digital transformation Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Aria Omidvar: Lessons from a Top-Down Agile Transformation Journey

Aria recounts his involvement in a top-down, multi-layered agile transformation in a company with five teams. Despite management’s drive for change, the transformation faced resistance from the teams on the ground. After six months, it became evident that morale and engagement had plummeted, and the desired outcomes were not met. Aria attempted widespread training, but this approach backfired. He learned the importance of focusing on one major change at a time, prioritizing people, and fine-tuning direction for successful transformations. The episode serves as a valuable guide for navigating complex organizational shifts.

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About Aria Omidvar

Aria has 4+ years of experience serving as Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Agile Coach (CSM, A-CSM, CSPO) from single teams to multiple teams and the whole software organization. He’s a Software Engineer turned Software Developer turned Peopleware Developer and Agilist.

You can link with Aria Omidvar on LinkedIn and connect with Aria Omidvar on Twitter.

Pedro Silva: Understanding what needs to be different when adopting Agile, it’s not a “simple” process change!

When teams, and organizations start on their Agile adoption journey, Pedro observes, they often lack the ability to grasp what needs to be different in the team and the organization beyond the “simple” process change. In this episode, we talk about a team that started their Agile journey on the wrong foot, and discuss what Scrum Masters can do to help teams grasp what “else” need to be different.

About Pedro Silva

Pedro considers himself a Scrum Master supporting software development teams while keeping his focus on their growth towards the efficient delivery of value, while having a blast.

You can link with Pedro Silva on LinkedIn.

Franziska Moenster: Leading change in a traditional, non-tech company. From traditional to Agile!

Franny was working in a very traditional, and old company. She was hired to work with a small team in their Digital Transformation. If being an Agile Coach in a tech organization is hard enough, what Franny was about to face was orders of magnitude harder! However, thanks to the fact that the organization was not ready for Agile, Franny learned the importance of going through the change process with patience and persistence! Listen in to learn the process they followed in that organization, that helped them transform!

About Franziska Moenster

Franny (short for Franziska) loves seeing the power of building strong performing teams that build products in a customer centric way. She’s been working as a Scrum Master/Agile Coach for over 5 years. Profiting from her hands-on experience on scaling agile across teams and her joy of trying out new things she is always inspecting and adapting on an organizational level as well! On a personal note, she has recently moved to Tenerife to follow her passion of freediving.

You can link with Franziska Moenster on LinkedIn.

BONUS: Plan to pivot, a book and many lessons for Agile non-IT organizations with Gerry Starsia

Gerry came across Agile while working as a project manager in a construction company. Motivated by his drive to provide a great service to his customers, he started to study how to make his own business more adaptable and Agile.

Working with new technologies, he started to improve certain aspects of his business. However, he quickly realized that the size of the projects and demands of the customers were making what once was an “easy” to manage service, into a complicated service with many moving parts.

The use of computers helped manage that complexity, but also brought even more complexity. This was when Gerry discovered Agile and what it could bring to a non-IT business.

Agile applied to non-IT industries

Continue reading BONUS: Plan to pivot, a book and many lessons for Agile non-IT organizations with Gerry Starsia

BONUS: How to setup Agile and DevOps teams, Team Topologies interview with Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais

Setting up teams to work collaboratively is one of the challenges that organizations go through when adopting Agile. The functional team setup (all DBAs, all testers, all windows devs together, etc.) is not acceptable for teams that want to quickly develop and deliver products and services to the market. But neither is it possible to have all possible skills (sometimes 10’s of skills) in one team because organizations simply don’t have that many people with certain skills.

In this episode, we talk about the possible team topologies, and how each of those affects our ability to deliver in different organizations.

How we set up teams directly affects the quality of the software teams deliver

Continue reading BONUS: How to setup Agile and DevOps teams, Team Topologies interview with Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais