand is an Agile Coach a) he loves Agile 2) he loves Agile and 3) he loves Agile ..
You can link with Anand Murthy on LinkedIn and connect with Anand Murthy on Twitter.
None of us is born a Scrum Master. We all must go through a journey to “get it” and put it in practice. Anand shares with us his journey, a failure and a story that will change your mind about Agile transformations.
About Anand Murthy
Anand is an Agile Coach helping Philips to transform into SAFe, the scaled agile framework. He loves working with People who say NO to Agile transformation and believes that you can only learn when there is some level of chaos. He was also awarded the Agile coach of the year award in july 2016. Three important reasons why Anand is an Agile Coach a) he loves Agile 2) he loves Agile and 3) he loves Agile ..
You can link with Anand Murthy on LinkedIn and connect with Anand Murthy on Twitter.
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.