flow – Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Daniel Hommel on the parttime Scrum Master pattern

Many Scrum Masters start their career as parttime Scrum Masters. A few books read, a course or two attended, and here we go. What could go wrong? In this episode Daniel explains his first project, and the mistakes that come from lack of experience and parttime assignment.
We also discuss the book Product Development Flow by D. Reinertsen in the context of creating the necessary conditions for learning.

About Daniel Hommel

Daniel is a ScrumMaster and Agile Coach with a strong background in Software Engineering. His first touch point with Agility was starting to use the Extreme Programming practices in 2007. After some years of working more on the technical side in recent years his interest has shifted to facilitation, coaching, guiding continuous improvement and working with people in general. You can connect with Daniel Hommel on Twitter.

Claudio Perrone explains how you can quickly identify and solve system problems

How do you help the whole organization evolve and improve? Easy, says Claudio. Here’s his recipe:

Look at the whole value stream (from concept to cash!)
Find out what impedes flow in that value stream
Use PopcornFlow to learn, and solve those flow bottlenecks
Rinse and repeat.
Claudio also adds, that when we look at the whole value stream we see how important the role of management really is, because management is the function responsible to make flow happen at the value stream level.

About Claudio Perrone

Claudio is an independent Lean & Agile management consultant, entrepreneur and startup strategist. You may know him for the amazing cartoons he creates for his presentations or, perhaps, for A3 Thinker, a deck of brainstorming cards for Lean Problem Solving. These days he focuses on PopcornFlow, a brand-new continuous evolution method for personal and organisational change.
You can connect with Claudio Perrone on twitter, and see Claudio Perrone on LinkedIn. These days Claudio is focusing on his latest work: PopcornFlow, a method by which you can Learn how to establish a continuous flow of small, traceable, co-created, explicit change experiments. For you, your team, your organization.

Claudio Perrone on why the daily meetings fail

Daily meetings fail for many reasons, and Claudio has an idea of why it happens regularly. The 3 questions in the Scrum daily just can’t work in all situations. Claudio discusses some ideas on how to improve the questions the team asks in the daily meeting and gives a few tips on how to improve the Scrum board to make work more visible and focus the team on Flow.
We also discuss a promising framework to help teams understand the “why” of every story they develop. This is a framework developed based on the work by Clayton Christensen (Innovator’s Dilemma), and tries to define the content of products from a different perspective: the job to be done that customers hire the product for. Watch Clayton Christensen present the idea of jobs to be done on youtube. Or listen to the Jobs-To-Be-Done radio podcast if you want to know more about this promising framework.

About Claudio Perrone

Neil Killick on information radiators, Little’s Law and Queuing Theory

Little’s Law is a relatively recent discovery in Queuing Theory. It was only proven in 1961, and still unknown to many in the software industry today.
Neil discusses why that simple theorem is so important in software projects, and how it can help you understand why over-commitment is so common, and bad for software development.

About Neil Killick

Neil has been a software professional for over 18 years, mostly as a developer, before moving to management. He spent the last 5 years being a passionate Agile, Lean and Scrum coach, trainer and practitioner. Neil cares deeply about creating enjoyable, authentic workplaces in which human potential can thrive.
You can connect with Neil Killick on twitter. Neil Killick’s blog.