Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
When it comes to the success of a Scrum Master, Stanislava likes to focus on the conflicts that emerge in the team, and ask if they have been solved, and if people are collaborating again.
I the end the value we produce is fully dependent on what people contribute, in Scrum, we only produce value through people!
Stanislava likes to refer back to the previous action points from the previous retrospectives and examine what has changed. She asks, for all items listed: “has it changed in the previous 2 weeks?” This way she focuses the conversations on the core outcome of the retrospective: the changes we want to implement to improve our work.
About Stanislava Potupchik
Stanislava is not only a serious games facilitator and a team coach, but she also spends a considerable amount of time rock-climbing and hiking, traveling with her partner and son, and drawing zentangles.
You can link with Stanislava Potupchik on LinkedIn and connect with Stanislava Potupchik 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.
Are you working on an “agile bubble”? Agile bubbles emerge in organizations, where one or more teams are allowed to use Agile, but all other teams are stuck in Waterfall. How do we help organizations that have these Agile Bubbles?
In this episode, we talk about the Cynefin Framework and how visualization helps groups understand how they can change.
In this episode, we also refer to Michael Sahota’s work.
About Stanislava Potupchik
Stanislava is not only a serious games facilitator and a team coach, but she also spends a considerable amount of time rock-climbing and hiking, traveling with her partner and son, and drawing zentangles.
You can link with Stanislava Potupchik on LinkedIn and connect with Stanislava Potupchik 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.
Sometimes team members have significantly different expectations of the Scrum process, or any other Agile process. Before we can help that team, we must detect when the team members are growing apart and understand what the expectations are for each one of them.
In this episode, we talk about the book The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni.
In Leadership and Self-Deception: Getting Out of the Box by the Arbinger Institute, Stanislava found a source of inspiration on how to work with people that might be in a defensive mode. It’s a book that helped Stanislava understand better her team members and to communicate with people that are on the defensive
About Stanislava Potupchik
Stanislava is not only a serious games facilitator and a team coach, but she also spends a considerable amount of time rock-climbing and hiking, traveling with her partner and son, and drawing zentangles.
You can link with Stanislava Potupchik on LinkedIn and connect with Stanislava Potupchik 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.
When helping teams adopt Scrum, it is important to start with the concrete situation the team is in. In this episode, we discuss how you can help the team decide on their own improvements as a starting point to adopt Scrum and Agile.
In this episode, we refer to the Complexity Framework Cynefin, the Agile Manifesto, Clean Language and the week of episodes with Susanne Taylor, a previous guest on the podcast.
About Stanislava Potupchik
Stanislava is not only a serious games facilitator and a team coach, but she also spends a considerable amount of time rock-climbing and hiking, traveling with her partner and son, and drawing zentangles.
You can link with Stanislava Potupchik on LinkedIn and connect with Stanislava Potupchik 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.
It’s not only how the Product Owners act at work that matters when it comes to great Product Owner examples. In this episode, we discuss how the private life of a Product Owner affects the team, and how the Product Owner’s private life is also affected by their approach to the role.
When we think about the Product Owner role, we often get stuck in the responsibilities of the role. However, it is important to understand what are the work-ethics, and work-life boundaries that great Product Owners have. In this episode, we talk about the Product Owner role from a human, personal perspective, and learn how this Product Owner setup his life to be a great product owner. Listen in to learn the approach at work, and how he separated work from personal life.
Email management is one of the anti-patterns we often see. In this segment, we talk about the micro-managing email-driven Product Owner, and how that pattern of behavior created conflict and problems in the relationship with the team.
Are you having trouble helping the team working 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 Susanne Taylor
Susanne is a transition coach, which translates to roles as: change management facilitator, organizational development consultant, scrum master, agile coach and community manager. (Often simultaneously.) Susanne has learned to be adaptable and resilient after having lived in Alaska, Japan, Taiwan and now Germany. She is passionate about accompanying people on journeys of transformation. (And she considers herself an introvert.)
You can link with Susanne Taylor on LinkedIn and connect with Susanne Taylor 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.
While it is tempting to define success as an end state for the work of the Scrum Master, it is important to recognize that the journey (how we get there) is also important. In this episode, we talk about a method to reflect on our work, and how that can help us navigate the challenges we will face as Scrum Masters. Take this episode, and reflect on your role, learn from what you have faced in the past, and keep the journey going.
We’ve talked about Liberating Structures in a past episodes, in this segment we talk about the “What?, So What?, Now What?” technique. We also discuss how we can bring team members into the retrospective so that they are present and focused on the retrospective.
About Susanne Taylor
Susanne is a transition coach, which translates to roles as: change management facilitator, organizational development consultant, scrum master, agile coach and community manager. (Often simultaneously.) Susanne has learned to be adaptable and resilient after having lived in Alaska, Japan, Taiwan and now Germany. She is passionate about accompanying people on journeys of transformation. (And she considers herself an introvert.)
You can link with Susanne Taylor on LinkedIn and connect with Susanne Taylor 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.
This organization was proud of their achievements. However, their culture was not allowing them to collaborate, and move the organization to the next stage. That move was critical for them to survive a changing market.
In this episode, we discuss a non-conventional way to approach organizational change, and how that helped this particular organization. Listen in, to learn about why that approach worked and how you can apply that approach in your Scrum team.
About Susanne Taylor
Susanne is a transition coach, which translates to roles as: change management facilitator, organizational development consultant, scrum master, agile coach and community manager. (Often simultaneously.) Susanne has learned to be adaptable and resilient after having lived in Alaska, Japan, Taiwan and now Germany. She is passionate about accompanying people on journeys of transformation. (And she considers herself an introvert.)
You can link with Susanne Taylor on LinkedIn and connect with Susanne Taylor 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.
Working with a team of leaders, Susanne was facing a tough situation. The team was not able to collaborate. When investigating the situation, listening to the team members, and doing her own reflection, she realized what the problem was. In this episode, we talk about a critical need for teams to successfully self-organize, and how the move from micro-management to self-organization is a multistep journey.
In Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz by Frank J. Barrett, Susanne learned to recognize the importance of having a clear framework for the team, but also letting the team members build on each other’s contribution. She learned that, once you have the right constraints in place, the team has an easier time being creative and clear in their decisions.
About Susanne Taylor
Susanne is a transition coach, which translates to roles as: change management facilitator, organizational development consultant, scrum master, agile coach and community manager. (Often simultaneously.) Susanne has learned to be adaptable and resilient after having lived in Alaska, Japan, Taiwan and now Germany. She is passionate about accompanying people on journeys of transformation. (And she considers herself an introvert.)
You can link with Susanne Taylor on LinkedIn and connect with Susanne Taylor 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.
When organizations bring people together in a team and then add a “planning” factor on top of them to “steer” them in the right direction, they might be losing the most powerful contribution of a team.
In this episode, we discuss what Susanne learned from a situation where she overplanned things, and did not give the team enough freedom and space to bring in their skills and knowledge. A brilliant reminder that we, as Scrum Masters, must focus on the team, not the work! Let the team focus on the work, while you focus on the team.
About Susanne Taylor
Susanne is a transition coach, which translates to roles as: change management facilitator, organizational development consultant, scrum master, agile coach and community manager. (Often simultaneously.) Susanne has learned to be adaptable and resilient after having lived in Alaska, Japan, Taiwan and now Germany. She is passionate about accompanying people on journeys of transformation. (And she considers herself an introvert.)
You can link with Susanne Taylor on LinkedIn and connect with Susanne Taylor 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.
Although Proxy Product Owners may be an anti-pattern, there are cases in which that ability to be a bridge and translate the customer requirements will help the team.
We also talk about the case of the PO that needed to learn to speak the team’s language.
It’s easy to be tempted to hire a very experienced Product Owner. However, in some situations, what the team needs is a hard-working Product Owner with a good understanding of technology, to help translate user/customer requirements into small enough stories. In this segment, we talk about the newbie PO, that was technical-minded and was able to translate the customer requirements in a way that helped the team.
When a Product Owner joins a team, and has little knowledge of the product, the team may need to step in and help the Product Owner. However, that help can detract from the PO’s need and ability to learn the product. In this segment, we discuss such a case, and how Izis was able to help that Product Owner step up and take on more responsibility.
Are you having trouble helping the team working 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 Izis Filipaldi
Izis' mission is to help people to improve their knowledge and professional value inside organizations, applying the agile way of working. She has been working as an Agile Coach for more than 7 years, helping people to deliver products, developing an environment free of judgments where they can fail fast and learn faster. Continuous improvement of: people knowledge, product delivery, and work environment, are her 3 main focus on work. And she loves what she does!
You can link with Izis Filipaldi on LinkedIn and connect with Izis Filipaldi 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.
As Scrum Masters, we aim to help teams progress in their ability to deliver value. However, it is important that we ask a few questions of the team behavior when reflecting on our own performance. We discuss some of the questions that Scrum Masters can ask to assess their own impact on the teams they serve.
Although Izis prefers to use the 3-question retrospective format, she tends to not follow that format strictly. In this segment, we also discuss the importance of having a strong focus on defining and following-up on the action points from retrospectives.
About Izis Filipaldi
Izis' mission is to help people to improve their knowledge and professional value inside organizations, applying the agile way of working. She has been working as an Agile Coach for more than 7 years, helping people to deliver products, developing an environment free of judgments where they can fail fast and learn faster. Continuous improvement of: people knowledge, product delivery, and work environment, are her 3 main focus on work. And she loves what she does!
You can link with Izis Filipaldi on LinkedIn and connect with Izis Filipaldi 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.
Scaling the use of Scrum in any organization is not easy. In this episode, we discuss Izis approach to that challenge from the Scrum Master perspective. Scrum Masters in larger organizations end up having to work with multiple teams. We explore an approach that may help Scrum Masters serve more teams, while amplifying their impact.
About Izis Filipaldi
Izis' mission is to help people to improve their knowledge and professional value inside organizations, applying the agile way of working. She has been working as an Agile Coach for more than 7 years, helping people to deliver products, developing an environment free of judgments where they can fail fast and learn faster. Continuous improvement of: people knowledge, product delivery, and work environment, are her 3 main focus on work. And she loves what she does!
You can link with Izis Filipaldi on LinkedIn and connect with Izis Filipaldi 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.
In Agile teams, Leadership has a different role. In this episode, we talk about the traditional approach to leadership in teams. From the technical lead, to the line manager, and how those roles should change to enable Agile teams.
In How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie, Izis found a set of tools that help her in her daily work as a Scrum Master. The book was written in the 1930’s, on the back of the Great Depression, and shares some of the techniques that successful people used to achieve in their lives. Dale goes through many of those techniques and outlines simple approaches that can help Scrum Masters also achieve their goals and help their teams.
About Izis Filipaldi
Izis' mission is to help people to improve their knowledge and professional value inside organizations, applying the agile way of working. She has been working as an Agile Coach for more than 7 years, helping people to deliver products, developing an environment free of judgments where they can fail fast and learn faster. Continuous improvement of: people knowledge, product delivery, and work environment, are her 3 main focus on work. And she loves what she does!
You can link with Izis Filipaldi on LinkedIn and connect with Izis Filipaldi 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.
Some Agile transformations are doomed to failure. In this episode, we talk about the signs that indicate when Agile is not likely to be adopted in an organization.
We also talk about the importance for Scrum Masters to work at different levels of the organization, not only at the team level.
About Izis Filipaldi
Izis' mission is to help people to improve their knowledge and professional value inside organizations, applying the agile way of working. She has been working as an Agile Coach for more than 7 years, helping people to deliver products, developing an environment free of judgments where they can fail fast and learn faster. Continuous improvement of: people knowledge, product delivery, and work environment, are her 3 main focus on work. And she loves what she does!
You can link with Izis Filipaldi on LinkedIn and connect with Izis Filipaldi on Twitter.
Diana and I were kicking around a few topics for this episode, and we ended up selecting “Agile and Leadership, friends or foes?” The idea is to talk about how Agile and Leadership play together (or not)
In this episode, we talk with Diana Larsen and Jutta Eckstein about what problems Leaders try to fix with Agile, what challenges they have when they try to adopt Agile, and we will do this with the focus on the Scrum Master role, and what they can do by working with the leaders of the organizations they work within.
Full show notes are available at https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/.
About Diana Larsen and Jutta Eckstein
Diana Larsen co-founded and collaborates in leadership of Agile Fluency™ Project. Diana co-authored the books Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great; Liftoff: Start and Sustain Successful Agile Teams; Five Rules for Accelerated Learning; and the seminal “Agile Fluency Model: A Brief Guide to Success with Agile” article.
You can link with Diana Larsen on LinkedIn and connect with Diana Larsen on Twitter.
Jutta Eckstein works as an independent coach & consultant.
As a developer, she started with XP in 97/98, started scaling agile in 2001 (and published about that in 2004), and am now Jutta focuses on company-wide agility.
You can link with Jutta Eckstein on LinkedIn and connect with Jutta Eckstein on Twitter.
You can learn more at Jutta Eckstein’s website, and check out Jutta’s books on Amazon and LeanPub.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
From an inexperienced PO to a PO with a clear Vision, in this episode, we explore two totally different types of Product Owners, and we learn from Nick what worked in those cases.
This Product Owner behaved like a great PO from the start of the project. The PO had a clear vision for the end result and was able to filter all the requests and requirements. From the team’s perspective, the process felt seamless.
If it was only like this for all teams we work with. Listen in to learn what made this PO so productive and his approach motivating for the team
At one point Nick was working with a new and inexperienced Product Owner. This did not make things easy, and the anti-patterns quickly started to surface.
It was a coaching challenge for Nick. In this segment, we explore the techniques and approaches that Nick used to try and help this inexperienced PO.
Are you having trouble helping the team working 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 Nick Stewart
Nick has worked in the "Projects Space" for the last 5 years, initially working with business change, then in IT using Prince 2, Waterfall and ultimately found Agile organically through pain of delivering projects using the other methodologies. More recently he has taken on a Delivery Lead role which allows him to continue to learn whilst helping teams deliver continuous value.
You can link with Nick Stewart on LinkedIn and connect with Nick Stewart 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.
Nick shares the process a team went through to move from Scrum to Kanban. Their initial goal was not to move to Kanban, but through small steps and focusing on improving they found themselves using Kanban even without trying.
Do you wish all change process would be this simple? Listen in to learn what steps Nick went through with the team.
About Nick Stewart
Nick has worked in the "Projects Space" for the last 5 years, initially working with business change, then in IT using Prince 2, Waterfall and ultimately found Agile organically through pain of delivering projects using the other methodologies. More recently he has taken on a Delivery Lead role which allows him to continue to learn whilst helping teams deliver continuous value.
You can link with Nick Stewart on LinkedIn and connect with Nick Stewart 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.
This team that Nick was working with had trouble delivering on time. When Nick looked into it, he discovered that the team did not take into account all the work necessary to adhere to the Definition of Done. Once he found that, however, he had to work with the team to help them realize what was going on, and how they could become more predictable by simply taking into account what they had committed to: the Definition of Done criteria.
When reading The Goal by Goldratt, Nick had a lightbulb moment. In that book, the author describes the impact that one single aspect of work can have: throughput.
The book describes how not paying attention to that aspect may destroy the ability to deliver value.
In this episode, we also discuss The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim et al.
About Nick Stewart
Nick has worked in the "Projects Space" for the last 5 years, initially working with business change, then in IT using Prince 2, Waterfall and ultimately found Agile organically through pain of delivering projects using the other methodologies. More recently he has taken on a Delivery Lead role which allows him to continue to learn whilst helping teams deliver continuous value.
You can link with Nick Stewart on LinkedIn and connect with Nick Stewart 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.
Nick was working with a team that had just lost their Product Owner. The new Product Owner had a conflict of interest and was changing priorities mid-sprint. This is a common anti-pattern that many teams face.
In this episode, we talk through Nick’s efforts to help the Product Owner understand the consequences of his behavior. It’s never an easy situation to be in, but we must be ready.
About Nick Stewart
Nick has worked in the "Projects Space" for the last 5 years, initially working with business change, then in IT using Prince 2, Waterfall and ultimately found Agile organically through pain of delivering projects using the other methodologies. More recently he has taken on a Delivery Lead role which allows him to continue to learn whilst helping teams deliver continuous value.
You can link with Nick Stewart on LinkedIn and connect with Nick Stewart 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.
In this episode, we discuss two very different Product Owner patterns. We talk about a PO that felt their role was to be the voice of the customer, and the PO who felt the team was merely a “service provider” and they were the “outsider” who would demand service.
Are you having trouble helping the team working 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 Sebastian Reverso
Sebastian is from Tucuman, Argentina. He has been working as a software developer since 2012 and as a Scrum Master since 2017.
Among his favorite activities are mountain biking and football (soccer).
You can link with Sebastian Reverso on LinkedIn and connect with Sebastian Reverso 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.
Are you a Scrum mom? When assessing our own success as Scrum Masters, we must look not only at how the team performs but also how we get there. How we contribute to that team’s success.
In this episode, we talk about some of the questions you can ask to learn if you are transitioning from that initial Scrum Mom role to an approach that allows the team to grow and continue on their own when you are not available.
When we reflect on our success or actions, we often focus on the task, and its success (or not). However, the way people contribute to the team may often be ignored. For example, a team member that is focused on helping others succeed may feel they are “not contributing”. In this episode, we discuss a different approach to retrospectives. An approach inspired by the concept of Liquid Organizations by Stelio Verzera, and that focuses on recognizing the contribution of each team member to the common success. Team members evaluate their peers’ contribution, so that the person who was focused on helping, may feel they contribute, even if they don’t work on many stories.
About Sebastian Reverso
Sebastian is from Tucuman, Argentina. He has been working as a software developer since 2012 and as a Scrum Master since 2017.
Among his favorite activities are mountain biking and football (soccer).
You can link with Sebastian Reverso on LinkedIn and connect with Sebastian Reverso 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.
When introducing change to an organization, the way we present ideas and involve people become key aspects to our success. In this episode, we talk about how introducing ideas in different ways may have radically different results. We identify some approaches that have worked well, and we talk about the concept of “baby steps”, or relentless movement towards a direction. Finally, we discuss how to involve the team members directly in that process. As Scrum Masters we don’t need to tell the team what to do, they know. If they understand why the change is necessary, they can come up with the right steps.
About Sebastian Reverso
Sebastian is from Tucuman, Argentina. He has been working as a software developer since 2012 and as a Scrum Master since 2017.
Among his favorite activities are mountain biking and football (soccer).
You can link with Sebastian Reverso on LinkedIn and connect with Sebastian Reverso 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.
As Sebastian started to work with multiple teams, he started to note some patterns of behavior that might cause problems. In this episode, we focus on the “professional jealousy” that some team members showed towards each other. We discuss how to detect it, and what the possible consequences of that behavior might be. Learn to detect it, and listen in to learn how Sebastian helped the team move forward.
In this episode, we refer to the Agile retrospective format: The Treasure Island, and to Solution Focused Coaching.
Por Un Scrum Popular by Mayer and Cyment is the Spanish edition of the popular: The People's Scrum by Tobias Mayer.
Sebastian found especially informative the aspects of the day-to-day Scrum that the authors go through, and how they compare what work looks like when using Scrum and when not using Scrum.
In this segment, we also refer to the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast episode with Claudia Toscano where the book “Por un Scrum Popular” is discussed in more depth.
About Sebastian Reverso
Sebastian is from Tucuman, Argentina. He has been working as a software developer since 2012 and as a Scrum Master since 2017.
Among his favorite activities are mountain biking and football (soccer).
You can link with Sebastian Reverso on LinkedIn and connect with Sebastian Reverso on Twitter.