1-2-4-all Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Amruta Beri: Building Trust and Encouraging Participation with Team Agreements

In this episode, Amruta shares their experience as a new scrum master and the challenges she faced in encouraging participation from all team members. She emphasizes the importance of building trust early in the team formation process and highlights the Tuckman model of team formation as a model that helps us understand the stages of group development. Amruta discusses the issue of some team members lacking trust and not feeling comfortable expressing their views and ideas in meetings, leading to the dominance of the loudest person in the room. To address these issues, Amruta suggests using working agreements (see Lisette’s approach to team agreements) and conducting a starting exercise around team agreements. She provides tips such as using silent writing techniques to involve quieter team members and the value of establishing rapport through one-on-one conversations. Additionally, they refer to the “1-2-4-all” method from liberating structures as a useful resource.

The inspiring story of how a failing hospital turned things around with Agile and Lean

Recovering from failure, or difficult moments is a critical skill for Scrum Masters. Not only because of us, but also because the teams, and stakeholders we work with will also face these moments! We need inspiring stories to help them, and ourselves! The Bungsu Story, is an inspiring story by Marcus Hammarberg which shows how a Coach can help organizations recover even from the most disastrous situations! Learn how Marcus helped The Bungsu, a hospital in Indonesia, recover from near-bankruptcy, twice! Using Lean and Agile methods to rebuild an organization and a team! An inspiring story you need to know about! Buy the book on Amazon: The Bungsu Story – How Lean and Kanban Saved a Small Hospital in Indonesia. Twice. and Can Help You Reshape Work in Your Company.

About Amruta Beri

Amruta is an Agile enthusiast, artist, and environmentalist. She loves quiz shows, travel and sports, and is an engineer at heart.

You can link with Amruta Beri on LinkedIn and connect with Amruta Beri on Twitter.

Oguz Ozyurt: Liberating Structures and Wise Crowds, Strategies for Facilitating Effective PI Planning in Agile Teams

In this episode, Oz discusses the challenges of leading change and shares some tips for Scrum Masters to enable effective planning and team participation. Oz describes a scenario where the team was struggling to commit to the goals of the next PI and how it was discovered that the teams were not self-organizing and did not understand the “why” behind their work. The planning process was already defined before the teams came into the PI planning session, which was an anti-pattern of using agile terms but applying waterfall practices.

Oz suggests that effective facilitation is critical for Scrum Masters and advises creating a planning process that involves the team in defining the plan. Oz also recommends observing the meeting first to understand what the team is trying to accomplish and encourages enabling the team to speak up. Oz shares some links to resources that can be useful in planning and facilitating team participation, such as the wise crowds liberating structure. Additionally, Oz suggests using break out rooms to help the team talk about goals/user stories in private and to find problems in the plan using the 1-2-4-all Liberating Structure.

Want to Improve Your Change Management Results? Discover the Lean Change Management Approach Today!

As Scrum Master we work with change continuously! Do you have your own change framework that provides the guidance, and queues you need when working with change? The Lean Change Management framework is a fully defined, lean-startup inspired change framework that can be used as the backbone of any change process! You can buy Lean Change Management the book at Amazon. Also available in French, Spanish, German and Portuguese.

About Oguz Ozyurt

Oz came from a technical background, and has worked across multiple industries, applying agile practices toward the technical and non-technical areas. He is passionate about agile, he has leveraged his passion for delivery value and agile practices by coaching, teaching, mentoring many teams to transform from traditional software development life cycle to Agile principles and practices.

You can link with Oguz Ozyurt on LinkedIn.

Daniel Lutz: Psychological safety for Agile teams, a sign of Scrum Master success

Psychological Safety (see these episodes for details) is one of the key aspects that Daniel looks for in a team, and also a focus of his work as a Scrum Master. He shares with us some of the signs that indicate the presence, or absence of psychological safety, and recommends we have a retrospective question focused on psychological safety.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: A format for quick decision making, and one for new teams

Daniel shares with us why the Agile Retrospectives are the most power tool we have in any transformation or change process we might be involved in. He shares with us 2 different types of retrospective formats. One that is more adequate for teams that are under time pressure and need to get quickly to actions, and improvements, and one for teams that are maybe at a crossroads in their forming process, or are just about to get started. For teams that need to get to quick actions, Daniel recommends the Start, Stop, Continue format or the 1-2-4-all Liberating Structure (see these episodes for more) as these help silent people speak up and get to actions quickly. And for teams that are at a crossroads, or starting their team journey, he recommends the Sailboat Retrospective.

Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches – Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!

About Daniel Lutz

Daniel is an organizational agile coach, working full time at a leading European Energy company, scaling agile with around 30 agile teams. After years in Marketing departments, he realized how much more impact he can have as a Scrum Master by empowering people and building cross-functional teams. He also works part-time as a freelance coach and business consultant helping clients on building high performing teams.

You can link with Daniel Lutz on LinkedIn and connect with Daniel Lutz on Twitter.

Nick Nielsen: How to NOT adopt Agile/SAFe and what to do instead, a real-life story

In this episode, we hear about a company that was going through a long, 3.5 year journey of Agile transformation. When Nick joined, they had just decided to adopt SAFe, as a way to scale their use of Agile methods. Unfortunately, this is not a story of complete success, as we hear about how a traditional consultancy tried to impose SAFe on the organization, with a top-down, linear (aka Waterfall) plan of adoption. Fortunately, however, the Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters in that organization were able to turn the adoption around, and make it succeed! Listen in to learn about how NOT TO adopt Agile/SAFe.

In this episode, we refer to the 1-2-4-all technique from Liberating Structures, and the Lean Change Management approach to change and transformation.

About Nick Nielsen

Nick completed his education at Aarhus University in Denmark and currently works in the Digital Organisation at Grundfos, the worlds biggest pump manufacturer. He views him self as a pragmatic Agile Handyman.

You can link with Nick Nielsen on LinkedIn and connect with Nick Nielsen on Twitter.

Usman Kotwal: Helping Agile teams focus on outcomes

When we start working with a team, we need to understand what is their situation, so that we can decide what to start with. As we start to understand the team’s situation, we might need to focus on the organizational impediments to help the team progress. Some useful questions to ask are: is the team engaging with the stakeholders? Are they able to interact with customers/users? Do they have clear impact metrics for their product? What is the level of engagement in the team?

All of these questions help us, Scrum Masters, understand if the team is ready to focus on, and work on outcomes.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Retrospectives for Scrum Masters starting with a new team

The Team Health Check is one of the formats we talk about as a possible “getting started with a new team” format. Usman also recommends the Sailboat Retrospective for Scrum Masters getting started with new teams.

Once we are “in the rhythm” with a team, Usman recommends some more “free” formats like 1-2-4-all or something from Liberating Structures. Finally, his recommendations is: “help teams make their own choices, as they are much more committed to those”

About Usman Kotwal

Usman is a Scrum Master and Agile Coach in the field of data analytics in life sciences. He considers his learning journey to continue forever when it comes to bringing forward change in the ways we work collaboratively. His mission is to help guide the way to empowered product teams.

You can link with Usman Kotwal on LinkedIn.