Rafał Witaszek: Helping a Scrum team that was drowning in “invisible” work

Rafał joined a large organization that was moving to Agile. Even if the team Rafał joined claimed to have been practicing Scrum, when he observed the team, it looked like they were organized around components, and the team also had a large amount of “hidden” work. There was not enough transparency on what was going on. This is when Rafał understood that a lot of work was needed to help this team understand the situation, and act on it.

In this segment, we refer to the episode with Jeff Campbell and János Csorvási, where they also describe a similar situation, and how they got out of it. We also refer to the idea of using the Iceberg visualization to help teams understand that there’s a lot of “invisible” work that needs to be surfaced for the team to be able to take action.

Featured Book of the Week: Atomic Habits by James Clear

In Atomic Habits An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear, Rafał found many ideas, and practices that helped him change how he operates both in his professional and personal life. In this segment, we also refer to the book The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter, Updated and Expanded by Watknis.

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 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.

BONUS: A DevOps transformation from the point of view of the development teams with János Csorvási and Jeff Campbell

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

Jeff and János share the story of a DevOps transformation at Meltwater, where they both work. We start by discussing the big differences between an Agile and a DevOps transformation.

The big difference between Agile and DevOps transformations

As they describe it, a DevOps transformation is more about the technical aspects of software development. While in an Agile transformation we may look at processes, and team composition, the DevOps transformation that Jeff and János describe was focused on removing the hand-overs, and building the technical infrastructure necessary for that to happen. Their goal was to create, and support cross functional teams that would be able to implement, deploy and operate their software in production.

Change management in a DevOps transformation

Continue reading BONUS: A DevOps transformation from the point of view of the development teams with János Csorvási and Jeff Campbell

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

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