culture change Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Bojan Smudja: Conflicts and empathy, helping Project Managers learn the Scrum Master role when adopting Agile

In this episode, Bojan discusses the challenges of change, emphasizing the need to start with personal transformation before guiding others. Scaling frameworks like SAFe add complexity to the change process, requiring numerous adjustments. Bojan shares a story of a top-down change where project managers were suddenly transitioned to be Scrum Masters. He highlights the difficulty of facilitating this shift and helping PMs adopt the new mindset. Especially because, often managers feel insecure and push PMs to exert control, creating a conflict between the change needed and the short term requests to Scrum Masters. Bojan advises bringing up these conflicts and developing empathy for managers. He suggests clarifying the role of an enabler for managers and coaching them in influencing teams positively. Understanding the safety net for managers in case of team failure and assisting with process mapping are additional tips Bojan provides.

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About Bojan Smudja

Bojan is an Agile coach dedicated to assisting individuals, teams, and organizations in reaching their objectives. With his expertise and guidance, he empowers others to embrace Agile methodologies and maximize their potential for success.

You can link with Bojan Smudja on LinkedIn.

Catherine Kraus: How to setup an Agile team working remote and hybrid

Catherine was in the process of helping set up a team with on-shore and off-shore team members, which was being setup as a hybrid work team. As she discussed with the team members, and stakeholders, she quickly understood the team setup would have to be thought through, and followed-up carefully. In this episode, she describes the process she used, and how she involved the stakeholders in the process of setting up that team.

About Catherine Kraus

As a Scrum Master & Team Coach, Catherine Kraus inspires and galvanizes others into action with her playful and pragmatic approach. She works with organizations to build happier, healthier teams with purpose. She has over 15 years experience leading various transformation and change management projects in IT, Finance, HR & Marketing.

You can link with Catherine Kraus on LinkedIn.

Miguel Moro: Leading change in an organization, without mentioning Scrum

Miguel, and a team of coaches were working with an organization in an Agile transformation process. When discussing how to start helping the teams, and the organization in general, they came to the decision that they would start with knowledge sharing, and helping team members understand each other better. Through small, but deliberate activities, the team of coaches helped the teams take ownership of their own practices, and proposed concrete ways in which the teams could improve their way of working. Throughout this process, the team of coaches was able to help the organization, and the teams move towards Agile, without ever pushing “the Agile change”.

About Miguel Moro

As an Agile practitioner, Miguel’s passion is to delight customers using Agile practices and Lean methodologies in development teams, to explore the best alternatives to deliver in an iterative and incremental way, with a continuous value of flow, as fast as possible, and with innovative solutions. He does that by focusing on high performance teams and happiness at work.

You can link with Miguel Moro on LinkedIn and connect with Miguel Moro on Twitter.

Ziryan Salayi: A simple mirroring technique that can skyrocket your change process! An Agile adoption story

Ziryan was working with 2 teams who were trying to use Scrum, but were struggling. As he started to learn more about the team, he noticed that the manager for that team had forced the team to adopt Scrum. Later on, the management team itself decided to adopt Scrum for their own work. As they started the process, one of the managers came to Ziryan explainiung why Scrum did not work for management work. This presented Ziryan with the opportunity to share that that manager’s team was also struggling with Scrum, and that they should move to Kanban instead… That’s when the story took an unexpected turn! Listen to learn how mirroring can transform the change process in your organization!

Abou Ziryan Salayi

Ziryan is a Scrum Master, Professional Scrum Trainer, and organization coach with a passion for getting the most out of people and teams. His aim is to enable employees to be fully empowered and support self-organization in all areas within agile organizations

You can link with Ziryan Salayi on LinkedIn and connect with Ziryan Salayi on Twitter.

Rafał Witaszek: Leading change bottom-up and top-down at the same time!

When Rafał joined this organization, he realized the IT department was being blamed as the bottleneck for the speed of the organization. Together with his colleagues, they sent an email to the CEO explaining what they saw, and how they started to understand that the IT department could be more efficient (they had already done some changes), but their backlogs were empty, and not enough work was being added to the teams’ backlogs.

This started a whole change process, where the CEO took the lead and helped them work with the rest of the organization to improve the situation.

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.

You can link with Rafał Witaszek on LinkedIn.