Working with the system where our teams work is one of the critical skills for Scrum Masters, but for that to be possible we need to learn how to observe and “poke” the system to understand it better. In this episode we discuss the organizational system and how to work within the system to be able to help the teams we work with. We also refer to ORSC: Organizational Responsibility Systems Coaching, a model that Zuzi uses in her work.
About Zuzi Sochova
Zuzi help companies and individuals to be more successful. She teaches teams and their managers how to be more efficient, how to provide better quality and how to communicate and organize teams so that people have fun, they are motivated and have high commitment. Zuzi helps teams and managers find out how to handle customer relationship to help them improve customer satisfaction.
You can visit Zuzi’s website at: http://sochova.cz/, and link with Zuzi Sochova on LinkedIn, or connect with Zuzi Sochova on twitter, or your favorite conferece.
What helps teams self-organize? What are the things that support, or prevent self-organization? Zuzi explains and guides us through her own model for self-organization and how we, as Scrum Masters can help teams reach a level where they self-organize.
About Zuzi Sochova
Zuzi help companies and individuals to be more successful. She teaches teams and their managers how to be more efficient, how to provide better quality and how to communicate and organize teams so that people have fun, they are motivated and have high commitment. Zuzi helps teams and managers find out how to handle customer relationship to help them improve customer satisfaction.
You can visit Zuzi’s website at: http://sochova.cz/, and link with Zuzi Sochova on LinkedIn, or connect with Zuzi Sochova on twitter, or your favorite conferece.
When we recruit we normally try to get the “most qualified” people. But what makes someone qualified for a position in a team? Can a lone-ranger super performer really work well in a team? What should we be looking for when we hire a team member? Zuzi suggests a few ideas, and explains why the hard skills are not where your focus should be.
About Zuzi Sochova
Zuzi help companies and individuals to be more successful. She teaches teams and their managers how to be more efficient, how to provide better quality and how to communicate and organize teams so that people have fun, they are motivated and have high commitment. Zuzi helps teams and managers find out how to handle customer relationship to help them improve customer satisfaction.
You can visit Zuzi’s website at: http://sochova.cz/, and link with Zuzi Sochova on LinkedIn, or connect with Zuzi Sochova on twitter, or your favorite conferece.
Many teams get stuck in a bad place, but there are some teams that also get stuck, but because they think they already are “good enough”. Listen in to learn how Zuzi learned to work with teams that already think they are “good enough”.
About Zuzi Sochova
Zuzi help companies and individuals to be more successful. She teaches teams and their managers how to be more efficient, how to provide better quality and how to communicate and organize teams so that people have fun, they are motivated and have high commitment. Zuzi helps teams and managers find out how to handle customer relationship to help them improve customer satisfaction.
You can visit Zuzi’s website at: http://sochova.cz/, and link with Zuzi Sochova on LinkedIn, or connect with Zuzi Sochova on twitter, or your favorite conferece.
There are many paths to starting our journey as a Scrum Master. Zuzi started as a line manager, but she soon learned the key differences between being a team leader and being a Scrum Master. She also explains why some companies still fail to improve, even when using Scrum.
About Zuzi Sochova
Zuzi help companies and individuals to be more successful. She teaches teams and their managers how to be more efficient, how to provide better quality and how to communicate and organize teams so that people have fun, they are motivated and have high commitment. Zuzi helps teams and managers find out how to handle customer relationship to help them improve customer satisfaction.
You can visit Zuzi’s website at: http://sochova.cz/, and link with Zuzi Sochova on LinkedIn, or connect with Zuzi Sochova on twitter, or your favorite conferece.
We observe the system we work on every day. We even have many ideas on how the system could or should change for work to flow better, for people to feel better. However, without a form of visualizing the system we work with those are just fuzzy speculative ideas that may or may not matter in the end. Jeff walks us through his version of a Value Stream Map for knowledge work, and how that helps visualize and understand the system we work with. It is only then that we can start changing the system.
About Jeff Campbell
Jeff is an Agile Coach who considers the discovery of Agile and Lean to be one of the most defining moments of his life, and considers helping others to improve their working life not to simply be a job, but a social responsibility. As an Agile Coach, he has worked with driving Agile transformations in organisations both small and large. He is one of the founding members of www.scrumbeers.com and an organiser of www.brewingagile.org in his spare time. He is also the author of an open source book called Actionable Agile Tools, where he explains how he uses 15 of the tools he uses in his daily work as a scrum master and agile coach.
You can link with Jeff Campbell on LinkedIn, and connect with Jeff Campbell on Twitter.
How can we prove the value we bring to organizations? He discuss the value metrics for Scrum Masters and how you can look at your work from the organization’s point of view. We also discuss the effectiveness of meetings and how that affects our own performance. We mention a research paper that explores the differences between stand-up and sit-down meetings, a must read for all Scrum Masters. Read the paper to know when each meeting format is the most appropriate (PDF link): The effects of stand-up and sit-down meeting formats on meeting outcomes.
About Jeff Campbell
Jeff is an Agile Coach who considers the discovery of Agile and Lean to be one of the most defining moments of his life, and considers helping others to improve their working life not to simply be a job, but a social responsibility. As an Agile Coach, he has worked with driving Agile transformations in organisations both small and large. He is one of the founding members of www.scrumbeers.com and an organiser of www.brewingagile.org in his spare time. He is also the author of an open source book called Actionable Agile Tools, where he explains how he uses 15 of the tools he uses in his daily work as a scrum master and agile coach.
You can link with Jeff Campbell on LinkedIn, and connect with Jeff Campbell on Twitter.
We very often talk about recruiting the best Scrum Masters, but in this episode we take the opposite point of view. How do you make sure you get hired as a Scrum Master? Jeff shares with us his learning of when he was not hired, and what he learned from that experience.
Jeff is an Agile Coach who considers the discovery of Agile and Lean to be one of the most defining moments of his life, and considers helping others to improve their working life not to simply be a job, but a social responsibility. As an Agile Coach, he has worked with driving Agile transformations in organisations both small and large. He is one of the founding members of www.scrumbeers.com and an organiser of www.brewingagile.org in his spare time. He is also the author of an open source book called Actionable Agile Tools, where he explains how he uses 15 of the tools he uses in his daily work as a scrum master and agile coach.
You can link with Jeff Campbell on LinkedIn, and connect with Jeff Campbell on Twitter.
We’ve all done it in one way or another. We spend time in a retrospective criticizing what is wrong, and assigning blame to others. Jeff Campbell has been there as well, and in this episode he explains how you can get teams to stop spending their valuable time whining, and start taking action.
Jeff is an Agile Coach who considers the discovery of Agile and Lean to be one of the most defining moments of his life, and considers helping others to improve their working life not to simply be a job, but a social responsibility. As an Agile Coach, he has worked with driving Agile transformations in organisations both small and large. He is one of the founding members of www.scrumbeers.com and an organiser of www.brewingagile.org in his spare time. He is also the author of an open source book called Actionable Agile Tools, where he explains how he uses 15 of the tools he uses in his daily work as a scrum master and agile coach.
You can link with Jeff Campbell on LinkedIn, and connect with Jeff Campbell on Twitter.
There are many learnings we collect along our journey as Scrum Masters. However, transformative lessons are not that common, except for Jeff in this particular job. Listen how he learned 2 lessons that totally changed how he looks at his job as a Scrum Master.
Jeff is an Agile Coach who considers the discovery of Agile and Lean to be one of the most defining moments of his life, and considers helping others to improve their working life not to simply be a job, but a social responsibility. As an Agile Coach, he has worked with driving Agile transformations in organisations both small and large. He is one of the founding members of www.scrumbeers.com and an organiser of www.brewingagile.org in his spare time. He is also the author of an open source book called Actionable Agile Tools, where he explains how he uses 15 of the tools he uses in his daily work as a scrum master and agile coach.
You can link with Jeff Campbell on LinkedIn, and connect with Jeff Campbell on Twitter.
How do we get started mapping the system conditions we must face every day? Dennis suggests that you understand the stakeholders that the team needs to interact with. By understanding the map of the system you can then dig deeper with Expectation Mapping to understand what the team is expected to deliver to all those stakeholders. This will help you map the key system conditions. Use also visualization to understand how those other stakeholders interact among themselves and use Circles of Influence to understand what the team can affect on its own, and what they need help with.
About Dennis Wagner
Dennis is an Agile Coach with a lot of experience in the technical side of software development. Dennis has worked with teams in different industries, is thinking of writing a book about continuous delivery (bug him if you want to know more), and he loves, really loves his work.
You can connect with Dennis Wagner on LinkedIn and XING, and you can connect with Dennis Wagner on Twitter.
To define success for us as Scrum Masters we need to define also what it means not to succeed. Dennis defines what is failure, and uses 2 concrete tools to check the situation all the time. The tools are 5 Why’s and a simple powerful question: “how are we succeeding?”
Each of these tools tackles a different purpose that Dennis explains in this episode.
About Dennis Wagner
Dennis is an Agile Coach with a lot of experience in the technical side of software development. Dennis has worked with teams in different industries, is thinking of writing a book about continuous delivery (bug him if you want to know more), and he loves, really loves his work.
You can connect with Dennis Wagner on LinkedIn and XING, and you can connect with Dennis Wagner on Twitter.
Dennis and I explore many different options to shape our recruiting process, from ZAPPOS, to Fredric Laloux’s Reinventing Organizations, to a conclusion that the recruiting interview is a very inefficient way to recruit the right people. Teams are almost like families, after all we share 40+ hours of time every week together. We need to find other ways to find the right people.
About Dennis Wagner
Dennis is an Agile Coach with a lot of experience in the technical side of software development. Dennis has worked with teams in different industries, is thinking of writing a book about continuous delivery (bug him if you want to know more), and he loves, really loves his work.
You can connect with Dennis Wagner on LinkedIn and XING, and you can connect with Dennis Wagner on Twitter.
Teams never get into trouble because of one single reason. We discuss several patterns that get teams in trouble, and especially two patterns that relate to team-stakeholder and team member-team member relationship. Dennis explains one tool that he uses to detect these relationship anti-patterns that can destroy teams.
About Dennis Wagner
Dennis is an Agile Coach with a lot of experience in the technical side of software development. Dennis has worked with teams in different industries, is thinking of writing a book about continuous delivery (bug him if you want to know more), and he loves, really loves his work.
We become Scrum Masters because we want to help teams, organizations, and ourselves to make a difference in the world, to create better working places. However, sometimes we want that too much. Dennis explains one such case and a key lesson he learned.
We also refer to Don Reinertsen’s book The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development. We discuss a tool that you can use to manage expectations with the teams you work with: Expectation Mapping.
About Dennis Wagner
Dennis is an Agile Coach with a lot of experience in the technical side of software development. Dennis has worked with teams in different industries, is thinking of writing a book about continuous delivery (bug him if you want to know more), and he loves, really loves his work.
You can connect with Dennis Wagner on LinkedIn and XING, and you can connect with Dennis Wagner on Twitter.
We explore Systems Thinking with Matthew, and describe a 3 step process to apply Systems Thinking in our Scrum Master work:
This process will help you to understand the system of work and diagnose the systemic problems that you will need to address.
We mention the Quality Software Management: Systems Thinking by Gerry Weinberg and Toyota Production System by Liker, both great primers to Systems Thinking applied in practice.
About Matthew Heusser
Matthew Heusser is the co-author of Save our Scrum, co-chair of the enterprise track at Agile2015, And he is also an author at CIO.com. Matt Software is a delivery consultant/writer and Collaborative software geek since before it was cool.
You can find Matthew Heusser on LinkedIn, and connect with Matthew Heusser on Twitter.
A common answer to the success question on the podcast is “when I’m no longer needed”, but that isn’t a great career advancing answer. So we explore what happens after “I’m no longer needed”.
About Matthew Heusser
Matthew Heusser is the co-author of Save our Scrum, co-chair of the enterprise track at Agile2015, And he is also an author at CIO.com. Matt Software is a delivery consultant/writer and Collaborative software geek since before it was cool.
You can find Matthew Heusser on LinkedIn, and connect with Matthew Heusser on Twitter.
Matthew shares with us a story of a disaster hire, and why the regular hiring process is not likely to succeed. He finishes with a value bomb: he shares with us a tip that will help you hire the right person every time! Don’t believe me? Listen up!
About Matthew Heusser
Matthew Heusser is the co-author of Save our Scrum, co-chair of the enterprise track at Agile2015, And he is also an author at CIO.com. Matt Software is a delivery consultant/writer and Collaborative software geek since before it was cool.
You can find Matthew Heusser on LinkedIn, and connect with Matthew Heusser on Twitter.
Many will think that having daily standups + iterations + user stories is enough to “do” Scrum. Well, that can be very far from what Scrum is about. In this episode we discuss some of the most critical anti-patterns in teams that end up under-performing or even worse: dis-integrating.
We also mention two very important books for every scrum master: Agile Software Development by Cockburn, and Team of Teams by McChrystal.
About Matthew Heusser
Matthew Heusser is the co-author of Save our Scrum, co-chair of the enterprise track at Agile2015, And he is also an author at CIO.com. Matt Software is a delivery consultant/writer and Collaborative software geek since before it was cool.
You can find Matthew Heusser on LinkedIn, and connect with Matthew Heusser on Twitter.
It’s never hard to break with the status quo, and communicating the adoption process, positioning the change and managing the expectations can become the most important job for us as Scrum Masters. This was the hard-earned lesson that Matt shares with us in the podcast.
We also mention the book Agile Software Development With Scrum by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle, and refer to the 3 amigos: “The Three Amigos meeting is about the transition from user stories to scenarios. It is meant to happen before development starts, part of a good test first approach. It is meant to happen just before development starts.”
Matthew Heusser is the co-author of Save our Scrum, co-chair of the enterprise track at Agile2015, And he is also an author at CIO.com. Matt Software is a delivery consultant/writer and Collaborative software geek since before it was cool.
You can find Matthew Heusser on LinkedIn, and connect with Matthew Heusser on Twitter.
Listening, taking notes and asking questions are the tools that Gitte uses to understand that system conditions that affect the teams that she works with. Look at who talks to whom, who eats alone, how each team member reacts to each other.
How to get people to talk? Create the spaces for conversation to happen, like watercoolers, coffee machines, etc.
Gitte is a very pragmatic world-changer. She wants to make the world a better place today, not tomorrow. She’s also very experienced agile coach and regular speaker. But here’s the punch line: she talks about things that no one else talks about. She lives by the mantra "why try to fit in when you were born to stand out?” and she says that her best coaching tools are listening and making people think.
You link with Gitte Klitgaard on LinkedIn, and connect with Gitte Klitgaard on twitter.
Success for a scrum master is when people start to take responsibility for their work, and collaborate to get problems solved. Gitte also mentions the BIG MISUNDERSTANDING in the idea of cross-functional teams. We discuss the book: Flow by Csikszentmihalyi.
Gitte is a very pragmatic world-changer. She wants to make the world a better place today, not tomorrow. She’s also very experienced agile coach and regular speaker. But here’s the punch line: she talks about things that no one else talks about. She lives by the mantra "why try to fit in when you were born to stand out?” and she says that her best coaching tools are listening and making people think.
You link with Gitte Klitgaard on LinkedIn, and connect with Gitte Klitgaard on twitter.
How do you hire an entire team? How to cope with different personalities? What to do about the coaches and Scrum Masters that turn into process police? These are just some of the questions we discuss in this episode.
Gitte is a very pragmatic world-changer. She wants to make the world a better place today, not tomorrow. She’s also very experienced agile coach and regular speaker. But here’s the punch line: she talks about things that no one else talks about. She lives by the mantra "why try to fit in when you were born to stand out?” and she says that her best coaching tools are listening and making people think.
You link with Gitte Klitgaard on LinkedIn, and connect with Gitte Klitgaard on twitter.
Gitte explains why teams sometimes forget to think and they that is a self-destruction pattern. Being agile requires us to be flexible, and when we stop thinking the best we can do is follow orders. Asking questions and being ready to sit back and listen helps us bring the thinking pattern to our team’s day-to-day work.
Gitte is a very pragmatic world-changer. She wants to make the world a better place today, not tomorrow. She’s also very experienced agile coach and regular speaker. But here’s the punch line: she talks about things that no one else talks about. She lives by the mantra "why try to fit in when you were born to stand out?” and she says that her best coaching tools are listening and making people think.
You link with Gitte Klitgaard on LinkedIn, and connect with Gitte Klitgaard on twitter.
People who have been successful all have one thing in common: they tend to fall back to the old ways that worked in the past. Gitte tells us a story of when this happened to her, how she overcame those temptations and why it is important to have different points of view in one project.
Gitte is a very pragmatic world-changer. She wants to make the world a better place today, not tomorrow. She’s also very experienced agile coach and regular speaker. But here’s the punch line: she talks about things that no one else talks about. She lives by the mantra "why try to fit in when you were born to stand out?” and she says that her best coaching tools are listening and making people think.
You link with Gitte Klitgaard on LinkedIn, and connect with Gitte Klitgaard on twitter.