Bosses or leaders? Which type of people do you hire. All people we hire must at some point make a decision, to work for the team or work despite the team. This is the difference between bosses and leaders, and you should consider this when recruiting Scrum Masters.
Developer, software architect and a team leader. Karol is a big fan of Behavior Driven Development and open source software. In his everyday work he tries to share his experience and actively participate in development and spreading a good word about open source projects like Symfony, Behat or PhpSpec. He is also fascinated by the process of making teams work better and tweak their productivity. After hours he is one of PHPers meetups organizers in Poland.
Karol is the author of To-Do: Team!: Simple productivity techniques for improving your team & making software that matters
You can connect with Karol Sójko on twitter, and subscribe to his helpful tips on how to get your team to the next level.
The life of a startup is very different from working on a large corporate environment. This influences your work as a Scrum Master. In this episode Karol shares what he learned from that experience, and a technique he learned then that he now applies everywhere.
Developer, software architect and a team leader. Karol is a big fan of Behavior Driven Development and open source software. In his everyday work he tries to share his experience and actively participate in development and spreading a good word about open source projects like Symfony, Behat or PhpSpec. He is also fascinated by the process of making teams work better and tweak their productivity. After hours he is one of PHPers meetups organizers in Poland.
Karol is the author of To-Do: Team!: Simple productivity techniques for improving your team & making software that matters
You can connect with Karol Sójko on twitter, and subscribe to his helpful tips on how to get your team to the next level.
Karol shares his story of how a project went from perfect to disaster. From engaging and motivating to unfocused, “pet project” and un-interesting for the team. His experience made a big difference for his career, and has influenced his work as a team lead and Scrum Master.
SPECIAL GIVEAWAY INCLUDED: listen to the end of the episode for a giveaway that will help you get a free copy of Karol’s book: To-Do: Team!: Simple productivity techniques for improving your team & making software that matters
Developer, software architect and a team leader. Karol is a big fan of Behavior Driven Development and open source software. In his everyday work he tries to share his experience and actively participate in development and spreading a good word about open source projects like Symfony, Behat or PhpSpec. He is also fascinated by the process of making teams work better and tweak their productivity. After hours he is one of PHPers meetups organizers in Poland.
Karol is the author of To-Do: Team!: Simple productivity techniques for improving your team & making software that matters
You can connect with Karol Sójko on twitter, and subscribe to his helpful tips on how to get your team to the next level.
Retrospectives are a systems thinking tool that can help you understand how teams are affected by the wider system. Ben explains his views on how to build that into the way you host and facilitate retrospectives.
About Ben Linders
Ben Linders is an Independent Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement, based in The Netherlands. Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives & What Drives Quality.
You can follow Ben Linders on Twitter, and connect with Ben Linders on LinkedIn.
You can find Ben’s Agile self-assessment in his web-site, and find more about his work and upcoming workshops.
Is the team working as a team? Or are they working in isolation, and come together only occasionally to “report their work”? And how can you build an environment where teams can come together and work as teams?
In this episode we also mention the book Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great, by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen.
About Ben Linders
Ben Linders is an Independent Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement, based in The Netherlands. Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives & What Drives Quality.
You can follow Ben Linders on Twitter, and connect with Ben Linders on LinkedIn.
You can find Ben’s Agile self-assessment in his web-site, and find more about his work and upcoming workshops.
Mindset and beliefs when recruiting Scrum Masters are good indicators of the suitability of the candidates to the job at hand. Ben Linders explains why, and how to build that into the recruiting interview.
In this episode we mention Ben’s blog post on how sometimes it is better to do nothing.
Ben Linders is an Independent Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement, based in The Netherlands. Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives & What Drives Quality.
You can follow Ben Linders on Twitter, and connect with Ben Linders on LinkedIn.
You can find Ben’s Agile self-assessment in his web-site, and find more about his work and upcoming workshops.
Agile is not a process, and that is an important realization that all teams should reach at some point. But how to get them to that realization? How to help team members understand that Agile is not a set of recipes that you follow blindly?
Ben Linders is an Independent Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement, based in The Netherlands. Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives & What Drives Quality.
You can follow Ben Linders on Twitter, and connect with Ben Linders on LinkedIn.
You can find Ben’s Agile self-assessment in his web-site, and find more about his work and upcoming workshops.
How do you handle people that are not team players? We hear often that our role as Scrum Masters is to help the team collaborate. How can we do that if some team members are not team players? Ben explains how he was able to detect that in one team and what he did about it.
In this episode we mention the book Liftoff: Launching Agile Teams & Projects, by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies, a book that can help you get a project or a team started in the right way.
Ben also mentions one of his blog posts on how to help teams form with the use of Futurespectives for team chartering.
Ben Linders is an Independent Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality and Continuous Improvement, based in The Netherlands. Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives & What Drives Quality.
You can follow Ben Linders on Twitter, and connect with Ben Linders on LinkedIn.
You can find Ben’s Agile self-assessment in his web-site, and find more about his work and upcoming workshops.
How do you help the whole organization evolve and improve? Easy, says Claudio. Here’s his recipe:
Look at the whole value stream (from concept to cash!)
Find out what impedes flow in that value stream
Use PopcornFlow to learn, and solve those flow bottlenecks
Rinse and repeat.
Claudio also adds, that when we look at the whole value stream we see how important the role of management really is, because management is the function responsible to make flow happen at the value stream level.
Claudio is an independent Lean & Agile management consultant, entrepreneur and startup strategist. You may know him for the amazing cartoons he creates for his presentations or, perhaps, for A3 Thinker, a deck of brainstorming cards for Lean Problem Solving. These days he focuses on PopcornFlow, a brand-new continuous evolution method for personal and organisational change.
You can connect with Claudio Perrone on twitter, and see Claudio Perrone on LinkedIn. These days Claudio is focusing on his latest work: PopcornFlow, a method by which you can Learn how to establish a continuous flow of small, traceable, co-created, explicit change experiments. For you, your team, your organization.
What does it mean to be more Agile? Claudio has a very concrete definition of agility that you can start using today to measure how agile is your team. His definition: the more experiments you run, the more agile you are. After all experiments lead to learning, and learning leads to adaptation. Evolve as quickly as a virus, not as an elephant!
Claudio is an independent Lean & Agile management consultant, entrepreneur and startup strategist. You may know him for the amazing cartoons he creates for his presentations or, perhaps, for A3 Thinker, a deck of brainstorming cards for Lean Problem Solving. These days he focuses on PopcornFlow, a brand-new continuous evolution method for personal and organisational change.
You can connect with Claudio Perrone on twitter, and see Claudio Perrone on LinkedIn. These days Claudio is focusing on his latest work: PopcornFlow, a method by which you can Learn how to establish a continuous flow of small, traceable, co-created, explicit change experiments. For you, your team, your organization.
Sometimes recruiting for what people already know is the right approach. But is that always the right approach? Claudio suggests that sometimes you should rather focus on potential and he explains why.
Claudio is an independent Lean & Agile management consultant, entrepreneur and startup strategist. You may know him for the amazing cartoons he creates for his presentations or, perhaps, for A3 Thinker, a deck of brainstorming cards for Lean Problem Solving. These days he focuses on PopcornFlow, a brand-new continuous evolution method for personal and organisational change.
You can connect with Claudio Perrone on twitter, and see Claudio Perrone on LinkedIn. These days Claudio is focusing on his latest work: PopcornFlow, a method by which you can Learn how to establish a continuous flow of small, traceable, co-created, explicit change experiments. For you, your team, your organization.
Daily meetings fail for many reasons, and Claudio has an idea of why it happens regularly. The 3 questions in the Scrum daily just can’t work in all situations. Claudio discusses some ideas on how to improve the questions the team asks in the daily meeting and gives a few tips on how to improve the Scrum board to make work more visible and focus the team on Flow.
We also discuss a promising framework to help teams understand the “why” of every story they develop. This is a framework developed based on the work by Clayton Christensen (Innovator’s Dilemma), and tries to define the content of products from a different perspective: the job to be done that customers hire the product for. Watch Clayton Christensen present the idea of jobs to be done on youtube. Or listen to the Jobs-To-Be-Done radio podcast if you want to know more about this promising framework.
Claudio is an independent Lean & Agile management consultant, entrepreneur and startup strategist. You may know him for the amazing cartoons he creates for his presentations or, perhaps, for A3 Thinker, a deck of brainstorming cards for Lean Problem Solving. These days he focuses on PopcornFlow, a brand-new continuous evolution method for personal and organisational change.
You can connect with Claudio Perrone on twitter, and see Claudio Perrone on LinkedIn. These days Claudio is focusing on his latest work: PopcornFlow, a method by which you can Learn how to establish a continuous flow of small, traceable, co-created, explicit change experiments. For you, your team, your organization.
Change can be made cheap and easy with the right method that develops a culture of continuous improvement in the team and ultimately the organization. Claudio’s method: PopcornFlow is a an approach to help teams get out of the rut of no-improvement. The method consists of 7 steps:
List the problems and observations
Create options by asking questions like: what could we do now to improve?
Define possible experiments in the form of: Action, reason (why?), expectation, duration)
Select and commit to run one of the experiments you listed
Implement and follow-up the execution of the experiment you selected
Review the results once the experiment is completed
Define what your next steps are given what you learned from that experiment
Understand the gap between expectations and reality, and start the process all over again.
You can find out more about Claudio’s method at: PopcornFlow.com.
Claudio is an independent Lean & Agile management consultant, entrepreneur and startup strategist. You may know him for the amazing cartoons he creates for his presentations or, perhaps, for A3 Thinker, a deck of brainstorming cards for Lean Problem Solving. These days he focuses on PopcornFlow, a brand-new continuous evolution method for personal and organisational change.
You can connect with Claudio Perrone on twitter, and see Claudio Perrone on LinkedIn. These days Claudio is focusing on his latest work: PopcornFlow, a method by which you can Learn how to establish a continuous flow of small, traceable, co-created, explicit change experiments. For you, your team, your organization.
Follow the pain to understand the system. Look for unexplained trends, then look outside the team for possible explanations. Find out who is actually communicating with whom. Measure everything you can to detect changes, or impacts from others outside the system. Then sit back and see the big picture.
About Tim Bourguignon
Tim likes to describe himself as a full time geek, agile developer and BS hunter. He was born in France, raised as a European child and currently lives in Germany where he juggles with software development and Scrum Mastering. When he's not in front of a computer, you'll find him behind a camera, in his running shoes or with his wife & son... of course never in that order!
You can connect with Tim Bourguignon on twitter or visit Tim Bourguignon’s website to see what he is up to.
How do you measure success? You measure all the things! Wait, don’t switch off yet, because Tim has a very good idea on how you can do this.
Always take notes. In meetings, after conversations, all the time.
Measure everything you can. Tasks completed, cycle time, features, interactions, etc.
Get numbers on everything you do as a Scrum Master. How many times did you talk to each team member this week? How many times did you feel lost, or did not know how to go forward?
Look at trends. Only numbers can help you see trends. So measure and stand back to see the big picture.
About Tim Bourguignon
Tim likes to describe himself as a full time geek, agile developer and BS hunter. He was born in France, raised as a European child and currently lives in Germany where he juggles with software development and Scrum Mastering. When he's not in front of a computer, you'll find him behind a camera, in his running shoes or with his wife & son... of course never in that order!
You can connect with Tim Bourguignon on twitter or visit Tim Bourguignon’s website to see what he is up to.
The recipe for recruiting that Tim shares is about understanding motivation and passion, but recognizing that team work cannot be assessed in an interview. Be ware of the lone wolves when interviewing for Scrum team.
About Tim Bourguignon
Tim likes to describe himself as a full time geek, agile developer and BS hunter. He was born in France, raised as a European child and currently lives in Germany where he juggles with software development and Scrum Mastering. When he's not in front of a computer, you'll find him behind a camera, in his running shoes or with his wife & son... of course never in that order!
You can connect with Tim Bourguignon on twitter or visit Tim Bourguignon’s website to see what he is up to.
Tim’s story is about a team that is changing an organization. He discusses how believing you can, and wanting to improve the world can sometimes lead you down the wrong road. And he suggests a few rules to take into account if you want to survive the change process as a team.
Tim likes to describe himself as a full time geek, agile developer and BS hunter. He was born in France, raised as a European child and currently lives in Germany where he juggles with software development and Scrum Mastering. When he's not in front of a computer, you'll find him behind a camera, in his running shoes or with his wife & son... of course never in that order!
You can connect with Tim Bourguignon on twitter or visit Tim Bourguignon’s website to see what he is up to.
Tim as seen Scrum have a gigantic impact on the organization where he worked. This was a traditional, heavily regulated industry, and scrum had a huge impact. This was a transition where Tim learned the power of the political play. A sobering story that hopefully prepares us to understand that aspect of organizational life.
About Tim Bourguignon
Tim likes to describe himself as a full time geek, agile developer and BS hunter. He was born in France, raised as a European child and currently lives in Germany where he juggles with software development and Scrum Mastering. When he's not in front of a computer, you'll find him behind a camera, in his running shoes or with his wife & son... of course never in that order!
You can connect with Tim Bourguignon on twitter or visit Tim Bourguignon’s website to see what he is up to.
To understand how the system behaves we must “poke” it, and Scrum is just the perfect method for that. Every sprint is an experiment that helps the team and the Scrum Master understand how the system behaves and reacts to the different experiments that we run every sprint. Jeremy has a collection of metrics he follows-up regularly to keep in aware of how the system behaves, and enable him to actual test new approaches every sprint.
Jeremy Jarrell is an agile coach and author who helps teams get better at doing what they love. He is heavily involved in the technology community, both as a highly rated speaker as well as a syndicated author whose articles and videos have appeared on numerous popular websites.
You can connect with Jeremy Jarrell on twitter, and link with Jeremy Jarrell on LinkedIn. Jeremy’s web-site is at www.jeremyjarrell.com
Jeremy’s latest video course, Agile Release Planning, is available now from FrontRowAgile.com.
For a successful Scrum Master, Scrum is just the starting point. Success starts when the team is able to own the process, and tweak it to fit their needs without losing sight of why they adopted Scrum in the first place. Jeremy explains how he defines success and the paths he takes to get there.
Jeremy Jarrell is an agile coach and author who helps teams get better at doing what they love. He is heavily involved in the technology community, both as a highly rated speaker as well as a syndicated author whose articles and videos have appeared on numerous popular websites.
You can connect with Jeremy Jarrell on twitter, and link with Jeremy Jarrell on LinkedIn. Jeremy’s web-site is at www.jeremyjarrell.com
Jeremy’s latest video course, Agile Release Planning, is available now from FrontRowAgile.com.
Passion is in the overlap between attitude and aptitude, and it is the ingredient that makes good Scrum Masters even better. Jeremy explains how he looks and tests for passion in the recruiting interview.
Jeremy Jarrell is an agile coach and author who helps teams get better at doing what they love. He is heavily involved in the technology community, both as a highly rated speaker as well as a syndicated author whose articles and videos have appeared on numerous popular websites.
You can connect with Jeremy Jarrell on twitter, and link with Jeremy Jarrell on LinkedIn. Jeremy’s web-site is at www.jeremyjarrell.com
Jeremy’s latest video course, Agile Release Planning, is available now from FrontRowAgile.com.
Incremental delivery is a buzzword in the Agile lingo. It is very often used, but seldom defined. Jeremy explains what incremental really means, and gives us an insight about the far-reaching benefits for those that take his definition to heart.
In this book we refer to the book User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton.
Jeremy Jarrell is an agile coach and author who helps teams get better at doing what they love. He is heavily involved in the technology community, both as a highly rated speaker as well as a syndicated author whose articles and videos have appeared on numerous popular websites.
You can connect with Jeremy Jarrell on twitter, and link with Jeremy Jarrell on LinkedIn. Jeremy’s web-site is at www.jeremyjarrell.com
Jeremy’s latest video course, Agile Release Planning, is available now from FrontRowAgile.com.
There is a tool that every Scrum Master must use daily, the mental checklist of whom you’ve talked to. Jeremy shares how he uses that tool to keep tabs on how the team is doing, and how to help them further.
In the episode we also talk about a classic that every Scrum Master should read: How to win friends and influence people, by Dale Carnegie. This book, according to Wikipedia, will:
Get you out of a mental rut, give you new thoughts, new visions, new ambitions.
Enable you to make friends quickly and easily.
Increase your popularity.
Help you to win people to your way of thinking.
Increase your influence, your prestige, your ability to get things done.
Enable you to win new clients, new customers.
Increase your earning power.
Make you a better salesman, a better executive.
Help you to handle complaints, avoid arguments, keep your human contacts smooth and pleasant.
Make you a better speaker, a more entertaining conversationalist.
Make the principles of psychology easy for you to apply in your daily contacts.
Help you to arouse enthusiasm among your associates.
Jeremy Jarrell is an agile coach and author who helps teams get better at doing what they love. He is heavily involved in the technology community, both as a highly rated speaker as well as a syndicated author whose articles and videos have appeared on numerous popular websites.
You can connect with Jeremy Jarrell on twitter, and link with Jeremy Jarrell on LinkedIn. Jeremy’s web-site is at www.jeremyjarrell.com
Jeremy’s latest video course, Agile Release Planning, is available now from FrontRowAgile.com.
Wayde has worked with many teams, and in this episode he describes the aspects of the system conditions that affect team’s performance. Those system conditions are not the ones you would expect to hear about. The fact is that we work with people, and people make up the system we are part of, in the end it is all much more touchy feely than we would like to accept.
About Wayde Stallmann
Wayde is an Agile coach with TeamFirstDevelopment.com. He is interested in helping teams improve using the same techniques that Improv theater teams use to develop Great Team Players.
You can connect with Wayde Stallmann on twitter, or link with Wayde Stallmann on LinkedIn. Or email Wayde Stallmann at wayde@wayde.com.
Mistakes are part of the process of learning, we all know that. But Wayde goes further and challenges us to accept them as gifts, not just part of the process. Listen how Wayde tackles mistakes when they happen to help the team accept, and build on those mistakes rather than try to recover. This mental shift can have a huge impact on team’s performance.
About Wayde Stallmann
Wayde is an Agile coach with TeamFirstDevelopment.com. He is interested in helping teams improve using the same techniques that Improv theater teams use to develop Great Team Players.
You can connect with Wayde Stallmann on twitter, or link with Wayde Stallmann on LinkedIn. Or email Wayde Stallmann at wayde@wayde.com.