Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
How do we help teams that are not developing software, but still are using Scrum? In this episode, we talk about how different the adoption process is for non-technical teams, and learn about the tool that Ellen developed to help teams adopt Scrum even when not working in a software development role.
About Ellen Santamaria
Ellen is a Scrum Master based in Berlin, and originally from Australia. She completed a Bachelor in Australian and later a Masters in Berlin, Germany where she works.
Ellen is passionate about startups, innovation, social entrepreneurship, new business models, organisational change management, and other topics. She also loves story-based video games, sci-fi, pétanque, and finding new ways of doing things.
You can link with Ellen Santamaria 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.
How often do you reflect on the prevailing culture of the team and organization where you work? Are that team or organization's values aligned with you own personal values?
As Scrum Masters, the organizations and teams we work with have a big impact on the work we can do. In this episode, we discuss how sometimes the organization and team’s cultures are not aligned with the Scrum Master’s values, and what we should do about it.
In The Hitchhiker’s guide to Agile Coaching, by the Agile42 coaches (free sign-up required), Ellen found a good description of the different stances Scrum Masters need to take in their role. The book invites us to consider the stance we take at each moment.
In this segment, we also refer to the 5 coaching stances for Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches (free sign-up required).
About Ellen Santamaria
Ellen is a Scrum Master based in Berlin, and originally from Australia. She completed a Bachelor in Australian and later a Masters in Berlin, Germany where she works.
Ellen is passionate about startups, innovation, social entrepreneurship, new business models, organisational change management, and other topics. She also loves story-based video games, sci-fi, pétanque, and finding new ways of doing things.
You can link with Ellen Santamaria 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.
Let’s say that a team has started adopting Scrum. That’s great, right? No so quick! Did the team start adopting Scrum of their own accord? Or was it a dictate from above? As a Scrum Master, we need to pay special attention to why the teams started adopting Scrum. And we must work with them to define and help them stick to their own work agreements. It’s easy to say that people are motivated to do the work they themselves define, but as a Scrum Master are you helping the team define what they want to achieve, and how they want to work?
About Ellen Santamaria
Ellen is a Scrum Master based in Berlin, and originally from Australia. She completed a Bachelor in Australian and later a Masters in Berlin, Germany where she works.
Ellen is passionate about startups, innovation, social entrepreneurship, new business models, organisational change management, and other topics. She also loves story-based video games, sci-fi, pétanque, and finding new ways of doing things.
You can link with Ellen Santamaria 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 the absent PO, to the the 3 critical skills PO’s must have, this is an episode filled with in-depth details of how to work well with your Product Owner.
The Product Owner might be the toughest role in the Scrum framework. PO’s are often required to juggle a lot of activities when doing their job. In this segment we talk about the 3 skills that great Product Owners have: 1) they are able to prioritize quickly; 2) they are able to speak different languages (business and tech); 3) they are able to negotiate when stakes are high. Does your PO exhibit these skills? Listen it to learn about how Valeria helps the PO’s she works with.
When the Product Owner is not available to the team it is impossible for the collaboration to emerge. But that’s only one aspect that is hindered by the PO’s absence. In this segment, we explore how Valeria is able to talk to, and collaborate with PO’s that are absent, and get them closer to a collaborative relationship with the team.
[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 Valeria Greco
Valeria has worked as a Scrum Master for 4 years. She has experience with both Software development and non-software development Agile teams. When asked what she does for a living, Valeria replies: "I build teams!" And she does it by focusing on building relationships first. As Valeria says: “all my teams will tell you that I like talking about the feelings :-)"
You can link with Valeria Greco on LinkedIn and connect with Valeria Greco 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 talking about success, we learn that Valeria focuses on evaluating the level of collaboration between team members. Listen in to learn about what collaboration “signs” Valeria looks for, and to learn more about what kind and why conflict might be a good thing in a Scrum team.
In this segment, we discover how Valeria used a concrete game to help the team practice retrospectives in a short period of time. Through the game, Valeria was able to help the team practice “observation”, and speed up the learning cycle greatly.
You can learn more about the Jenga game from wikipedia and from this YouTube video.
About Valeria Greco
Valeria has worked as a Scrum Master for 4 years. She has experience with both Software development and non-software development Agile teams. When asked what she does for a living, Valeria replies: "I build teams!" And she does it by focusing on building relationships first. As Valeria says: “all my teams will tell you that I like talking about the feelings :-)"
You can link with Valeria Greco on LinkedIn and connect with Valeria Greco 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.
Happy New Year Scrummies! :) Today marks the first day of 2020, and we have a great episode for you.
In this episode, Valeria shares a story of a company that wanted to go towards Continuous Delivery and Delivery on Demand. The main challenge was to help the developers and the teams understand what the difference in mindset. For that Valeria took up a few questions she would repeatedly ask the team such as: “can we release this right after you finish it”?
What questions do you have for your team when helping them through a change?
Listen in to learn what other questions and techniques Valeria used in that process.
If you are interested in Continuous Delivery and the changes associated, don’t miss our Continuous Delivery special series [LINK].
About Valeria Greco
Valeria has worked as a Scrum Master for 4 years. She has experience with both Software development and non-software development Agile teams. When asked what she does for a living, Valeria replies: "I build teams!" And she does it by focusing on building relationships first. As Valeria says: “all my teams will tell you that I like talking about the feelings :-)"
You can link with Valeria Greco on LinkedIn and connect with Valeria Greco 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.
Teams benefit from team members with a lot of experience. However, when those team members become the “only voice” in the team, that may lead to serious problems. In this episode, we explore the Senior Team Member anti-pattern, whereby one team member “overpowers” everyone else in the team, and the other team members are hesitant to share their perspectives. What should a Scrum Master do in this situation? Listen in to learn more, and get Valeria’s tips.
In Coaching agile teams by Lyssa Adkins, Valeria found an inspiring book that helped her in her journey as a Scrum Master. In the book she finds a valuable reminder of the things she still has to practice and learn to be better at.
About Valeria Greco
Valeria has worked as a Scrum Master for 4 years. She has experience with both Software development and non-software development Agile teams. When asked what she does for a living, Valeria replies: "I build teams!" And she does it by focusing on building relationships first. As Valeria says: “all my teams will tell you that I like talking about the feelings :-)"
You can link with Valeria Greco on LinkedIn and connect with Valeria Greco 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 may be tempted to go straight to problem solving when we join a team. As “quick” as that may sound, what Valeria learned in this story was that it makes our Scrum Master work harder, not easier. There’s a critical step we must go through before the team is ready, and willing to work with us. Listen to learn what that step is.
About Valeria Greco
Valeria has worked as a Scrum Master for 4 years. She has experience with both Software development and non-software development Agile teams. When asked what she does for a living, Valeria replies: "I build teams!" And she does it by focusing on building relationships first. As Valeria says: “all my teams will tell you that I like talking about the feelings :-)"
You can link with Valeria Greco on LinkedIn and connect with Valeria Greco 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.
About Leena SN
Leena is the Co-founder/CTO @ Good Karma, Bangalore, India. She is a strong believer of lean principles for delivering software and an evangelist and practitioner of Continuous delivery. CD is there to ensure that the software can be reliably released at any time helping the business to get faster feedback from the market.
You can link with Leena SN on LinkedIn and connect with Leena SN on Twitter.
Read more about Continuous Delivery from Leena SN at Medium.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
About Wouter Lagerweij
Wouter Lagerweij is an Agile Coach who likes to cover the whole spectrum: from the technical practices of Dev and Ops to business and product. He works with organizations to help them do continuous delivery, and provides training and workshops on agile development practices, and dealing with legacy systems.
You can link with Wouter Lagerweij on LinkedIn and connect with Wouter Lagerweij 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.
About Chris O’Dell
Chris works at Monzo helping to build the future of banking. She has spent nearly fourteen years as a backend engineer, primarily with Microsoft technologies, but recently with Go on Monzo’s large microservices platform. She has led teams delivering highly available Web APIs, distributed systems and cloud based services. She has also led teams developing internal build and deployment tooling with the goal of improving the developer’s experience. Chris promotes practices such as Continuous Delivery, including TDD, version control, and Continuous Integration.
You can link with Chris O’Dell on LinkedIn and connect with Chris O’Dell 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.
About Manuel Pais
Manuel is the co-author of Team Topologies book, and also Co-founder DevOps Lisbon meetup. He works as an independent consultant on organisational design, DevOps, Continuous Delivery.
You can link with Manuel Pais on LinkedIn and connect with Manuel Pais 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.
About Morten Herman
Morten is a software professional that have been working with Software Product- and Software As A Service development for the last 15 years.
He started his career as a developer with a SCRUM master role and later became a software architect. In 2011 he changed to the team lead role and people manager at eBay in Denmark for four and a half years. In 2012, he heard about Continuous Delivery and DevOps for the first time. And since 2015 he started as an independent consultant, working with clients in relation to implementing various aspects of continuous delivery, devops and microservices in their organisations.
You can link with Morten Herman 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.
About Thierry de Pauw
Thierry is a CI/CD advocate, lean software engineer and occasional speaker.
Currently, he is Engineering Lead at the fintech startup PaxFamilia.
Thierry also founded ThinkingLabs, a consultancy around Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. In 2019 Thierry organised the CITCON - Continuous Integration and Testing unconference in Ghent, Belgium.
Visit Thierry’s website at Thinking Labs.
You can link with Thierry de Pauw on LinkedIn and connect with Thierry de Pauw on Twitter.
We talk about testing strategy; business benefits of Continuous Delivery; main challenges when adopting Continuous Delivery and resources to help you and your team get started.
Read the full Show Notes and search through the world’s largest audio library on Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website.
About Dave Farley
Dave Farley is an independent software developer and consultant, and founder and director of Continuous Delivery Ltd.
Dave Farley is a thought-leader in the field of Continuous Delivery, DevOps and Software Development in general. He is co-author of the Jolt-award winning book 'Continuous Delivery' a regular conference speaker and blogger and one of the authors of the Reactive Manifesto.
Dave has been having fun with computers for over 30 years. He started working in large scale distributed systems more than 25 years ago, doing research into the development of loose-coupled, message-based systems - a forerunner of MicroService architectures.
You can link with Dave Farley on LinkedIn, or visit Dave Farley’s website.
Many User Stories end up being written from the “solution” perspective. Reinald found that Product Owners that are willing to define stories from the perspective of the problem to solve are better able to communicate their ideas to the team. But there are other benefits from taking this approach. Listen in to learn about the other benefits of having your Product Owner firmly anchored in the Problem domain as opposed to the solution domain.
When Product Owners have a background in development it is natural that they may concentrate on the details, but the problems really start when the PO starts telling programmers how to write code, and steering development decisions. Listen in to learn how to deal with such Product Owners.
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 Reinald Kirchener
Reinald is active in the IT industry for more than 20 years. With agile methods and systemic project management he found his role as coach to inspire individuals and teams to learn, have fun and get better at what they want to do.
You can link with Reinald Kirchener on XING and connect with Reinald Kirchener 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 focus, Reinald suggests, should be on creating outcomes/impact, not output/more stuff. He looks into the role of the work with management for the ultimate success of the Scrum Master work. But that’s not where it stops. We talk about inspiration, reviewing our relationships at work, and practical tips on how to keep notes on our work as Scrum Masters.
An often overlooked aspect of the retrospectives is the atmosphere, and physical space has a direct impact on how team members feel when reflecting on their work. In this episode, Reinald talks about the “walking in pairs” retrospective. A format that requires the whole team to get up and walk outside. Given that walking will activate your body, and your brain, you may actually get more insights from a walking, than a sitting retrospective. Listen in, and give it a try.
About Reinald Kirchener
Reinald is active in the IT industry for more than 20 years. With agile methods and systemic project management he found his role as coach to inspire individuals and teams to learn, have fun and get better at what they want to do.
You can link with Reinald Kirchener on XING and connect with Reinald Kirchener 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 an organization of about 300 software developers that wanted to “get agile”. The organization started by hiring Scrum Masters to help the teams, and the transition. So far, so good. So Reinald invited all the Scrum Masters in the organization to a kick-off for the Agile transition. What happened next was a surprise, and changed Reinald’s view of change management forever. Listen in to learn what was that surprise, and how you can avoid that problem in your own work.
About Reinald Kirchener
Reinald is active in the IT industry for more than 20 years. With agile methods and systemic project management he found his role as coach to inspire individuals and teams to learn, have fun and get better at what they want to do.
You can link with Reinald Kirchener on XING and connect with Reinald Kirchener 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 the anti-pattern of the “team of specialists”. This team was formed by many freelancers and sub-contractors that were hired to do a specialist job and were not about to give that up. Listen in to learn what that caused and how Reinald handled the problem.
In The Responsibility Process by Chris Avery, Reinald found a good reason to change his personal attitude towards the things he didn’t like to do.
Reinald also mentions the Rene Brown’s talk about Vulnerability, a talk that helped him change his attitude as a freelance software developer, and stopping to try to be a superhero, a problem that many freelancers face in their desire to help their clients.
About Reinald Kirchener
Reinald is active in the IT industry for more than 20 years. With agile methods and systemic project management he found his role as coach to inspire individuals and teams to learn, have fun and get better at what they want to do.
You can link with Reinald Kirchener on XING and connect with Reinald Kirchener 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.
After discovering Extreme Programming, Reinald decided that Agile was the way to go and started looking for education and a job as a Scrum Master. He started working as a group lead with a team that “wanted to go in the Scrum direction” instead though, and the surprises just kept coming. There was a hard conflict to solve in that team. Listen in to learn what Reinald learned about conflict management and resolution in software development teams.
About Reinald Kirchener
Reinald is active in the IT industry for more than 20 years. With agile methods and systemic project management he found his role as coach to inspire individuals and teams to learn, have fun and get better at what they want to do.
You can link with Reinald Kirchener on XING and connect with Reinald Kirchener 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.
From tools to the habits that Product Owners need to drop, in this episode, we explore practices and an anti-pattern that can derail the relationship between PO and team.
When Product Owners are able to convey a message clearly, it is natural that the work with the team improves. However, there are certain tools that help that message stick and be followed by the team. In this segment, we explore 3 tools and 1 practice that can greatly help Product Owners convey their expected results, and be sure that the team understands what that means in practice.
In this segment we refer to User Story Mapping, User Story slicing, Personas and Acceptance Test Driven Development.
When a former team member, a developer, takes on the role of Product Owner, there are many possible anti-patterns to look out for. In this episode, we explore the case of the PO who knew too much, and decided to tell the team not only what to do, but also how to do it. Inevitably, problems followed. Listen in to learn how Dmytro helped that Product Owner.
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 Dmytro Balaba
Dmytro calls himself one of the most dedicated Scrum Masters/Agile Coach in the world :) On his right-hand he has a tatoo with golden ratio, Fibonacci sequence. After almost 15 years of work in IT management Dmytro found himself balanced and happy. He’s been a full-time Scrum Master for more than 3 years.
You can link with Dmytro Balaba on LinkedIn and connect with Dmytro Balaba 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 considering success for our work as Scrum Masters, Dmytro suggests we should take 3 different perspectives into account. These perspectives help us get feedback, and also consider the stakeholders we need to work with. Listen in to learn about the 3 key perspectives that Dmytro uses in his own success self-assessment.
In this segment dedicated to Agile Retrospectives we explore why Scrum Masters may want to have multiple formats they are ready to execute on depending on the goals for the retrospective. We also talk about lowering the barrier for retrospective execution with formats that are easy to setup and run.
About Dmytro Balaba
Dmytro calls himself one of the most dedicated Scrum Masters/Agile Coach in the world :) On his right-hand he has a tatoo with golden ratio, Fibonacci sequence. After almost 15 years of work in IT management Dmytro found himself balanced and happy. He’s been a full-time Scrum Master for more than 3 years.
You can link with Dmytro Balaba on LinkedIn and connect with Dmytro Balaba 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 when Dmytro faces the requirement to adopt SAFe. How to help teams learn about SAFe (is training sufficient?) and start working differently. The organizational legacy and inertia become obstacles, but the team of Scrum Masters at this organization was able to help the teams learn how to adopt SAFe. Listen in to learn how.
In this episode, we also refer to Lean Change Management by Jason Little, and 7 Rules for Positive, Productive Change: Micro Shifts, Macro Results by Esther Derby.
About Dmytro Balaba
Dmytro calls himself one of the most dedicated Scrum Masters/Agile Coach in the world :) On his right-hand he has a tatoo with golden ratio, Fibonacci sequence. After almost 15 years of work in IT management Dmytro found himself balanced and happy. He’s been a full-time Scrum Master for more than 3 years.
You can link with Dmytro Balaba on LinkedIn and connect with Dmytro Balaba 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.
What happens when a team member who joined as a “gift” from management fails to keep the standard expects from each of the team members? If you add to this, the fact that some team members become vocal about the problem, but others don’t even want to touch the subject, you have all the ingredients you need for massive conflict. What can a Scrum Master do? Listen in to learn how Dmytro, the Scrum Master helped the team get out of this negative spiral.
Dmytro’s recommendation is the book by Gene Kim, Jez humble and Nicole Forsgren, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations.
In Accelerate, Dmytro found many inspirational stories and anecdotes that helps him improve the organization and the teams he works with.
Dmytro also recommends Scrum, the art of doing twice the work in half the time by Sutherland. In this book he highlights the many real-life examples.
Additionally, Dmytro refers to The DevOps Handbook by Gene Kim, a book he describes as filled with technical practices that teams can apply.
About Dmytro Balaba
Dmytro calls himself one of the most dedicated Scrum Masters/Agile Coach in the world :) On his right-hand he has a tatoo with golden ratio, Fibonacci sequence. After almost 15 years of work in IT management Dmytro found himself balanced and happy. He’s been a full-time Scrum Master for more than 3 years.
You can link with Dmytro Balaba on LinkedIn and connect with Dmytro Balaba 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 we need to work with teams that have lost hope. The team might be cynical about future improvements and look at Agile or Scrum skeptically. This was what Dmytro had to face in his team. In this episode, we talk about how to work with a skeptical team, and get them engaged in improving their work. This is a critical lesson for all Scrum Masters, don’t miss it!
About Dmytro Balaba
Dmytro calls himself one of the most dedicated Scrum Masters/Agile Coach in the world :) On his right-hand he has a tatoo with golden ratio, Fibonacci sequence. After almost 15 years of work in IT management Dmytro found himself balanced and happy. He’s been a full-time Scrum Master for more than 3 years.
You can link with Dmytro Balaba on LinkedIn and connect with Dmytro Balaba on Twitter.