How do we understand the system conditions affecting our teams? Anssi shares with us how he does that, and why his approach is important for Scrum Masters to get a good grasp of what Systems Thinking is really about.
In this episode we refer to Gerald Weinberg’s Introduction to General Systems Thinking book, a good primer for those interested in learning more about Systems Thinkin.
About Anssi Lehtelä
Anssi is a new born optimist, team work enthusiast, and a big supporter of get more done by doing less things. Developer , tester, and the "process guy".
You can link with Anssi Lehtelä on LinkedIn and connect with Anssi Lehtelä on Twitter.
Anssi shares his 4-area model for Scrum Master success and also some of the indicators and metrics he uses to evaluate his own work.
About Anssi Lehtelä
Anssi is a new born optimist, team work enthusiast, and a big supporter of get more done by doing less things. Developer , tester, and the "process guy".
You can link with Anssi Lehtelä on LinkedIn and connect with Anssi Lehtelä on Twitter.
Change brings uncertainty, fear and perhaps even chaos to teams and organizations. Change processes can be forced and cause more problems than what they are supposed to help with. How can we avoid this? How can we bring in the necessary changes, perhaps even big changes, without causing chaos? Listen to Anssi as he shares one such story with us.
In this episode we talk about the Lean Change Management book by Jason Little.
About Anssi Lehtelä
Anssi is a new born optimist, team work enthusiast, and a big supporter of get more done by doing less things. Developer , tester, and the "process guy".
You can link with Anssi Lehtelä on LinkedIn and connect with Anssi Lehtelä on Twitter.
Teams evolve, people move on and new team members join the team. Those moments are prime candidates for disaster. New team members bring new ideas and they change the internal team dynamics. This, in turn, can lead to chaos and problems. How can we avoid such problems? Listen to Anssi’s story and what he recommends you take into account if you are about the hire new team members.
About Anssi Lehtelä
Anssi is a new born optimist, team work enthusiast, and a big supporter of get more done by doing less things. Developer , tester, and the "process guy".
You can link with Anssi Lehtelä on LinkedIn and connect with Anssi Lehtelä on Twitter.
Retrospectives can sometimes become just formalities and fail to deliver improvements, or worse: fail to motivate the team to improve the way they work. Anssi shares with us a story of such a situation and his own alternative to formal retrospectives that he still uses today. Do you have retrospectives that fail to deliver value? This episode is for you!
About Anssi Lehtelä
Anssi is a new born optimist, team work enthusiast, and a big supporter of get more done by doing less things. Developer , tester, and the "process guy".
You can link with Anssi Lehtelä on LinkedIn and connect with Anssi Lehtelä on Twitter.
Listen in to know what tools Alexandre uses to build his own view of the system that affects the teams we work within.
In this episode we mention The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, and the Causal Loop Diagram tool to help us build a map of the conditions in play at the system level and how they interact.
About Alexandre Thibault
Alexandre is a Canadian computer scientist that became ScrumMaster and Agile Coach after 15 years as a programmer. For 4 years now, he helps directors and managers creating work environments where team members are engaged in their work using intrinsic motivation.
You can link with Alexandre Thibault on LinkedIn and connect with Alexandre Thibault on Twitter.
Alexandre wants to take into account different aspects of the work we do as Scrum Masters to build his own view of success. He also shares his approach to building his assessment of success.
In this episode we mention Impact Mapping by Gojko Adzic, a great technique to help see why we are embarking on a change process.
About Alexandre Thibault
Alexandre is a Canadian computer scientist that became ScrumMaster and Agile Coach after 15 years as a programmer. For 4 years now, he helps directors and managers creating work environments where team members are engaged in their work using intrinsic motivation.
You can link with Alexandre Thibault on LinkedIn and connect with Alexandre Thibault on Twitter.
Alexandre shares the tools he’s used in the past in change processes. The focus is on helping the teams go through the change process by visualizing and participating in the process itself. Listen in to hear about some of the games you can use to introduce a team to a necessary change.
About Alexandre Thibault
Alexandre is a Canadian computer scientist that became ScrumMaster and Agile Coach after 15 years as a programmer. For 4 years now, he helps directors and managers creating work environments where team members are engaged in their work using intrinsic motivation.
You can link with Alexandre Thibault on LinkedIn and connect with Alexandre Thibault on Twitter.
Blame culture develops when teams, or team members have different expectations. Conflict ensues, and the blame dance starts. Can that be avoided? How? Alexandre shares with us his own recipe for getting out of a Blame Culture environment, even if you get there in the middle of the action.
About Alexandre Thibault
Alexandre is a Canadian computer scientist that became ScrumMaster and Agile Coach after 15 years as a programmer. For 4 years now, he helps directors and managers creating work environments where team members are engaged in their work using intrinsic motivation.
You can link with Alexandre Thibault on LinkedIn and connect with Alexandre Thibault on Twitter.
Agile is not something a team can adopt in isolation. The people who interact with that team need to adopt it as well. Alexandre shares with us the story of a CEO that did not adopt Agile, but asked the teams to do so. In this episode we talk about what happened, why it is important to get that kind of stakeholders to adopt Agile.
Some of the links we discuss on this show:
About Alexandre Thibault
Alexandre is a Canadian computer scientist that became ScrumMaster and Agile Coach after 15 years as a programmer. For 4 years now, he helps directors and managers creating work environments where team members are engaged in their work using intrinsic motivation.
You can link with Alexandre Thibault on LinkedIn and connect with Alexandre Thibault on Twitter.
Philipp works in a contractor for software development, and - as he says - the customer interaction is one of the key system conditions. How we work with, how often we meet, etc. are just some of the possible system conditions we need to look into. But he also gives examples of some of the system metrics that can help us understand if our efforts to improve the system have an impact.
About Philipp Eisbacher
Philip works as a ScrumMaster and Lead. Recently moved to Berlin to face a new challenge in setting up a new site for his company and building up teams from scratch. His current challenges are remote collaboration, corporate growth and finding a good butcher in Berlin for the next Barbecue Season. He wants to share his problems, but also insights that he gets on a daily basis.
You can link with Philipp Eisbacher on LinkedIn and connect with Philipp Eisbacher on Twitter.
In one form or another we need some definition of success in order to assess if we have reached that state. And those metrics can focus on many aspects of our work, or outcome of our work. Philipp suggests we focus on behavior metrics and explains what that could look like.
About Philipp Eisbacher
Philip works as a ScrumMaster and Lead. Recently moved to Berlin to face a new challenge in setting up a new site for his company and building up teams from scratch. His current challenges are remote collaboration, corporate growth and finding a good butcher in Berlin for the next Barbecue Season. He wants to share his problems, but also insights that he gets on a daily basis.
You can link with Philipp Eisbacher on LinkedIn and connect with Philipp Eisbacher on Twitter.
Philipp walks us through the story of his company, and how the change process that once worked, failed to work after the company grew beyond a certain size. He also shares what are some of the symptoms that can indicate that the change process is failing. And they are not the ones you would expect…
About Philipp Eisbacher
Philip works as a ScrumMaster and Lead. Recently moved to Berlin to face a new challenge in setting up a new site for his company and building up teams from scratch. His current challenges are remote collaboration, corporate growth and finding a good butcher in Berlin for the next Barbecue Season. He wants to share his problems, but also insights that he gets on a daily basis.
You can link with Philipp Eisbacher on LinkedIn and connect with Philipp Eisbacher on Twitter.
We’ve reviewed the concept of re-teaming by Heidi Helfand, Philipp reminds us in this episode why changing team structure is so important and how that can improve the group’s performance over time.
About Philipp Eisbacher
Philip works as a ScrumMaster and Lead. Recently moved to Berlin to face a new challenge in setting up a new site for his company and building up teams from scratch. His current challenges are remote collaboration, corporate growth and finding a good butcher in Berlin for the next Barbecue Season. He wants to share his problems, but also insights that he gets on a daily basis.
You can link with Philipp Eisbacher on LinkedIn and connect with Philipp Eisbacher on Twitter.
We’ve reviewed the importance of fostering and having the right conversations in a team or organization. This is one of our critical roles as Scrum Masters: conversation facilitators. In this episode we talk about conversations as the main work-materialization tool based on the work by Finnish management writer Esko Kilpi. His articles are well worth reading if you are interested in how to foster the right conversations in your organization.
About Philipp Eisbacher
Philip works as a ScrumMaster and Lead. Recently moved to Berlin to face a new challenge in setting up a new site for his company and building up teams from scratch. His current challenges are remote collaboration, corporate growth and finding a good butcher in Berlin for the next Barbecue Season. He wants to share his problems, but also insights that he gets on a daily basis.
You can link with Philipp Eisbacher on LinkedIn and connect with Philipp Eisbacher on Twitter.
Purpose and Alignment are key system conditions that will either help our teams succeed or ensure that they fail. The lack of alignment is one of the most important topics for us to focus on and work on from a systemic point of view. David shares with us how he finds the lack of alignment and how to take steps to rebuild that alignment with the team and stakeholders.
David ends this episode with a brilliant quote: “Being Agile is a direction of travel, not a goal or an end state".
About David Williams
David is an experienced manager with excellent product management and project management skills using agile principles. Extensive experience managing teams and developing for embedded, PC and web based software and electronics for scientific and industrial applications.
He is passionate about creating teams with innovative cultures that are fully engaged in their work that is aligned to the company’s strategy for success.
His focus points are:
- Delivering projects with the highest business value
- Building high performance teams, that work hard and are passionate and fully engaged
- Creating an innovative culture that everyone wants to be part of so that we can make a difference
- Understanding people and getting them to work together in a safe environment where they can take risks.
- Designing products that exceed the customer’s wildest dreams.
- Embracing and driving change
You can link with David Williams on LinkedIn and connect with David Williams on Twitter.
As Scrum Masters we very often focus on metrics that help us understand how others see our work. David reminds us that it is also important for us to look inside, at how we feel to know if we are being successful. David shares with us many personal metrics that will help us understand if we are being successful.
About David Williams
David is an experienced manager with excellent product management and project management skills using agile principles. Extensive experience managing teams and developing for embedded, PC and web based software and electronics for scientific and industrial applications.
He is passionate about creating teams with innovative cultures that are fully engaged in their work that is aligned to the company’s strategy for success.
His focus points are:
- Delivering projects with the highest business value
- Building high performance teams, that work hard and are passionate and fully engaged
- Creating an innovative culture that everyone wants to be part of so that we can make a difference
- Understanding people and getting them to work together in a safe environment where they can take risks.
- Designing products that exceed the customer’s wildest dreams.
- Embracing and driving change
You can link with David Williams on LinkedIn and connect with David Williams on Twitter.
This is a JUMBO episode with David where we talk about change management, how to engage with teams that are involved in change as well as how to help them overcome their fear of change.
But this is also a JUMBO episode because David shares with us many tips on how to help teams take the most out of Visual Task Boards. Listen in to get many, many ideas on how to improve the way your teams use physical Task Boards.
In this episode we mention the book Lean Change Management by Jason Little.
About David Williams
David is an experienced manager with excellent product management and project management skills using agile principles. Extensive experience managing teams and developing for embedded, PC and web based software and electronics for scientific and industrial applications.
He is passionate about creating teams with innovative cultures that are fully engaged in their work that is aligned to the company’s strategy for success.
His focus points are:
- Delivering projects with the highest business value
- Building high performance teams, that work hard and are passionate and fully engaged
- Creating an innovative culture that everyone wants to be part of so that we can make a difference
- Understanding people and getting them to work together in a safe environment where they can take risks.
- Designing products that exceed the customer’s wildest dreams.
- Embracing and driving change
You can link with David Williams on LinkedIn and connect with David Williams on Twitter.
Many things have been said about trust and how important it is for a team to work well together. David shares a story of a team where trust was eroded, why that happened and how the team was affected by that. We also discuss how to recover from the lack of trust in a specific context. We mention the book The 5 dysfunctions of a team by Patrick Lencioni.
About David Williams
David is an experienced manager with excellent product management and project management skills using agile principles. Extensive experience managing teams and developing for embedded, PC and web based software and electronics for scientific and industrial applications.
He is passionate about creating teams with innovative cultures that are fully engaged in their work that is aligned to the company’s strategy for success.
His focus points are:
- Delivering projects with the highest business value
- Building high performance teams, that work hard and are passionate and fully engaged
- Creating an innovative culture that everyone wants to be part of so that we can make a difference
- Understanding people and getting them to work together in a safe environment where they can take risks.
- Designing products that exceed the customer’s wildest dreams.
- Embracing and driving change
You can link with David Williams on LinkedIn and connect with David Williams on Twitter.
How do you go from a failure to a comeback that is better than you could have expected? This is the story that David shares with us today. In process he explains how small changes can lead to creating an environment where emergent collaboration is possible.
About David Williams
David is an experienced manager with excellent product management and project management skills using agile principles. Extensive experience managing teams and developing for embedded, PC and web based software and electronics for scientific and industrial applications.
He is passionate about creating teams with innovative cultures that are fully engaged in their work that is aligned to the company’s strategy for success.
His focus points are:
- Delivering projects with the highest business value
- Building high performance teams, that work hard and are passionate and fully engaged
- Creating an innovative culture that everyone wants to be part of so that we can make a difference
- Understanding people and getting them to work together in a safe environment where they can take risks.
- Designing products that exceed the customer’s wildest dreams.
- Embracing and driving change
You can link with David Williams on LinkedIn and connect with David Williams on Twitter.
Sometimes it may be hard to know where we are and what is the next step. Matteo suggests we use the Agile Fluency model to a) evaluate where we are, b) envision the next steps and c) identify constraints or obstacles to our development.
About Matteo Vaccari
Matteo is a fan of extreme programming. Through his work and experience he has become interested in how teams can deliver quality software, at reasonable cost. He thinks the two things are connected :) Matteo worked first as a developer, then as agile coach and currently he is a developer/consultant in ThoughtWorks.
You can link with Matteo Vaccari on LinkedIn and connect with Matteo Vaccari on Twitter.
You can also follow Matteo’s latest projects, including his unfinished book on TDD on his site: http://matteo.vaccari.name/
Matteo walks us through his 3-stakeholder model of success and how he measures and aims to reach success for all 3 stakeholders.
In this episode we refer to “the 10 critical improvements” by Tom Gilb, and the Happiness Index
About Matteo Vaccari
Matteo is a fan of extreme programming. Through his work and experience he has become interested in how teams can deliver quality software, at reasonable cost. He thinks the two things are connected :) Matteo worked first as a developer, then as agile coach and currently he is a developer/consultant in ThoughtWorks.
You can link with Matteo Vaccari on LinkedIn and connect with Matteo Vaccari on Twitter.
You can also follow Matteo’s latest projects, including his unfinished book on TDD on his site: http://matteo.vaccari.name/
What helps teams evolve and change? Matteo tells us the story of how the art of focusing, and not following the book helped his team evolve to a point where every practice was developed for the right reasons and how that helped the team reach a level of high performance.
In this episode we refer to Arlo Belshee’s Naked Planning methodology.
About Matteo Vaccari
Matteo is a fan of extreme programming. Through his work and experience he has become interested in how teams can deliver quality software, at reasonable cost. He thinks the two things are connected :) Matteo worked first as a developer, then as agile coach and currently he is a developer/consultant in ThoughtWorks.
You can link with Matteo Vaccari on LinkedIn and connect with Matteo Vaccari on Twitter.
You can also follow Matteo’s latest projects, including his unfinished book on TDD on his site: http://matteo.vaccari.name/
Having a star programmer in a team can be a life saver. But is it always? Matteo explains the story of a team that had a star programmer, someone that had been involved in the product development since the start, and how that led to the team’s self-destruction.
About Matteo Vaccari
Matteo is a fan of extreme programming. Through his work and experience he has become interested in how teams can deliver quality software, at reasonable cost. He thinks the two things are connected :) Matteo worked first as a developer, then as agile coach and currently he is a developer/consultant in ThoughtWorks.
You can link with Matteo Vaccari on LinkedIn and connect with Matteo Vaccari on Twitter.
You can also follow Matteo’s latest projects, including his unfinished book on TDD on his site: http://matteo.vaccari.name/
Sometimes things are going so well that we forget to verify the obvious, and this is one of those stories, where the most obvious problem wasn’t in the team’s radar because everything was working so smoothly. Listen in as Matteo explains the error of the perfect project.
About Matteo Vaccari
Matteo is a fan of extreme programming. Through his work and experience he has become interested in how teams can deliver quality software, at reasonable cost. He thinks the two things are connected :) Matteo worked first as a developer, then as agile coach and currently he is a developer/consultant in ThoughtWorks.
You can link with Matteo Vaccari on LinkedIn and connect with Matteo Vaccari on Twitter.
You can also follow Matteo’s latest projects, including his unfinished book on TDD on his site: http://matteo.vaccari.name/.