agile retrospectives – Page 2 – Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Raj Solanki: What is Scrum team success, and how it relates to the Scrum Master’s success

Raj’s definition of success starts with the team. He defines what success looks like for the team, and how he focuses on helping teams reach that success. In this episode, we also discuss how team-velocity is a factor of many variables, not only the work that team does.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The standard “what went well” format with a twist

Raj starts by describing the “What went well/not so well” format and adds a twist, a set of practices to help the team get started with the discussion and ends with an appreciation exercise. Listen in, to learn how Raj improves on the standard retrospective format.

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About Raj Solanki

Raj is a Manager, Technical program manager as well as Scrum master. He focuses on helping the teams learn about Agile, overcoming obstacles, foster a collaborative community, and more.

He constantly reads about agile and seeks out coaches when he feels stuck. He seeks constant feedback and helps teams be transparent and build trust.

You can link with Raj Solanki on LinkedIn and connect with Raj Solanki on Twitter.

Ademar Perez: How to unlock your team’s potential

Ademar’s perspective on success brings the idea of unlocking the potential of the team. We discuss what might be the things that need to be in place before we can help the team reach their potential. Finally, we discuss what Scrum Masters can do to help teams along their journey.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Sailboat Retrospective

In this episode, we revisit the Sailboat Retrospective, a format that is a favorite for many Scrum Masters. We explore how we can use that format to help set up a new project or analyze something that happened recently.

About Ademar Perez

Ademar Perez is cultivating high-performing product teams as an Agile Coach at Xero. He fell in love with the Agile way of working after seeing 5 to 6 scrum teams collaborate to develop a customer-facing application. Since then, Ademar has helped over 30+ teams become self-organizing and high-performing.

You can link with Ademar Perez on LinkedIn.

Mustafa Ergun: The Scrum Master’s success from 3 different perspectives

Mustafa looks at three different aspects of the Scrum Master work to define what success looks like. From these aspects he suggests we ask specific questions to evaluate the team’s situation and progress over time. Listen in to learn about these 3 different aspects, and how to incorporate these into your regular reflection as a Scrum Master.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Breaking Bad Retrospective

Mustafa focuses on formats that help the team be fully engaged in sharing insights, questions, and learnings. He suggests we focus on helping teams share via games, and suggests a TV series based retrospective: “The Breaking Bad Agile Retrospective”. Listen in to learn how Mustafa introduces and facilitates retrospectives based on TV series.

About Mustafa Ergun

Mustafa is an experienced Scrum Master. He has a passion for helping individuals and organizations see their potential and make things better. His current focus is on improving teams’ performance through insightful facilitation. Mustafa is always eager to learn, share his experience with others and enjoys seeing people succeed.

You can link with Mustafa Ergun on LinkedIn and connect with Mustafa Ergun on Twitter.

Pascal Clarkson: Helping teams own, and measure their own success

In Pascal’s perspective, Scrum Masters can be successful if they help the teams be comfortable with change, and feel accountable for their delivery. In order to get there, we must help teams know what success means (they need to be part of defining it) and measure it (help them do it!) In this segment, we also refer to the “what could go wrong” retrospective exercise.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Questions that generate conversations

In this segment, we talk about a simple concept: “helping teams have a conversation”. Pascal shares some of the tips and questions he uses when helping teams get started with the improvement conversation we hope to trigger in every retrospective.

Pascal also shares a critical tip on how to handle the situation when the team does not go along with your plan in the retrospective. Don’t miss it!

About Pascal Clarkson

Pascal has a bachelor degree in computer science. After years of working as a software engineer and having 8+ years of practical experience with the Scrum Framework, he has shifted his attention towards group facilitation. He uses Systemic Modelling and other methods to support groups in their discovery of how they can be the best version of themselves.

You can link with Pascal Clarkson on LinkedIn and connect with Pascal Clarkson on Twitter.

You can also follow Pascal’s writings on Artocraft.nl.

Tomo Lennox: Customer-delight as the success KPI, and how to measure end-to-end success

Tomo suggests we consider “customer-delight”, the measure of success. However, that is hard to measure. In this episode, we explore how we might be able to measure “customer delight” and mention some “end-to-end” tools we can use to help the teams be aware that their work only produces value after team-external activities are completed.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Best Story this sprint

Tomo starts by recommending we always have more than one format ready to go when preparing a retrospective. However, we explore “The Best Story” retrospective format that helps team members talk about their work. In this segment, we also refer to the “mood-graph” (aka Journey Lines for the Sprint).

About Tomo Lennox

Tomo has 20 years of experience in project management, both waterfall, and Agile. A few years ago he was at David Anderson’s first Kanban Conference and has been a fanatic ever since, even though he has lost several jobs as a result of it. Tomo became then an advocate for projection over guessing, and reactive planning.

You can link with Tomo Lennox on LinkedIn and connect with Tomo Lennox on Twitter.

Dov Tsal: Defining success as a dynamic benchmark, that follows the team’s evolution

When it comes to defining success for a Scrum Master, Dov suggests we think of it as the success of a parent. Where the perspective, and the actions we take change constantly because the team (like a child) is also continuously evolving and changing. In this segment, we share many tips on how to review and assess our performance as Scrum Masters.

Featured Retrospective Format of the Week: The Silent Retrospective

Dov introduces the “silent retrospective”, an approach he takes to help the team reflect and share their insights in a way that allows all to share their views and thoughts. We also talk about how to prepare and facilitate the “silent retrospective”.

About Dov Tsal

Dov Tsal is a versatile agile coach, scrum-master, change-agent, and enabler, helping companies teams, and individuals to make an impact. Dov is also the creator of the #MeetingSpicer, a coaching tool to hack meeting culture. He is also the co-creator of The Agile Tao Podcast about understanding agility through the Taoist prism.

You can link with Dov Tsal on LinkedIn.

Kyla MacDonald: Measuring the impact of a team of Agile Coaches

Kyla was working with a team of coaches, and they defined their vision as “We exist to support teams to deliver more value, more frequently with more ease and more delight”. This helped them accept that they were always there to push the teams forward and then again move forward. To ensure they kept themselves accountable, they needed to keep score for themselves as a team of coaches. Listen in to learn how they measured themselves and the impact they had on the teams they worked with.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The 3 V’s

Kyla shares the 3V’s format, where the team discusses Value, Velocity and Vitality! This format helped her introduce the concept of fulfillment and how the work we do has many dimensions.

About Kyla MacDonald

Kyla imagines a world where the talk at Friday drinks is all about the great things we achieved in the week, what we learned, and what we can try next. As she puts it, people who find satisfaction, meaning, fun, and growth in their work, will naturally be in a better position to find the same in their home life. The thing that excites Kyla the most about agile is how concepts and principles apply to any and every area of your life. Which for her is running, paragliding and life on her hobby farm (they call it a lifestyle block in NZ).

You can link with Kyla MacDonald on LinkedIn and connect with Kyla MacDonald on Twitter.

Philip Rogers: How to measure Scrum team happiness and team satisfaction

When we try to assess our impact and success as Scrum Masters, we can look at team happiness and satisfaction. Measuring those will help us assess our impact, and there are simple ways to do it. In this episode, we talk about the Niko Niko Calendar (the Niko Niko Calendar has been previously discussed also in other episodes) and the ideas from the Spotify Health Check approach.

Featured Retrospective From for the Week: Pick Discussion Questions

Philip shares with us a format that can be set up relatively quickly and focuses on helping the team get started with a productive discussion on some of the most pressing topics for them. Philip shares some of the questions he uses when starting this kind of retrospective, and suggests we use a Futurespective to help teams gain fresh insights on their approach to work.

About Philip Rogers

Phil is a father of four children and a volunteer paleontologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. He is also an “agile whisperer” (coach) who has worked with scores of teams in the spirit of continuous learning, continuous improvement, and simply finding creative ways to collaborate and have fun in the workplace.

You can link with Philip Rogers on LinkedIn and connect with Philip Rogers on Twitter.

Evelien Acun-Roos: Happiness and Business Value, the focus for a success conversation

Evelien focuses on the Happiness metric as well as business value to help her understand where the team and Product Owner are in their journey to success. By having the business value discussed during the retrospective and during Sprint planning she tries to focus the team on having an impact, and helps clarify what the PO wants to deliver.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The 4 L’s retrospective

Evelien shares the 4 L’s retrospective and how she changes the “Loved” square to focus on appreciating and thanking someone in the team for something they did. This helps us teach team members to compliment each other and creates positive energy in the retrospective.

About Evelien Acun-Roos

Evelien Acun-Roos is an experienced Agile Trainer at Xebia Academy, Professional Scrum Trainer at Scrum.org and a Certified Trainer for “Training from the Back of the Room”.

You can link with Evelien Acun-Roos on LinkedIn and connect with Evelien Acun-Roos on Twitter.

Wouter Gheysen: Scrum team success from many different perspectives

Success can have many different perspectives. We start this episode, discussing how those perspectives affect how we define and measure success with the teams we work with. And Wouter asks an important question, we should all think about: “What do you do that brings success to the team you work with?”

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Sailboat Retrospective

Even if he uses many different retrospective formats, the first retrospective format that Wouter uses with a new team is The Sailboat Retrospective. For many teams, this format is something new, that helps them feel engaged with the retrospective. The use of metaphor and drawing can also engage the team, and help the team discuss difficult problems that would otherwise be difficult to approach.

About Wouter Gheysen

Wouter is a creative generalist with a broad area of interest beyond agility, a focus on people, and working with teams. He is a coach, guide and life long learner with a keen interest in facilitation, design thinking and systemic coaching.

You can link with Wouter Gheysen on LinkedIn and connect with Wouter Gheysen on Twitter.