Uncategorized Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Aria Omidvar: The Many Layers to Scrum Master Success

Aria explores the layers of success for Scrum Masters, highlighting the transformation of team culture. He assesses success through the lens of team self-reliance, self-organization, and ownership of work. Aria’s metric for success involves equipping teams with tools and practices that enable them to effectively carry out their responsibilities. This episode offers valuable insights into the multifaceted nature of success in the role of a Scrum Master.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Making Retrospectives Clearly Different From Other Meetings and Work

Aria shares his preferred retrospective format, emphasizing the importance of a distinct mindset for this higher-order team work. He advocates for creativity and mindfulness, aiming to set retrospectives apart from regular team activities with a specific format he shares in this episode. Aria offers practical tips such as note-taking, root cause analysis, and solution brainstorming during discussions. He underscores the value of critical thinking, focusing on root causes, and showing the path to solutions. Aria’s approach promotes effective retrospectives as a catalyst for meaningful team improvement.

How can I, as a Scrum Master, supercharge my facilitation?

Retrospectives, planning sessions, vision workshops, we are continuously helping teams learn about how to collaborate in practice! In this Actionable Agile Tools book, Jeff Campbell shares some of the tools he’s learned over a decade of coaching Agile Teams. The pragmatic coaching book you need, right now! Buy Actionable Agile Tools on Amazon, or directly from the author, and supercharge your facilitation toolbox!

About Aria Omidvar

Aria has 4+ years of experience serving as Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Agile Coach (CSM, A-CSM, CSPO) from single teams to multiple teams and the whole software organization. He’s a Software Engineer turned Software Developer turned Peopleware Developer and Agilist.

You can link with Aria Omidvar on LinkedIn and connect with Aria Omidvar on Twitter.

Simon Flossmann: The Proxy PO that worked for a team of Product Owners

In this episode, we talk about collaboration with customers, and how that can help the team and PO to work well together. And we discuss what happens when the PO is only a proxy to multiple other PO’s.

The Great Product Owner: The Great Collaborator

Great Product Owners are able to collaborate closely with the stakeholders and customers. In this segment, we talk about the PO that was able to communicate with the customers in a way that helped him bring insights and knowl3edgte to the team so that the team could understand better the problems the customers were facing, and come up with innovative solutions.

The Bad Product Owner: The Proxy PO that worked for a team of Product Owners

When the PO is nothing but a proxy for another decision-maker, the team will suffer. In this segment, we talk about a PO proxy that had several big obstacles in their way: there were multiple PO’s to work with (a team of PO’s), and on top of that a “chief PO”. How can a PO succeed when they are unable to make decisions? How can the Scrum Master help that PO? Listen in to learn about Simon’s approach in that situation.

Are you having trouble helping the team working well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at: bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.

About Simon Flossmann

Simon helps teams effectively use Scrum and an agile mindset to deliver products and services that matter! As a Scrum Master and Professional Scrum Trainer, licensed by Scrum.org, he supports teams and organizations of varying sizes in a wide range of business domains, like automotive, home appliance, energy sector, federal government agency, and insurance.

You can link with Simon Flossmann on LinkedIn and connect with Simon Flossmann on Twitter.

You can follow Simon Flossmann’s writings on this home page.

Carolina Gorosito shares her own map to navigate complex systems

Mapping is a tool we don’t talk about enough. Mapping includes visualization, affinity grouping, analysis and synthesis all in one tool. We don’t talk about enough this tool that can literally help you map your way to success. In this episode we talk about different types of mapping approaches that can (literally) help us navigate the system we work within.

About Carolina Gorosito

Carolina is a natural connector and team enabler, great at finding people’s strengths and helping them combine their skills to become hi performers in the organisations and obtain better results every day.

You can connect with her via her personal blog: carolinagorosito.com.

You can link with Carolina Gorosito on LinkedIn and connect with Carolina Gorosito on Twitter.

Top 5 of 2015 BONUS: Bob Marshall on Empathy, NVC and the key skill for Scrum Masters

In this very special episode we talk with Bob Marshall, aka Flowchainsensei on twitter. We discuss some of his outstanding work:
The Marshall model, where Bob Marshall explores the different types of mindsets and their influence on the effectiveness of organizations.

Simply put, the Model explains how the effectiveness of any knowledge-work organisation is a direct function of the kind of mindset shared collectively by all the folks working in the organisation – managers, executives and employees, all. – Bob Marshall

The Anti-matter principle, where Bob explores a single, overarching principle that could guide the actions of those that take Agile seriously.

“Attend to folks’ needs.” — Anti-matter principle

Empathy as a key skill for Scrum Masters

We also discuss one of the key skills for Scrum Masters: Empathy. How to develop it, and what resources are available for those that want to grow their ability to experience empathy.
We mention resources such as videos by Marshall Rosenberg and Carl Rogers.

The Story of the Anti-matter principle

If you are familiar with the anti-matter principle, you have probably wondered where the idea came from. Bob explains the organizational setting that led him to develop what he later called the anti-matter principle. In this section we also discuss the Theory X and Theory Y contrasting theories of management, developed by Douglas McGregor in his famous book: The Human Side of the Enterprise.

A special attention is given in our conversation to the impact of Extrinsic Motivators on the degrading of organizational performance over time. A must listen, if you ask me 🙂

Enjoy this first special episode of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast.

About Bob Marshall

Bob Marshall has been at the forefront of Digital Business for more than twenty years.
Throughout, he has consistently inspired people to improve their effectiveness – along with the effectiveness of their teams and organisations. He spent three years as founder and CEO of Familiar, Europe’s UK’s first one hundred percent Agile software house and digital consultancy start-up, serving major Digital Business clients in Telecoms, Finance, Travel, Media, and eBusiness.
He has for the past fifteen years headed Falling Blossoms – a Digital Business Consultancy advising organisations how best to go about applying Digital to achieving their business objectives.

He is also the co-founder of the Rightshifting movement, and the creator of the Marshall Model (Dreyfus for the organisation), as well as Prod•gnosis, Emotioneering and FlowChain; the enterprise-wide approach to developing software-intensive products and services.

He has also pioneered the application of psychology and psychotherapy techniques to Digital Business and Digital Business Transformation.

You can find Bob Marshall on Twitter, and link with Bob Marshall on Linkedin.
You can read his regular postings on the Flowchainsensei blog.

Top 5 of 2015: Two Transformative Lessons in One Project | Jeff Campbell

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.

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.