SPECIAL XMAS BONUS: Katrina Clokie on retaining the purpose for your Agile adoption

For Christmas week 2020, we have a special treat for you. Yves Hanoulle and I interview great Agilists and Scrum Masters that you will probably not hear from in your local Agile conference.

These are people that are really pushing the state of the practice, and we want to bring their forward-looking, and hopeful ideas to you in our Christmas Special Week for 2020.

Katrina is the author of A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps, a book that offers direction and advice relevant to anyone involved in testing in a DevOps environment.

She started her Agile transition after a long stint within a waterfall organization, and she shares some of the most contrasting changes she experienced when moving to an Agile organization. Ultimately, she reminds us, the Agile approach is much closer to the final purpose: solving a problem for a customer out there. And she reminds us that we should try to keep that purpose front and center at all times.

Learning to be persuasive: a key lesson for Scrum Masters and all agile practitioners

When we dive into Katrina’s most important lesson learned in her Agile journey, we discuss the need to bring our best persuasive game with us. We discuss some of the reasons why the ability to persuade others is so important, for example testers will often be outnumbered in an Agile team, and their ideas are less likely to be followed if they can’t “bring others along”. In this segment, we refer to a key book for all wanting to learn more about influencing colleagues and building collaborative relationships: How To Win Friends And Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

Books for Agilists and Agile leaders

The books that Katrina chose to recommend remind us that often we need to express our leadership abilities, and we can do that only if we cultivate those through reading and practice. We talk about Lara Hogan’s Resilient Management, The Manager’s Path: A Guide for Tech Leaders Navigating Growth and Change by Camille Fournier, and Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren et al.

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 experiences: 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 Katrina Clokie

Katrina is an accomplished and experienced IT leader. She is a regular keynote at international conferences where the main themes include leadership, knowledge sharing, and communicating change. In 2017 Katrina published her first book, A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps. Katrina was a finalist for the Inspiring Individual of the Year Award at the 2018 New Zealand Hi-Tech Awards.

You can link with Katrina Clokie on LinkedIn and connect with Katrina Clokie on Twitter.

BONUS: Peter Oliver-Krueger and Michael Dougherty on shifting from “product” to “people” centric practices in your Agile adoption

Download the first chapters of the book Shift: From Product to People at: https://bit.ly/shift_book

If you have already accessed the book, you can log back in at: https://www.oikosofyseries.net/login

Peter and Michael just finished the first half of a book they are writing together on the topic of shifting our attention, and focus from the “product” focused techniques to “people” focused techniques in order to achieve superior performance.

The first four chapters of the book are freely available here. Sign-up to get the first four chapters today.

Listen to the podcast with Peter and Michael in the player below, and check out the show notes with the details of the topics discussed.

The third wave of Agile adoption: People focus

As Peter and Michael describe it, we went through different phases of Agile adoption in the industry. The first phase was a move away from projects and into a “product” thinking approach to software development. The move to focus on people is according to Peter and Michael, the third major shift in our industry. Continue reading BONUS: Peter Oliver-Krueger and Michael Dougherty on shifting from “product” to “people” centric practices in your Agile adoption

BONUS: Influencing management in an Agile change process with Scott Rosenblatt and Jeff Campbell

In this mega-episode on change, we have Jeff Campbell (long time contributor to the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast) and Scott Rosenblatt (engineering lead at Meltwater) share their experience with agile adoption in a large organization.

Jeff is also the author of Actionable Agile tools (available on Amazon, and direct from the author at bit.ly/aatbook).

Why does Management resist Agile change?

This is the first question of the episode and one that Scott and Jeff have worked together on for years. Scott shares how his past as a developer has helped him understand the role of management in an Agile organization.

We also talk about how to understand the reaction of managers when employees come to them with gripes, or ideas for changes to implement. We tend to think that when managers don’t do what we ask, they haven’t listened to us. Is that really so?

Anger management, not change management

Continue reading BONUS: Influencing management in an Agile change process with Scott Rosenblatt and Jeff Campbell

How Scrum Masters can deal with resistance when implementing Agile Q&A with Jeff Campbell

Jeff is the author of Actionable Agile tools (available on Amazon, and direct from the author at bit.ly/aatbook). He joins us on this series of Q&A shows to answer questions you’ve submitted. You can submit your questions via our survey (short, about 2 min to fill-in) or by tweeting us @scrumpodcast with #agilejeff.

In this episode, we talk about getting management to be involved and buy-in to the agile transformation.

How to deal with resistance when implementing Agile

Continue reading How Scrum Masters can deal with resistance when implementing Agile Q&A with Jeff Campbell

Emilia Breton-Lake on how executive support can help save a failing Scrum adoption

Sometimes we face situations where it feels like the Scrum adoption is failing. Emilia tells us one such story where the stakeholders were not cooperating, where there was confusion and fear of failure. How she, with the help from an executive, reacted is a great way to get back to the basics and help the team overcome the challenges in the transformation.
In this episode we also talk about #NoNumbers, an approach that Emilia uses to help her teams focus on the value to be delivered. The discussion also touches on #NoEstimates, about which you can read more at NoEstimatesBook.com

About Emilia Breton-Lake

Emilia is a natural-born Agile thinker who managed to swim out of the PMI waterfall almost a decade ago. As the head of the PMO at a major non profit she is constantly looking for new ways to build better software and make the world a better place.
She has also been working on 2 major innovations, On going retrospectives, and #NoNumbers where they have eliminated sizing of stories. They still groom and plan, but don’t assign sizes to stories.
Emilia has worked hard to introduce Scrum and Agile to a non-profit that is very resistant to change.
You can link up with Emilia Breton-Lake on LinkedIn. Or follow Emilia Breton-Lake’s articles at the Scrum Alliance website.

Emilia Breton-Lake on how to manage change towards Agile

In an organization with a long history it is hard to introduce new ideas that are not in line with that history. Emilia went through that and learned how to help teams that have been working in a certain way to explore, and ultimately adopt a new way of working: Agile Software Development. In this episode we refer to The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team by Lencioni, a book that helped Emilia solve the main blockers to change in the teams she worked with.

About Emilia Breton-Lake

Sven Schnee explains how important it is to have c-level support when adopting Agile

Adopting Agile is not an easy task in any organization that is larger than 1 team. In larger organizations the task is even harder. Sven explains his experience with a larger consulting organization, and how even the C-Level support was not enough to complete the Agile adoption.

About Sven Schnee

Sven started his journey as a developer around the year 2000. He experienced many projects and felt the pain of how traditional approaches to software development failed.
A few years ago he discovered Agile and Lean, and he is not going back.
He is an Agile Coach and Founder of Oikosofy. He wants to bring agile ways of working to a variety of customers from small companies to big enterprises. One of his key strengths is helping teams evolve on their path to self-organization.
You can connect with Sven Schnee on twitter, and link with Sven Schnee on LinkedIn.
You can read Sven Schnee’s blog The Product Owner Toolbox.

Alexandre Cuva on the importance of choosing the right project to start your agile adoption

Not all projects are suited to be the first ones to adopt agile. In organizations there are people who are ready to take the leap, and there are people who would rather work the old way and will take any opportunity to do so. The first agile projects should be carefully selected to avoid killing all hope of agile ever being adopted. Alexandre shares with us a story of a project that explains this problem in detail.

About Alexandre Cuva

Former International Agile Coach, now CEO in charge of SmartDev an outsourcing company in Vietnam. In SmartDev Alexandre applies XP Programming practices within Agile/Lean Management. He has been worked with pragmatic, agile, lean, big, organic and team oriented organizations. Based upon his experiences, he understands that agile is a big experiment and in some peoples mind still is an unproven hypothesis.
He co-founded diverse agile communities in Switzerland like ScrumBeer, Stoos Satellite and now he is the co-founder of the Agile Community in Da Nang.
You can link up with Alexandre Cuva on LinkedIn, and find Alexandre Cuva on Twitter.

Jon Eversett explains how the way you define work, defines team culture

Team culture is affected by the organizational culture, as well as individual culture. It is therefore important for us, as Scrum Masters to realize that the way we allow work to be defined will directly affect the culture of the team. Jon explains how the deep gap between skills makes agile adoption harder, and affects how the team tackles the work they need to deliver.

About Jon Eversett

Former Business Analyst, Product Owner wannabe, currently a Scrum Master. Jon works with teams with different maturity levels and some relatively new Product Owners. You can find Jon Eversett on LinkedIn, or interact with Jon Eversett on Twitter. You can read Jon Eversett’s blog to find out more about his ideas on the role of the scrum master and all things agile.

Jon Eversett talks the long term cultural effects of a Waterfall to Agile transition

A Waterfall to Agile transition is never easy, but there are many problems that appear simple at first, until we see their impact on the organization. One such problem is the existence of skill silos in the Waterfall (matrix organization) world. These silos are often reinforced by organizational structures that are hard or impossible to break, even after adopting agile. Their impact on the teams is something that Scrum Masters need to be aware of.