causal loop diagram Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Daniel Westermayr: The Group Mentality vs. Creating Real Agile Product Teams

In this episode, Daniel discusses the overuse of the word “team” and the importance of true teams in product development. He highlights the need for preconditions for a team, and notes that sometimes teams don’t even have a shared goal. Daniel also warns against the “it’s done, just needs to be tested” anti-pattern and explains how it can lead to problems with team collaboration. We discuss the use of Causal Loop Diagram to find hypotheses, and mention a talk by Jeff Patton on the client-vendor anti-pattern. Finally, Daniel emphasizes the need to remove the notion that one party needs to own the game in the client-vendor relationship.

Featured Book of the Week: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

In this segment, Daniel Westermayr discusses the importance of data-driven decision making in product development. He references the book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, which highlights the biases and faulty intuitions that can arise in decision making. Daniel emphasizes the need to use data to inform decisions and cites the book “Out of the Crisis” by W. Edwards Deming as an important resource. He also provides a link to a talk by Russell Ackoff about Deming’s approach.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

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 Westermayr

Daniel is a Kanban Trainer with a knack for all things Lean and Theory of Constraints. He wants to help teams achieve and measure their continuous improvements.

You can link with Daniel Westermayr on LinkedIn.

Pratik Dahule: Helping an Agile team that is stuck in the skill silo, which created chaos at the end of the sprint

Often, developers want to work on their stories until the last day of the sprint. However, that leads to many problems which we explore in this episode. We learn the story of a team that was clearly divided in skill silos, which led to a lot of chaos at the end of the sprint. When faced with this tricky situation, Pratik started to help the team understand the anti-pattern they were in, and using tools like cause-and-effect diagrams (aka Ishikawa Diagrams), he helped the team understand and get out of this anti-pattern.

Featured Book of the Week: Slight Edge by Jeff Olson

In Slight Edge by Jeff Olson, Pratik learned an approach that helps him make daily choices and be consistent in applying what he’s learned in his career. This approach has helped him accept that we must do things over and over again, if we aim to succeed in being a great Scrum Master and other areas of life.

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 Pratik Dahule

Pratik is an Agile Project Manager and Agile enthusiast working in the USA. He leads teams and creates a culture of lifelong learning, constant collaboration and continuous improvement. Pratik has 12 years of experience and is passionate about helping teams in their agile transformation. Outside of work, he has a blogging site ClassactLifestyle.com where he shares insights on books and exotic places to travel.

You can link with Pratik Dahule on LinkedIn.

Marc Löffler on Causal Loop Diagram and other systems thinking tools

There are many tools that we can use, just like Causal Loop Diagram, to help us understand the deeper dynamics in our organizations. We discuss several of those tools and also how to use them. Finally, Marc introduces his book Retrospektiven in der Praxis: Veränderungsprozesse in IT-Unternehmen effektiv begleiten and why he wrote it. NOTE: the book will be available in English in the near future.
We also mention a systems thinking tool called Current Reality Tree that you can use to investigate the system you work within.

About Marc Löffler

Marc’s passion is to help teams implementing agile frameworks like Scrum and XP and to transform our world of work. Marc loves to help teams, that are struggling with agile transitions, to overcome dysfunctional behaviour. He loves to generate new insights by approaching common problems from the other side and trying to deliberately make havoc of the process.
You can connect with Marc Löffler on Twitter, and link with Marc Löffler on LinkedIn.
He hosts a Blog in English and another blog in German.

Antti Tevanlinna shares his tools to understand and change the system

Understand and change the system is perhaps one of the major challenges for Scrum Masters all over the world. In this episode Antti shares his favourite tools for that exact task:

Measure Lead Time, and how each action affects that metric. Use that metric to detect problems in how the system works at all times.
Create causal loop diagrams that help you understand what are the many effects, and causes in play within the organization.
Both of the tools mentioned are part of an arsenal of tools that you can find when studying Systems Thinking. To get you started, Antti recommends the book The V Discipline by Peter Senge.

About Antti Tevanlinna

Antti is an agile practitioner, who got started with agile in my own very first Agile project way back in 2004. He’s been through all kinds of roles, from team member, to management, to customer-facing roles.
You can connect with Antti Tevanlinna on twitter, and check Antti Tevanlinna’s blog.