The Agile Online Summit happens Oct 24th-26th. Get your EARLY BIRD TICKET, limited availability!

Get the EARLY BIRD ticket now!

Gert Brits: Involving the Agile team in Product Owner decisions, the why and how!

The Great Product Owner: How to involve teams in the whole product development process

Good PO’s always include the teams in the process of making decisions, but great PO’s go much further. They include the team in the process of gathering information, and listens to the team’s feedback.

In this segment, we refer to the “Superchicken Paradox” a video with Margaret Heffernan.

The Bad Product Owner: Helping PO’s that think they need to do everything, even the Scrum team’s work!

Sometimes, the Product Owners we work with behave as if the thought there was no team to develop the product with them. In fact, they might try to do everything up to, and sometimes even including, writing code! In this segment, we explore what might be some causes of this Anti-pattern, and how we can help the Product Owner step back from the team’s domain of work, and focus on the PO’s domain of work!

Are you having trouble helping the team work well with their Product Owner? We’ve put together a course to help you work on the collaboration team-product owner. You can find it at bit.ly/coachyourpo. 18 modules, 8+ hours of modules with tools and techniques that you can use to help teams and PO’s collaborate.

About Gert Brits

Gert came from a programming background, and has worked across multiple industries, applying Agile Coaching across diverse and non tech areas. He has a focus on group dynamics blended with systems thinking, and the art of balancing application vs theory.

You can link with Gert Brits on LinkedIn.

Gert Brits: A simple question that helps Scrum Masters evaluate their impact on Agile teams

When it comes to evaluating our success as Scrum Masters, Gert suggests we start with a simple question to frame our work: how is the scrum master helping the team deliver faster or better results? In this segment, we also talk about the importance of setting up a coaching agreement with the team and stakeholders, and we refer to Vasco’s Christmas 2022 bonus episode.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Tips on how to improve a simple Agile Retrospective format

Gert likes the simple format that focuses on 3 questions (what went well, not well, what can we do about it?). However, he brings in different tools and practices around that format to adapt it to the reality of the team at the time of the retrospective. He suggests starting with an ice-breaker, and shifting the order of the main questions around depending on what you feel the team needs to talk about at the time.

Retrospectives, planning sessions, vision workshops, we are continuously helping teams learn about how to collaborate in practice! In this Actionable Agile Tools book, Jeff Campbell shares some of the tools he’s learned over a decade of coaching Agile Teams. The pragmatic coaching book you need, right now! Buy Actionable Agile Tools on Amazon, or directly from the author, and supercharge your facilitation toolbox!

About Gert Brits

Gert came from a programming background, and has worked across multiple industries, applying Agile Coaching across diverse and non tech areas. He has a focus on group dynamics blended with systems thinking, and the art of balancing application vs theory.

You can link with Gert Brits on LinkedIn.

Gert Brits: Implementing OKR’s in a distributed Agile organization

In this organization, they struggled with the implementation of the OKR framework (Objective-Key Results). As Gert talked to the teams, he heard that they were frustrated with the long time the process took, how tightly structured it was, and how they felt unprepared to translate all their plans into the OKR framework.

Over time, Gert worked with leadership and the teams to find out how to adapt the framework to the reality of that organization and those teams. In this episode, we hear how Big Room Planning helped with the implementation of OKR’s and we learn other tools and practices to support the use of OKR’s in any organization.

As Scrum Master we work with change continuously! Do you have your own change framework that provides the guidance, and queues you need when working with change? The Lean Change Management framework is a fully defined, lean-startup inspired change framework that can be used as the backbone of any change process! You can buy Lean Change Management the book at Amazon. Also available in French, Spanish, German and Portuguese.

 

About Gert Brits

Gert came from a programming background, and has worked across multiple industries, applying Agile Coaching across diverse and non tech areas. He has a focus on group dynamics blended with systems thinking, and the art of balancing application vs theory.

You can link with Gert Brits on LinkedIn.

Gert Brits: The story of an Agile team that went from Conflict to Collaboration

Gert was working with a team that enabled other teams. It was a “developer advocate” team for Spotify, which helped other teams and company external contributors to develop innovative solutions at the website backstage.io. What this team was trying to achieve was completely new in that industry. As such a new team, there was a lot of uncertainty about the outcome to be worked on, which caused tension in the team. Listen in to learn how Gert was able to help the team overcome that tension and conflict, and grew to be a great team!

In this segment, we talk about the RACI chart, and the Squad Health Check.

Featured Book of the Week: Drive by Daniel Pink

Gert recommends Drive by Daniel Pink, a book that helped him understand what motivates people to take action. The book helped Gert develop a heightened awareness of people’s motivations, and also the necessary self-awareness he needed as a Scrum Master.

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 Gert Brits

Gert came from a programming background, and has worked across multiple industries, applying Agile Coaching across diverse and non tech areas. He has a focus on group dynamics blended with systems thinking, and the art of balancing application vs theory.

You can link with Gert Brits on LinkedIn.

Gert Brits: When “taking it to the team” is the wrong solutions, an unexpected lesson for Scrum Masters

Gert heard his colleagues complain to him about some of the challenges and problems they were facing. Trying to help them, Gert setup a session for the team of Scrum Masters to discuss the problems he had heard. However, there was one problem… Listen in to learn when it is not a good idea to set up a collective retrospective, even if you know there are problems that need to be solved!

Recovering from failure, or difficult moments is a critical skill for Scrum Masters. Not only because of us, but also because the teams, and stakeholders we work with will also face these moments! We need inspiring stories to help them, and ourselves! The Bungsu Story, is an inspiring story by Marcus Hammarberg which shows how a Coach can help organizations recover even from the most disastrous situations! Learn how Marcus helped The Bungsu, a hospital in Indonesia, recover from near-bankruptcy, twice! Using Lean and Agile methods to rebuild an organization and a team! An inspiring story you need to know about! Buy the book on Amazon: The Bungsu Story – How Lean and Kanban Saved a Small Hospital in Indonesia. Twice. and Can Help You Reshape Work in Your Company.

About Gert Brits

Gert came from a programming background, and has worked across multiple industries, applying Agile Coaching across diverse and non tech areas. He has a focus on group dynamics blended with systems thinking, and the art of balancing application vs theory.

You can link with Gert Brits on LinkedIn.

Get The Booklet!
How to deliver on time and eliminate scope creep By scoping projects around outcomes and impacts, not requirements!
Get the Product Owner Booklet!
Avoid scope creep! And learn to scope projects around impacts and outcomes, not requirements!
Get These Valuable Lessons Today!
Down-to-earth, hard-earned Scrum Masters lessons and the Tips from the Trenches e-book table of contents, delivered by email
Enter e-mail to download a clickable PO Cheat Sheet
This handy Coach Your PO cheat-sheet includes questions to help you define the problem, and links to handy, easy techniques to help you coach your Product Owner
Enter e-mail to download a clickable PO Cheat Sheet
This handy Coach Your PO cheat-sheet includes questions to help you define the problem, and links to handy, easy techniques to help you coach your Product Owner
Enter e-mail to download a checklist to help your PO manage their time
This simple checklist and calendar handout, with a coaching article will help you define the minimum enagement your PO must have with the team
Enter e-mail to download a checklist to help your PO manage their time
This simple checklist and calendar handout, with a coaching article will help you define the minimum enagement your PO must have with the team
Internal Conference
Checklist
Internal Conference
Checklist
Download a detailed How-To to help measure success for your team
Motivate your team with the right metrics, and the right way to visualize and track them. Marcus presents a detailed How-To document based on his experience at The Bungsu Hospital
Download a detailed How-To to help measure success for your team
Read about Visualization and TRANSFORM The way your team works
A moving story of how work at the Bungsu Hospital was transformed by a simple tool that you can use to help your team.
Read about Visualization and TRANSFORM The way your team works