Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
Christian has been thinking hard about the question of what success means for Scrum Masters. He describes how the role of the Scrum Master must have a “risk” perspective, and be about minimizing risk. In this episode, we discuss what that may mean for Scrum Masters and what practices help with that goal.
Christian shares his idea on “The Flow Retrospective”, which describes and illustrates how Agile software development can help teams reach much higher productivity and predictability. In this retrospective, Christian helps the team analyze and understand flow metrics to help them make better decisions.
In this segment, we refer to Actionable agile metrics from Dan Vacanti and The #NoEstimates book by Vasco Duarte.
About Christian Hofstetter
Christian is an enthusiastic Release Train Engineer, Certified Professional Co-Active Coach, and Facilitator who started his agile journey as a Product Owner. Later he turned his back on technology and focused on people and relationships. He is passionate about creating space for people and teams to be the best they can be.
You can link with Christian Hofstetter on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
In some organizations, the question that emerges over and over again is: “what’s the value a Scrum Master brings?”
As Scrum Masters, we must be ready to answer this question. Christian found inspiration in the work by Barry Overeem, Chris Verwijs (both previous guests on the podcast), and started to work with his colleagues in defining what an impactful and inspiring Scrum Master role would be at his company. Barry Overeem also published his own journey as a Scrum Master for us to read, and learn from.
About Christian Hofstetter
Christian is an enthusiastic Release Train Engineer, Certified Professional Co-Active Coach, and Facilitator who started his agile journey as a Product Owner. Later he turned his back on technology and focused on people and relationships. He is passionate about creating space for people and teams to be the best they can be.
You can link with Christian Hofstetter on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
Christian was asked to step in and give his insights on how one team was performing. When he joined a Sprint Planning he saw “finger-pointing” and a culture of blame. When he looked deeper he found some of the patterns that were fostering that culture.
In this episode, we discuss some of the patterns that drive a blame culture.
In Reinventing Organizations by Frederic Laloux, Christian found an explanation that helped him understand how organizations change (and don’t), and what are the cultural models that influence organizations’ evolution. He also understood what “value systems” may help or hinder the change we hope to promote when working as Scrum Masters.
In this segment, we refer to the idea and model of Spiral Dynamics.
About Christian Hofstetter
Christian is an enthusiastic Release Train Engineer, Certified Professional Co-Active Coach, and Facilitator who started his agile journey as a Product Owner. Later he turned his back on technology and focused on people and relationships. He is passionate about creating space for people and teams to be the best they can be.
You can link with Christian Hofstetter on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
Christian was working on an Agile transition, helping teams move from traditional project management to Scrum. As it usually happens, someone was trying to micro-manage and control the development team, after all, that’s the default situation in a project management culture. The team tried to push back, but that didn’t work. Christian took it up with the manager himself, confronting him with what was going on. At that time, Christian learned an important lesson: we have to stand for what we think is right.
In this episode, we talk about the book: Radical Candor by Kim Scott.
About Christian Hofstetter
Christian is an enthusiastic Release Train Engineer, Certified Professional Co-Active Coach, and Facilitator who started his agile journey as a Product Owner. Later he turned his back on technology and focused on people and relationships. He is passionate about creating space for people and teams to be the best they can be.
You can link with Christian Hofstetter on LinkedIn.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
From a Product Owner who spoke the same language as the team to the Product Owner that was absent, in this episode, we explore two patterns and the techniques Raphael used to help the team benefit from the Product Owner’s and stakeholder’s feedback.
In this segment, we talk about a manager that wanted to be involved, wanted to know what the team was working on, and was even able to “speak” SQL with the team. This is an example of how management can bring value to the team by providing insight and quick decisions.
Sometimes, we are given the task to work with a Product Owner that is absent. In this segment, we talk about how Raphael was able to work around that problem and involve the right person to have feedback and quick decisions for the team. A great story of how Scrum Masters can work with what is available, instead of complaining about what is not.
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 Raphael Branger
Raphael Branger is a Certified Disciplined Agile Practitioner and a pioneer in adapting agile methods in the context of data and analytics projects. He works as a Principal Consultant Data & Analytics at IT-Logix in Switzerland with more than seventeen years of experience in business intelligence and data warehousing.
You can link with Raphael Branger on LinkedIn and connect with Raphael Branger 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 we talk about success, we must also talk about what makes teams fail. In this episode, we talk about a common, yet often unresolved anti-pattern: producing software on time, but failing to provide business value for users and stakeholders.
In this episode, we explore Raphael’s approach to designing a way of working that focuses the team on Business Value at all times.
In this episode, we refer to the #NoEstimates book, as well as Raphael’s approach to defining and breaking down stories so that they fit the #NoEstimates heuristic of “one story, one day”.
In The Speed Car Retrospective (here’s’ another podcast episode referring to a different way to implement the Speed Car Retrospective), Raphael found a format that helps the team members verbalize what they “felt” during the Sprint, therefore focusing on underlying trends in the team’s performance, rather than only “the facts”.
About Raphael Branger
Raphael Branger is a Certified Disciplined Agile Practitioner and a pioneer in adapting agile methods in the context of data and analytics projects. He works as a Principal Consultant Data & Analytics at IT-Logix in Switzerland with more than seventeen years of experience in business intelligence and data warehousing.
You can link with Raphael Branger on LinkedIn and connect with Raphael Branger 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.
Raphael shares with us the largest change initiative he’s ever worked with: adopting Agile at his company, ITLogix, and in projects with his clients. We go through the deliberate steps he took, and how he built a learning organization first, and - using Scrum - helped his organization adopt Agile, and later move all projects to Agile even with clients that did not use Agile internally.
About Raphael Branger
Raphael Branger is a Certified Disciplined Agile Practitioner and a pioneer in adapting agile methods in the context of data and analytics projects. He works as a Principal Consultant Data & Analytics at IT-Logix in Switzerland with more than seventeen years of experience in business intelligence and data warehousing.
You can link with Raphael Branger on LinkedIn and connect with Raphael Branger 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 Raphael got started, many of his teams still had the back-end and front-end separation clearly visible, to the point of them being separate teams. Raphael found that, in Business Intelligence projects, that separation would cause communication gaps, and started investigating how to go about removing that gap. That led him to work in developing the concept of “generalizing specialists” for his organization, and he shares that process with us, with many tips on how to slowly, but deliberately move towards cross-skilled team members, and cross-functional teams.
In Agile Data Warehouse Design by Lawrence Core (check the book’s website), Raphael found an idea that helped him “see” how Agile could be adapted to work in Business Intelligence and Data projects. In the process of developing that idea, Raphael also found out how to involve users directly in the data modeling step, therefore benefiting from very early feedback.
In this segment, we also refer to the NoEstimates book by our podcast host Vasco Duarte.
About Raphael Branger
Raphael Branger is a Certified Disciplined Agile Practitioner and a pioneer in adapting agile methods in the context of data and analytics projects. He works as a Principal Consultant Data & Analytics at IT-Logix in Switzerland with more than seventeen years of experience in business intelligence and data warehousing.
You can link with Raphael Branger on LinkedIn and connect with Raphael Branger 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.
Raphael quickly realized that Agile could bring his organization a competitive advantage and help solve the problems he was facing in some of the projects he worked at. As he started to understand what being agile meant, however, he found that his initial focus (on the process) was detracting from his ability to learn quickly. In this episode, we cover Raphaeo’s personal transformation, from process to a completely new approach that has helped him continuously learn and improve the agility of his organization over the years.
In this segment, we refer to Raphael’s concept of Agile Business Intelligence Building Blocks, which helped him understand how to apply Agile to Business Intelligence projects.
About Raphael Branger
Raphael Branger is a Certified Disciplined Agile Practitioner and a pioneer in adapting agile methods in the context of data and analytics projects. He works as a Principal Consultant Data & Analytics at IT-Logix in Switzerland with more than seventeen years of experience in business intelligence and data warehousing.
You can link with Raphael Branger on LinkedIn and connect with Raphael Branger on Twitter.
Great Product Owners can engage the team, help them focus on the goals. But the PO’s role is not only about communicating, it is about creating a sense of a shared future. In this segment, we talk about how clear goals can help the team and the PO feel they are part of the team, and collaborate effectively.
Product Owners may try to dictate the focus and tasks to the team. When that happens, the team and PO start drifting apart. As Scrum Masters we must be aware of “how close” PO and team are so that we can tackle the distancing between them, and bring them together with techniques like shared goals, better Story writing techniques (e.g. Story Map), and other approaches.
[IMAGE HERE]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 Marianne Erickson
Always an enthusiastic Agilist, Marianne is proud to be a part of the Agile Transformation Team at AAA, a company that empowers its team members to learn, grow, empower, and do the right thing!
You can link with Marianne Erickson on LinkedIn and connect with Marianne Erickson 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.
Scrum Masters are tasked with facilitation responsibility, to help teams achieve their goals. In other words, Scrum Masters are successful when the teams are successful. This naturally focuses our work on finding and removing blockers, but there’s a technique that is especially helpful when working with teams to resolve blockers: innovate ways of working. In this segment, we talk about the role of innovation in helping teams succeed, and therefore in the success of our work as Scrum Masters.
Retrospectives are the place where the team reflects, and sometimes simulations like the Envelop Stuffing Game are excellent reflection triggers for the team. In this segment, we explore how Marianne used this game to help teams reflect on WIP limits, inventory, large batches, and collaboration.
About Marianne Erickson
Always an enthusiastic Agilist, Marianne is proud to be a part of the Agile Transformation Team at AAA, a company that empowers its team members to learn, grow, empower, and do the right thing!
You can link with Marianne Erickson on LinkedIn and connect with Marianne Erickson 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 Marianne worked through a long Agile transformation, she faced a very common pattern: the focus on velocity. A manager was constantly asking for the team’s velocity, and the Scrum Masters have to provide that information. That’s when the change started. Instead of augmenting against that behavior, the Scrum Masters explored why there was that need, and learned about why that manager was requesting that teams report their velocity. That understanding led to a deliberate change process that helped the teams, the organization, and that manager!
About Marianne Erickson
Always an enthusiastic Agilist, Marianne is proud to be a part of the Agile Transformation Team at AAA, a company that empowers its team members to learn, grow, empower, and do the right thing!
You can link with Marianne Erickson on LinkedIn and connect with Marianne Erickson 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.
Marianne joined a team that was forced to adopt Agile. That’s never an easy assignment, however, things got even worse. She started hearing comments like “Agile ruined my life!” What’s a Scrum Master to do in that situation? We explore how we can work teams that are stuck in the question “why should we adopt Agile?”.
As part of their interaction with Product Owners and teams, Scrum Masters often have to help facilitation User Story writing sessions. This book helped Marianne learn to think about the user experience. Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, is a seminal book on user experience and usability.
About Marianne Erickson
Always an enthusiastic Agilist, Marianne is proud to be a part of the Agile Transformation Team at AAA, a company that empowers its team members to learn, grow, empower, and do the right thing!
You can link with Marianne Erickson on LinkedIn and connect with Marianne Erickson 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 Marianne joined this team, she was surprised by the separation between different skills. Working with Product Owner for that team, she then found out that the expectation was that the Scrum Master “become” a project manager and manage siloed functional teams. She learned an important lesson for Scrum Masters: what to do when the work of the Scrum Master is understood as Project Manager
About Marianne Erickson
Always an enthusiastic Agilist, Marianne is proud to be a part of the Agile Transformation Team at AAA, a company that empowers its team members to learn, grow, empower, and do the right thing!
You can link with Marianne Erickson on LinkedIn and connect with Marianne Erickson 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 a particularly negative side of some PO’s approach, and how to help them get out of that negative spiral.
When it comes to a great Product Owner, Steve shares the story of a PO that worked all the angles of the PO job and understood that PO’s are not only Backlog managers, but there are a lot more sides to that role which will, in the end, help the team and the product succeed.
The company had a great product, that helped the company succeed in the market. To try and make it even better, the company hired one of their most vocal customers to drive the product forward. This customer became the PO, but the change they hoped for wasn’t going to happen. This PO would throw the team under the bus at Sprint Reviews. This was when Steve decided to intervene, but very quickly he found out that the best way to work with this PO was to meet him where he was and connect on a personal level. Listen in to learn how Steve helped this PO change his approach, without forcing any change.
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 Steve Jaccaud
Steve is an Enterprise Agile Coach, Volunteer, Speaker, and Musician in Boston, Massachusetts. When he's not leading workshops with creative software organizations, he's probably working on an album or deep in meditation!
You can link with Steve Jaccaud on LinkedIn and connect with Steve Jaccaud 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 a great Scrum Master works with a team, you don’t see the Scrum Master, you see the team succeeding and moving beyond their previously usual level of performance. In this segment, we discuss a few signs that we can use - as Scrum Masters - to assess if the team is starting the journey from good to a great Scrum team!
Steve tries to focus his work and his retrospectives on the aspects of continuous improvement. Because of that, he tries to find formats that don’t get in the way of the conversations that he wants to foster in the team. In this segment, we also discuss a tip to help teams be creative but keep the retrospective to the right topics without long rabbit-hole discussions.
About Steve Jaccaud
Steve is an Enterprise Agile Coach, Volunteer, Speaker, and Musician in Boston, Massachusetts. When he's not leading workshops with creative software organizations, he's probably working on an album or deep in meditation!
You can link with Steve Jaccaud on LinkedIn and connect with Steve Jaccaud 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 explore a story that many of us have faced. When someone in the organization gets interested in one of the many scaling frameworks for Agile, and their focus shifts away from the work, and into the framework itself. We discuss possible anti-patterns that emerge when adopting SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework), and what Scrum Masters in the organization can to together to help move the teams, and the leadership to a more Agile approach to their scaling efforts.
About Steve Jaccaud
Steve is an Enterprise Agile Coach, Volunteer, Speaker, and Musician in Boston, Massachusetts. When he's not leading workshops with creative software organizations, he's probably working on an album or deep in meditation!
You can link with Steve Jaccaud on LinkedIn and connect with Steve Jaccaud 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.
Steve was hired to help the teams go “faster”. However, when he started to see the Prodcut Owners throw their teams under the bus at Sprint Demos he understood that something else was going on. It wasn’t only about helping teams be faster anymore. As he started to dig deeper, he found a culture of fear in the organization and many other anti-patterns that he shares with us. A great story, with lots of warnings for us to keep an eye out for.
In The #NoEstimates Book by Vasco Duarte, Steve found a book that helped him understand what empirical process control is about, and put some things in place on how he approaches teams and their process.
In this segment, we also refer to The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, Drive!, Coaching Agile Teams, Agile Game Development with Scrum, and Suzuki’s Zen Mind.
About Steve Jaccaud
Steve is an Enterprise Agile Coach, Volunteer, Speaker, and Musician in Boston, Massachusetts. When he's not leading workshops with creative software organizations, he's probably working on an album or deep in meditation!
You can link with Steve Jaccaud on LinkedIn and connect with Steve Jaccaud 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.
Steve shares a critical part of his Scrum Master journey in this episode. We discuss how he went from a Scrum Master focused on the ceremonies, and process details, to a Scrum Master that focused on the needs of the team and constantly helped them adapt the process to the challenges they were facing. A great story, that shows how a simple perspective change for the Scrum Master can have a very large impact on their success with the team.
About Steve Jaccaud
Steve is an Enterprise Agile Coach, Volunteer, Speaker, and Musician in Boston, Massachusetts. When he's not leading workshops with creative software organizations, he's probably working on an album or deep in meditation!
You can link with Steve Jaccaud on LinkedIn and connect with Steve Jaccaud on Twitter.
Learn more about Better Retrospectives with David Horowitz by accessing the FREE Retrospective’s Academy by Retrium.
About David Horowitz
David Horowitz is the CEO of Retrium, a platform for agile retrospectives that has powered over 100,000 retrospectives from thousands of companies across the world.
Prior to co-founding Retrium, David spent a decade at The World Bank as an engineer turned Agile coach.
He has degrees in Computer Science and Economics from The University of Maryland and a Master’s Degree in Technology Management from The Wharton School of Business.
Learn more about Better Retrospectives with David Horowitz by accessing the FREE Retrospective’s Academy by Retrium.
You can link with David Horowitz on LinkedIn and connect with David Horowitz 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.
The amount of time a Product Owner spends thinking and working on the details is one of the aspects that has the biggest impact on the team. In this episode, we talk about two contrasting PO approaches: from the high-level focus of the Sprint Goal to the task-centric, command-and-control PO.
When we help teams, and Product Owners focus on the User Stories, we are helping them understand, and follow-up on the items they should work on. However, when we help the Product Owner and the team focus on the Sprint Goal, we are helping them focus on impact and outcomes over the tasks and stories they need to work on. This enables many positive behaviors, and when you find a PO that is able to crystalize a Sprint in a Sprint Goal, you know you’ve got gold in your hands, you’ve got a great Product Owner!
Sometimes, Product Owners behave as if they were Project Managers. When that happens, there’s many patterns that emerge in the team, and int he PO-team collaboration which Scrum Masters must actively manage, or mitigate. In this episode, we talk about the task-centric, command-and-control PO, and what you can do to help the PO and team find a better way to collaborate.
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 Willem-Jan Ageling
As a Scrum Master and writer for Serious Scrum, Willem-Jan is passionate about helping people understand what it means to work in a complex Product Environment. Which is how he likes to talk about Scrum.
You can link with Willem-Jan Ageling on LinkedIn and connect with Willem-Jan Ageling 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.
There are many aspects in the team’s behavior that point to a successful outcome of the Scrum Master’s work. However, there’s something that goes beyond process that will tell you the team is able to drive the work forward, and achieve a successful outcome. We discuss that specific topic: focus on progress.
In this episode, we discuss several Liberating Structures for retrospectives, and how Willem-Jan adapts them to his retrospectives. We focus on the benefits of using those approaches and focusing on solutions with the whole team. We refer to the 1-2-4-all structure and the episodes with two top proponents of Liberating Structures for Scrum Masters: Christiaan Verwijs and Barry Overeem.
About Willem-Jan Ageling
As a Scrum Master and writer for Serious Scrum, Willem-Jan is passionate about helping people understand what it means to work in a complex Product Environment. Which is how he likes to talk about Scrum.
You can link with Willem-Jan Ageling on LinkedIn and connect with Willem-Jan Ageling 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 story starts with a goal. The company wanted teams to “build and run” their own applications. How could they put that change into practice? Willem-Jan started by suggesting a full, cross-functional Scrum team for a product. That got accepted, but what came next was bold, unexpected, and kick-started the cultural change needed to bring the company to the next step in their transformation.
In this episode, we discuss the success conditions for a culture of “you build it, you run it”. For those interested in Continuous Delivery and DevOps, we have a 7-part series on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast podcast.
About Willem-Jan Ageling
As a Scrum Master and writer for Serious Scrum, Willem-Jan is passionate about helping people understand what it means to work in a complex Product Environment. Which is how he likes to talk about Scrum.
You can link with Willem-Jan Ageling on LinkedIn and connect with Willem-Jan Ageling 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.
Willem-Jan has a background in Project Management, and in his company, the leadership asked the teams to move away from Project Management and embrace Agile. That led Willem-Jan on a learning journey, to understand and apply Agile ideas in his work. In the process, as it usually happens, a team got fixated on the “velocity” metric. In this episode, we explore what can happen when teams get fixated on “velocity”, and what Willem-Jan learned to avoid that anti-pattern in the future.
In this episode, we refer to W. Edwards Deming, a precursor to Lean, and later Agile through his work.
In The Scrum Pocket Guide by Gunther Verheyen, Willem-Jan found an explanation for Scrum that made things click. This led him to explore the ideas behind “complexity” and to start to understand why “the plan” wasn’t always the thing to follow.
The Scrum Pocket Guide is authored by Gunther Verheyen who’s been on the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast before.
About Willem-Jan Ageling
As a Scrum Master and writer for Serious Scrum, Willem-Jan is passionate about helping people understand what it means to work in a complex Product Environment. Which is how he likes to talk about Scrum.
You can link with Willem-Jan Ageling on LinkedIn and connect with Willem-Jan Ageling 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 the middle of a big change, Willem-Jan was faced with the fact that the project plan wasn’t going to hold anymore. What should a Scrum Master do? In this episode, we discuss how we can tackle surprises to the plan the Agile way. We discuss how to get stakeholders involved and on board with the Agile value of “responding to change”.
About Willem-Jan Ageling
As a Scrum Master and writer for Serious Scrum, Willem-Jan is passionate about helping people understand what it means to work in a complex Product Environment. Which is how he likes to talk about Scrum.
You can link with Willem-Jan Ageling on LinkedIn and connect with Willem-Jan Ageling on Twitter.