distributed team Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Paula Dunne: Adapting Scrum to the new world remote work, an Agile learning journey

When Paula joined this team, she noticed the team was not sharing the good (or bad) things that were happening. We discuss how teams in the new “remote world” become passive and do not follow-up on their agreements, and let things drop because the other person is not there, present by their side. In this segment, we talk about how important it is to work on the relationships between team members as well as between team members and stakeholders, especially in this remote work world!

Featured Book of the Week: The Art of Being Brilliant by Cope and Whittaker

In The Art of Being Brilliant: Transform Your Life by Doing What Works For You by Cope and Whittaker, is a book that helped Paula orient her career and learn about positive psychology which helped her feel and help others feel more confident in themselves. In this segment, we refer to Woody Zuill, a previous guest on the podcast and his mantra “turn up the good”.

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 Paula Dunne

Paula is an Agile Coach with experience in large organization Agile adoption as well as in coaching product owners.

You can link with Paula Dunne on LinkedIn.

Franziska Moenster: The missing ingredient for a Scrum team to be able to work remote!

This is the story of a team that, even if they had a long history of working together, was faced with a new reality: remote work! During the pandemic years, many teams had to change from co-located work to remote work, and that change had big impacts on their work, and relationships. We discuss the lessons learned by Franny about teams that made that transition, and what is usually missing that leads to problems!

Featured Book of the Week: The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team by Lencioni

In The Five Dysfunctions Of A Team by Lencioni, Franny found a reminder that conflict is a necessary, and – if managed correctly – productive part of the team’s development. We discuss how everyone in the team has a different relationship with conflict, and why Scrum Masters should take that into account when observing, and intervening in team conflicts.

In this segment, we also talk about the book New Work needs Inner Work: Ein Handbuch für Unternehmen auf dem Weg zur Selbstorganisation, a German language book that helped Franny understand that the inner structures we have as Scrum Masters also need some work for us to be able to adapt ourselves to Agile.

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 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.

Juan Rodriguez: Helping to bridge the foreign language barrier in a distributed Scrum team

Juan was working with a marketing team. This team was divided between China and the USA, and on top of that, the team did not share a language. While the USA part of the team used English to communicate, the China based portion of the team would not feel comfortable with English in all situations, and preferred to use Chinese. This meant that the manager, who spoke Chinese, quickly became the bottleneck in communication, as she needed to translate all the conversations in the team. Juan had a problem to solve: how to help a team communicate regularly (in the daily meeting) without the manager having to be in the middle? Listen in to learn what Juan tried, and what eventually unblocked the communication between the team members!

Featured Book of the Week: Fish! A proven way to boost morale and improve results by Stephen Lundin

Fish! By Stephen Lundin, is a book that uses the story of the fish market in Seattle, to show how teams can become happier and more productive. In this section, we also refer to The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey, a book that helped Juan introduce the role of the Scrum Master using a metaphor that even non-technical people can understand.

About Juan Rodriguez

Juan started his career as a Drafter. He then transitioned to Engineering IT support, eventually landing in software development. His first introduction to agile-like practices was in 2014, which did not go that well. A few years later, Juan was introduced to Scrum, where he now enjoys being a Scrum Master.

You can link with Juan Rodriguez on LinkedIn.

BONUS: Highlights of the Scrum Master Summit 2022 with the track hosts Kjell de Ruiter and Ari-Pekka Skarp

In this podcast we explore some of the main highlights from the Scrum Master Summit 2022 with track hosts Kjell de Ruiter and Ari-Pekka Skarp.

We also name the remaining track hosts and the other tracks that you can check out at https://scrummastersummit.org/. Those include:

Dana Pylayeva, will host the coaching track at the summit, where we explore some of the hard lessons we need to be aware of when adopting coaching in our practice
Ayodeji Ishola, hosts a track on the state of Agile in the African continent, and will be showcasing talks that address the cultural specific aspects of Agile in Africa
Mariana Trigo, will have 6 sessions on career advice for Scrum Masters and hiring advice for those hiring Scrum Masters. She’ll have a special focus on how you can get into the Scrum Master role even if you don’t have a tech background.
Yves Hanoulle, the co-author of the Tips from The trenches audiobook, hosts a track on Hybrid work, very topical now that we have our teams remote most of the time
Martin von Weissenberg, will share patterns of scaled agile. Not the frameworks we always hear about, but rather practical, down-to-earth advice for specific needs when we scale agile

Accepting and learning to deal with Social Complexity in Agile adoption

Continue reading BONUS: Highlights of the Scrum Master Summit 2022 with the track hosts Kjell de Ruiter and Ari-Pekka Skarp

How to coordinate #remote teams (and improve collaboration in #covid19 times)

We started a survey to collect your biggest challenges when it comes to transitioning to remote work. You can submit your answers here.

From that survey, the early results are conclusive, one of the biggest challenges you are facing right now is to help your teams coordinate their work, and collaborate effectively after transitioning to #Remote work.

So, to help you adapt to this new #Remote work reality, we collected the following strategies and tools for helping #Remote teams coordinate and collaborate effectively.

Scrum is #Remote ready, especially this one tool…

Read on for the full list…

Continue reading How to coordinate #remote teams (and improve collaboration in #covid19 times)