Bevan Williams Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Bevan Williams: From Absent to Awesome! A Product Owner transformation story

The Great Product Owner: From Absent to Awesome! A PO transformation story

This Product Owner was absent at first. A common anti-pattern for PO’s. The PO was spread over 5 teams. That’s when Bevan got together with the PO and asked: “how do we solve this together?” Listen in to learn how this PO went from being absent, to being a great PO with the help of Bevan!

In this segment, we refer to intent based leadership by David Marquet, who’s been a guest on the podcast.

The Bad Product Owner: Solving the absent PO anti-pattern.

This Product Owner was often absent, a common anti-pattern in larger organizations. To make it even harder, this PO was only assigned to the role part-time. The team was sorely missing answers that would help them progress. What can we do in these situations? Bevan shares some of the solutions he’s tried to solve the Absent PO anti-pattern.

Are you having trouble helping the team work 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 Bevan Williams

Bevan is an Agile Coach & Trainer at Think Agile. His career has been driven by his passion of creating inclusive environments where people can be at their best.

You can link with Bevan Williams on LinkedIn and connect with Bevan Williams on Twitter.

Bevan Williams: Questions to help you reflect on your success as a Scrum Master

There are a few questions that we can ask ourselves to assess the impact of our work as Scrum Masters. Bevan shares the questions he asks himself, including: does the team own their work board? Do they share and help other teams use their progress information? Do they define and develop their own way of working?

These questions are reflection queues that help us define where to focus our efforts.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Timeline Retrospective

Bevan likes to mix different retrospective formats, but one of his favorite formats is the Timeline Retrospective, because it takes into account the whole timeline of the Sprint, and gives the team the needed time and input they need to reflect on what happened over the whole Sprint.

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 Bevan Williams

Bevan is an Agile Coach & Trainer at Think Agile. His career has been driven by his passion of creating inclusive environments where people can be at their best.

You can link with Bevan Williams on LinkedIn and connect with Bevan Williams on Twitter.

Bevan Williams: Helping an organization increase their speed with a change process you can use

When Bevan started working with this organization, he heard the CEO say that the development was too slow. So the change started with a clear mandate, which Bevan and the team took on and started working with. They used tools like Value Stream Mapping, and went through a process to involve the teams in defining and ultimately overcoming their slowness. In this episode, we refer to Clean Language and Systemic Modelling by Caitlin Walker.

About Bevan Williams

Bevan is an Agile Coach & Trainer at Think Agile. His career has been driven by his passion of creating inclusive environments where people can be at their best.

You can link with Bevan Williams on LinkedIn and connect with Bevan Williams on Twitter.

Bevan Williams: Helping a team grow and step out of their comfort zone

Bevan was working with a product tenma that ghad started their move towards Agile. But he started to notice an anti-pattern in their behavior. They acted as if Agile meant freedom to do “anything we want”. The team was focusing on their own comfort, and happiness, but did not seem to be worried about the product they were trying to develop. Listen in to learn how Bevan helped this team step out of their comfort-only anti-pattern and grow.

Featured Book of the Week: How Emotions Are Made, by Lisa Barrett

In How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Barrett, Bevan learned how important it is to understand the people we work with, and starting with ourselves. This book helped Bevan understand deeply the role of feedback and empathy on the Scrum Master role.

In this segment, we also refer to Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Adkins, which provides “a good overview of what is expected from the Scrum Master role”, as Bevan puts it.

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 Bevan Williams

Bevan is an Agile Coach & Trainer at Think Agile. His career has been driven by his passion of creating inclusive environments where people can be at their best.

You can link with Bevan Williams on LinkedIn and connect with Bevan Williams on Twitter.

Bevan Williams: How to cope with the dual manager and Scrum Master role!

Bevan was in a dual role: a manager and a Scrum Master. He had been always striving to improve the organizations he world at, and now was his chance to do just that. He had the power, and he was in an influential position. But how did it go? Listen in to learn how to cope with the dual manager and Scrum Master role!

About Bevan Williams

Bevan is an Agile Coach & Trainer at Think Agile. His career has been driven by his passion of creating inclusive environments where people can be at their best.

You can link with Bevan Williams on LinkedIn and connect with Bevan Williams on Twitter.