Ben Maynard: When the “best” team is a world of trouble for the Scrum Master

It seems like a “no brainer” to choose the best people available and form a team with them. However, as Ben reminds us, that’s not always the case. Sometimes the “best” people available don’t have compatible personalities, and the Scrum Master must be able to understand and tackle that together with leadership. In this episode, Ben shares the story of a team of “stars” that just couldn’t work together and describes the things he tried (and which worked… or not) to help that team grow.

In this episode, we refer to LeSS and to an episode with Bas Vodde, one of the creators of the LeSS framework.

In this segment, we refer to Deming and the concept of Gemba walks

Featured Book of the Week: Practices For Scaling Lean & Agile Development, by Vodde and Larman

Thanks to Bas Vodde’s and Craig Larman’s Practices For Scaling Lean & Agile Development, Ben changed his career. First, he started by applying many of the ideas in the book, and started to like the approach that the authors take in the book: suggesting experiments for readers to try. While reading the book, ben found many ideas that he could try at work, which ultimately led him to become a large scale Scrum trainer. 

About Ben Maynard

Ben is an experienced coach, trainer, and mentor assisting senior leaders in medium to large organizations with organizational design and the cultural repercussions. 

You can link with Ben Maynard on LinkedIn and connect with Ben Maynard on Twitter

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This handy Coach Your PO cheat-sheet includes questions to help you define the problem, and links to handy, easy techniques to help you coach your Product Owner
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This simple checklist and calendar handout, with a coaching article will help you define the minimum enagement your PO must have with the team
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This simple checklist and calendar handout, with a coaching article will help you define the minimum enagement your PO must have with the team
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Motivate your team with the right metrics, and the right way to visualize and track them. Marcus presents a detailed How-To document based on his experience at The Bungsu Hospital
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A moving story of how work at the Bungsu Hospital was transformed by a simple tool that you can use to help your team.
Read about Visualization and TRANSFORM The way your team works