In this episode we introduce a new Feature: the Featured book! A recommendation by our guests that will help you choose which books to read. Every week a new book for you to read.
This week Donald recommends you revisit one of the classics: Agile Software Development with Scrum by Schwaber and Beedle. Listen in to learn why!
About Donald Ewart
For more than 10 years, Don has been a scrum master and coach working in different sectors in London and across the UK as an independent consultant.
With a background of 10+ years in several development roles for web and finance systems, Donald has a good technical knowledge of modern development techniques, and can quickly build rapport and respect with development teams, understanding their issues and helping them to find the right solutions.
You can link with Donald Ewart on LinkedIn and connect with Donald Ewart on Twitter. You can also find out more about Donald’s work in his website.
In this episode we discuss how teams, in the forming phase, may get stuck in the avoidance of conflict, and how conflict may actually be a sign that the team is progressing in their journey to be an effective team. It all starts with a human connection! We describe tools and signs that help us detect if our teams are stuck.
About Donald Ewart
For more than 10 years, Don has been a scrum master and coach working in different sectors in London and across the UK as an independent consultant.
With a background of 10+ years in several development roles for web and finance systems, Donald has a good technical knowledge of modern development techniques, and can quickly build rapport and respect with development teams, understanding their issues and helping them to find the right solutions.
You can link with Donald Ewart on LinkedIn and connect with Donald Ewart on Twitter. You can also find out more about Donald’s work in his website.
We sometimes face situations where the teams are not ready to be Agile. In this episode we discuss such a story and talk about what we need to have in place to even get started with Agile. This is a great reminder that we should not try to make all teams Agile or all projects Agile. First we need to discuss and agree on the conditions we need to get started on our Agile journey.
In this episode we talk about the book Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber.
About Donald Ewart
For more than 10 years, Don has been a scrum master and coach working in different sectors in London and across the UK as an independent consultant.
With a background of 10+ years in several development roles for web and finance systems, Donald has a good technical knowledge of modern development techniques, and can quickly build rapport and respect with development teams, understanding their issues and helping them to find the right solutions.
You can link with Donald Ewart on LinkedIn and connect with Donald Ewart on Twitter. You can also find out more about Donald’s work in his website.
When looking at the team and the system conditions that affect its performance we need tools that help us understand the team beyond its physical boundaries (people, room, tools). In this episode we discuss the Integral Agile Model, introduced by Lyssa Adkins and the Agile Coaching Institute. This tool can be used as a system thinking tool to look at the team and understand that overall system that affects the teams we work with.
In this episode we refer to the book Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins.
About Venetia Foo
Venetia has been on her agile journey since 2007 and has been a witness to the best and to the worst of it. She is passionate about learning and continuous improvement. She uses a variety of skills to empower and enable teams to perform at their best.
You can link with Venetia Foo on LinkedIn and connect with Venetia Foo on Twitter.
Scrum Masters are seen as problem solvers. But is it really what they are there to do? Venetia challenges us to think about how we can help the teams take over the problem solving process themselves. How can we do it? How can we motivate teams to “own” the solving of their problems?
These are some of the questions we tackle on this episode where we share many tools for you to help your team own their problem solving process!
About Venetia Foo
Venetia has been on her agile journey since 2007 and has been a witness to the best and to the worst of it. She is passionate about learning and continuous improvement. She uses a variety of skills to empower and enable teams to perform at their best.
You can link with Venetia Foo on LinkedIn and connect with Venetia Foo on Twitter.
Venetia, a Scrum Master got the order from project management: the project must be moved to a new team, hundreds of miles away in another city! Wow, what a challenge!
When we discuss changes on the podcast we very often talk about Agile adoption, Agile transformation or some other “larger” kind of change. Venetia was facing a different story. She was facing a change of team for an existing product! In this episode Venetia shares how they were able to successfully onboard new team members (in a new city!) and change the whole project to that new team over a period of a few months. A real, tangible change that everyone needed to get used to, and execute it at the same time!
About Venetia Foo
Venetia has been on her agile journey since 2007 and has been a witness to the best and to the worst of it. She is passionate about learning and continuous improvement. She uses a variety of skills to empower and enable teams to perform at their best.
You can link with Venetia Foo on LinkedIn and connect with Venetia Foo on Twitter.
Many of us have been in teams where there’s a “dominant” team member. But have we thought about the possible consequences that it may bring to the team? In this episode we explore the possible consequences that dominant team members can trigger. We also discuss a very unusual way to address such situations, one that takes into account the whole team, not just the dominant team member.
About Venetia Foo
Venetia has been on her agile journey since 2007 and has been a witness to the best and to the worst of it. She is passionate about learning and continuous improvement. She uses a variety of skills to empower and enable teams to perform at their best.
You can link with Venetia Foo on LinkedIn and connect with Venetia Foo on Twitter.
A project is late and we think: let’s add more people. Project Managers all over the world use this technique to try to get their projects on schedule. However it’s not that easy…
In fact, integrating new project team members in an existing team actually changes the dynamic for the whole team! In this episode Venetia Foo walks us through a failure moment, where as Scrum Masters we are part of the integration process for a new team member, but that’s not an easy process at all! Listen to what Venetia learned from that story and what she does now when a new team member joins the team.
About Venetia Foo
Venetia has been on her agile journey since 2007 and has been a witness to the best and to the worst of it. She is passionate about learning and continuous improvement. She uses a variety of skills to empower and enable teams to perform at their best.
You can link with Venetia Foo on LinkedIn and connect with Venetia Foo on Twitter.
Jac shares with us a workshop he uses to help the teams he works with identify the system around them. This is the system that may be helping them (keep), or preventing them (change) to reach their goals. During this episode we talk about some specific tools that help us facilitate this workshop, like for example, the Moving Motivators from Management 3.0.
About Jac Hughes
Jac is a scrum master who has a passion to help teams become empowered, autonomous bust mostly importantly productive. Jac has served 7 years in the Royal Navy before moving into the world of IT.
You can link with Jac Hughes on LinkedIn.
Jac starts by sharing his value that orients the definition of success: People over Metrics. That is, while metrics are important, we must always consider the people first, not the metrics. Jac describes some of the symptoms of a successful outcome from our Scrum Master work, and shares with us some of the tools he uses to help him get to that successful outcome.
About Jac Hughes
Jac is a scrum master who has a passion to help teams become empowered, autonomous bust mostly importantly productive. Jac has served 7 years in the Royal Navy before moving into the world of IT.
You can link with Jac Hughes on LinkedIn.
Change is a dreaded word in many work places. They may be associated with fads, change of management, new processes that make our jobs harder, etc. But sometimes - when adopting Agile for example - change is something that helps us all and our customers! How can we help teams, especially teams with a long experience in pre-agile methods, to change and adopt Agile? Jac shares with us the Lego Scrum game and how that helped him bring a new hope to an old organization.
About Jac Hughes
Jac is a scrum master who has a passion to help teams become empowered, autonomous bust mostly importantly productive. Jac has served 7 years in the Royal Navy before moving into the world of IT.
You can link with Jac Hughes on LinkedIn.
Sooner or later we will be in a situation where someone has committed to a goal that the team did not co-create. A schedule the team did not work on. A plan that the team wasn’t aware of. These are normal anti-patterns that we will deal with in our role as Scrum Masters. And while, in some cases, it is better to run away, we also must be prepared and help our teams and stakeholders to deal with those anti-patterns. In this episode we discuss those anti-patterns, how they can affect the teams we work with and also what we can do to avoid the common pitfalls that come with them.
About Jac Hughes
Jac is a scrum master who has a passion to help teams become empowered, autonomous bust mostly importantly productive. Jac has served 7 years in the Royal Navy before moving into the world of IT.
You can link with Jac Hughes on LinkedIn.
As Jac puts it: “it was a dream to have the whole team co-located”. But invariably, as Scrum Masters we will face distributed teams. So we must prepare for those teams. There are many possible problems. The lack of interaction, the cultural expectations in different countries, the problems with the remote meeting technology. How are we to prepare to handle these challenges? Jac explores the topic and shares his experience on working well with distributed teams.
About Jac Hughes
Jac is a scrum master who has a passion to help teams become empowered, autonomous bust mostly importantly productive. Jac has served 7 years in the Royal Navy before moving into the world of IT.
You can link with Jac Hughes on LinkedIn.
In the regular Retrospectives we find the symptoms of the systemic problems we have to face. We can use Retrospectives as the engine to find and create possible improvements to solve those systemic problems. Balazs shares his approach to Retrospectives and some examples of how he applied this approach in his work. We also discuss a critical technique to make the “intangible” problems more concrete and actionable. This technique can take your team from complaining to taking action.
About Balazs Tátár
Balazs is a technical project manager, working for the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium. Currently he plays the Scrum Master role in a support team of one of the biggest web project at the European Commission. He is a former technical lead and fan of open source technologies.
You can link with Balazs Tátár on LinkedIn and connect with Balazs Tátár on Twitter.
When we define success for ourselves we are affecting how we see the work we do. Balazs challenges us to take things step-by-step and define success at the daily level. And only then move on to the work the team does and we do. Finally we should focus on how the team themselves succeed at achieving their goals. Success has many different layers and all of those have a daily implication. Listen in to hear the examples that Balazs shares about how he takes higher level definitions of success to the daily level in the work he does with teams.
About Balazs Tátár
Balazs is a technical project manager, working for the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium. Currently he plays the Scrum Master role in a support team of one of the biggest web project at the European Commission. He is a former technical lead and fan of open source technologies.
You can link with Balazs Tátár on LinkedIn and connect with Balazs Tátár on Twitter.
As Balazs puts it, you don’t expect public sector organizations to be the most Agile organizations ever. However, if you do things right - like Balazs shares with us in this episode - you can make a big impact with relatively small changes. In this episode Balazs shares how he was able to help a team go from ineffective and long daily meetings to sharp, clear and quick daily meetings.
In this episode we refer to Turn the Ship Around by David Marquet. Check out our interview with former captain Marquet right here on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast.
About Balazs Tátár
Balazs is a technical project manager, working for the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium. Currently he plays the Scrum Master role in a support team of one of the biggest web project at the European Commission. He is a former technical lead and fan of open source technologies.
You can link with Balazs Tátár on LinkedIn and connect with Balazs Tátár on Twitter.
Blockers are our most common obstacle. We face them, the team faces them. In fact, most of our time is spent on either solving or helping team and stakeholders solve the most critical blockers to progress. In this show Balazs gives us some tips on how we can get the teams to crush the blockers. Help the team crush their blockers and you will see them blossom and progress faster than you could imagine.
About Balazs Tátár
Balazs is a technical project manager, working for the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium. Currently he plays the Scrum Master role in a support team of one of the biggest web project at the European Commission. He is a former technical lead and fan of open source technologies.
You can link with Balazs Tátár on LinkedIn and connect with Balazs Tátár on Twitter.
Being a Scrum Master to a few local teams can be challenging enough, but how do you support multiple distributed teams? Balazs shares his steep learning curve on working with remote teams and shares also some important etiquette tips on working with remote teams.
About Balazs Tátár
Balazs is a technical project manager, working for the European Commission in Brussels, Belgium. Currently he plays the Scrum Master role in a support team of one of the biggest web project at the European Commission. He is a former technical lead and fan of open source technologies.
You can link with Balazs Tátár on LinkedIn and connect with Balazs Tátár on Twitter.
Captain L. David Marquet, author of Turn the Ship Around!, joins us in the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast to discuss the lessons learned from his stint at the Santa Fe, a US Navy submarine that, when he took over, ranked last in retention and operational standing.
How do you turn around a ship that is going south? When people leave quickly, you don’t even keep the little knowledge gathered in the team. Just like in our organizations today, the Santa Fe was losing key people and have very low morale. This was the moment when Retired Captain David Marquet entered the ship. The Santa Fe was about to change, and Captain Marquet shares with us the key moments in that story as well as very practical tools you can use as a Scrum Master to help your team go from follower to leader.
Complete show notes at http://scrum-master-toolbox.org/.