When Rafał joined this organization, he had a conversation with some of the Agile Coaches and Product Owners. In that process, he presented some ideas, and they came to an agreement of how to introduce Agile. However, that was not enough. Quickly, Rafał discovered that some critical stakeholders had not been listened to, which caused adoption problems. Rafał learned a key lesson in creating alignment between stakeholders before starting an engagement.
About Rafał Witaszek
Rafał believes the best things are done together. As a Scrum Master, his focus is on enabling communication within an organization. As he is also a passionate sailor, he’s learned that we need to adjust our sails to make the best use of the wind. Focus on what we can affect, and leave other things out.
Thomas was working with a scale up. The organization had grown quickly and the management felt that it was slowing down too much, so they wanted to work on their processes, and get the teams to collaborate better, and speed up the rate of delivery. After 6 months of trying, Thomas left. He felt that he had not had an impact on the organization, and needed to move on. Listen in to learn about what happened, and why that organization was not ready to improve. There’s a key lesson for all Scrum Masters starting to work with a new team or organization.
About Thomas van Zuijlen
Thomas is an independent Scrum Master and workshop facilitator from the Netherlands. He believes self-organization, empiricism and facilitation will save the world (of work). A former developer and occasional quiz master with 15 years of experience, Thomas operates in the Netherlands and Lithuania. His weekly newsletter on practical agility can be found at TheBacklog.cc.
Sometimes, when we work with a team, we discover that the changes needed to help the team are needed outside the team. In this episode, we talk about such a situation where Erik was asked to explain Agile to a management team. He took the approach that he would use only what was needed or asked for by management. Listen in to learn about this example of how to introduce a complex topic (Agile) to management without overwhelming them.
Erik is what you get when you take a trained scientist, who mastered Agile as a programmer and is now a Scrum Master. A pragmatic, analytic, systemic and critical personality who is completely focused on understanding the problem. Because once you understand the problem, the solution is easy.
Erik was working with a team that had been started under deadline pressure to build a critical application. But that was not all! That team had gone through all kinds of transformations and failed agile adoption processes. They were overworked, and had little trust among themselves and in management. Erik himself, was thought to be a spy for management. This was not the ideal scenario for a Scrum Master/Agile Coach to be able to help the team. Listen in to learn the key lessons Erik took from this difficult assignment.
Featured Book of the Week: Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them, by Hammel and Zanini
How can Angela (the Agile Coach) quickly build healthy relationships with the teams she’s supposed to help? What were the steps she followed to help the Breeze App team fight off the competition? Find out how Angela helped Naomi and the team go from “behind” to being ahead of Intuition Bank, by focusing on the people!Download the first 4 chapters of the BOOK for FREE while it is in Beta!
About Erik de Bos
Erik is what you get when you take a trained scientist, who mastered Agile as a programmer and is now a Scrum Master. A pragmatic, analytic, systemic and critical personality who is completely focused on understanding the problem. Because once you understand the problem, the solution is easy.
Wilson fell into the Scrum Master role by accident. And even if this is not an unusual story for a Scrum Master, this journey brings with it an identity crisis that Wilson describes for us. Wilson was both a Scrum Master and a tech lead, a technical Product Owner and a developer. These many hats seemed to work well together, until the release time came. Listen in to learn about how these many roles can interfere with each other and cause problems for the Scrum Master and the team.
About Wilson Govindji
Wilson is a pragmatic Scrum Master, he has over 15 years in Software development and has worked in different roles, from Support Analyst, Developer to tech lead. Wilson is from Portugal, with Indian origins and currently living and working in the UK with his wife and two daughters.
Jeremia and the team started to work with the c-level team to define a Vision and Mission that would clarify the purpose at his company. With that work, they were able to define a North Star, and start using OKR’s (Objectives and Key Results). He describes for us the process, and the lessons learned introducing OKR’s to focus the company on their purpose.
About Jeremia Riedel
Jeremia is an Agile Coach that describes himself as an Explorer, Enthusiast and Challenger.
Gurucharan (aka Guru) was working in a large organization, in a waterfall process. The people at that organization were not aware of Agile, and Guru took the initiative to discuss Scrum with the leaders of the organization. The start of the journey was rough, with people unsure, and even scared of the change. This gave Guru an opportunity to bring change in a slow, but effective way. Listen in to learn about the story of change, and how to deal with Agile adoption anxiety in waterfall organizations.
About Gurucharan Padki
Gurucharan Padki comes with 18 years of experience in the IT industry, of which he has spent more than a decade in the Agile world delivering products, programs and projects with focus on engineering and quality . He has played the role of product owner, scrum master and agile coach in multiple organizations across India and the world driving transformations.
Bent was working in a company that was facing serious economic challenges. This was not a case of Agile adoption, this was a case of changing to survive! Because of the economic challenges, the CEO decided to layoff some staff, and ask for Agile adoption immediately in all the teams. Bent helped the new teams start to work in a hardware business, with an Agile mindset and approach. This led to amazing improvements, and the company survived. Listen in to learn what was the approach, and steps the company took to the adoption of Agile in this crisis.
About Bent Myllerup
Bent Myllerup is a management consultant, organisational change agent and agile transformation coach with 20 years of personal experience in management and leadership. He holds a Master in Management Development (MMD) from Copenhagen Business School and a Bachelor in Science of Electronic Engineering. He was the first European Certified Scrum Coach and he is also a Certified Scrum Trainer.
While working with an organization in their Agile transition, Julie and colleagues recommended that they start with Kanban. Kanban would bring minimal disruption to the teams, and enable them to learn what Agile would mean in their context. However, there was a lot more to do before the teams were able to run a Kanban flow and start learning what Agile meant for them. In this episode, we explore not only how to introduce Kanban, but also what to consider when bringing Agile to a group of teams that are new to Agile.
About Julie Wyman
Julie Wyman has been working with Agile teams for over a decade and is continuously learning with and from them. She’s based just outside Washington, D.C., but has had the pleasure of supporting teams distributed across the globe and even experienced her own Agile takeaways all the way in Antarctica.
“This is what it says in the Scrum Guide” is probably the most importantly overused phrase among the Scrum Master community. In this episode, we explore how using phrases like this can actually make our work harder, and the message harder to understand and accept. An anti-pattern we must avoid at all costs.
About Jeroen de Jong
Jeroen started his career as a self-employed jack-of-all-trades in IT and is passionate about Agile. He is determined to keep learning and to share his knowledge with others.
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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 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
Enter e-mail to download a checklist to help your PO manage their time
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.
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