lead time Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Rayyan Karim: Measuring Success in Agile, Why Story Points Don’t Always Tell the Full Agile Story

In this episode, Rayyan discusses two main categories for measuring performance in organizations: hard and fast business results and effectiveness. The first indicator for effectiveness is happy people who can be themselves, which Rayyan refers to as “Shiny Happy People.” Rayyan suggests that instead of focusing on story points, teams should focus on cycle and lead time and examine the variation in the system to determine how to remove it. He recommends conducting team surveys or squad health checks over time and paying attention to how people talk at retrospectives. Additionally, Rayyan suggests setting up one-on-one meetings with team members to get a better understanding of how they are showing up for retrospectives.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Squad Health Check retro benefits

In this episode, Rayyan discusses his favorite agile retrospective format, which is the Squad Health Check. He mentions that while the Sailboat retro is the most commonly used, he prefers the Squad Health Check as it quickly gets everyone on the same page and can be used in larger teams and teams of teams. Rayyan notes that the Health Check is short, focused, and highly adaptable, and it gives a good understanding of where the teams are. He also gives tips to adapt it to the program or team you are working with and to remove the “neutral” option.

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About Rayyan Karim

Rayyan is and Agile Coach & Trainer and the founder of Design Your Future with presence in the UK and the UAE. Rayyan is known for supporting leading executives of FTSE100 and NASDAQ corporations to create transformational results quickly.

You can link with Rayyan Karim on LinkedIn and connect with Rayyan Karim on Twitter.

Johannes Lindman: Success Metrics for Scrum Masters. Monitoring Flow, Happiness, and Health

Johannes believes that a Scrum Master is successful when they can leave a team and feel confident that the team is on a good trajectory. One of the best indicators of this is when the team wants to try alternating the Scrum Master role among themselves. Johannes emphasizes the importance of investing a lot of time in teaching and mentoring the team at the beginning. He also likes to track metrics such as team happiness and health, lead time, cycle time, and the number of dependencies and the size of tasks. He recommends using the team health check exercise to assess team health.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Learning Matrix (with Kudos session)

In this segment, Johannes talks about his favorite Agile retrospective format, the Learning Matrix. He emphasizes the importance of starting with a Kudos session, which involves sharing kind thoughts about the other people in the team. Johannes believes that this opens up more creativity and positivity in the session, and it’s the key to the success of the format.

By starting from a good point in the session with the Kudos session, the team can feel more motivated and energized to tackle the issues at hand. Johannes also recommends using Kudos to boost creativity when the team is feeling stuck. Overall, the Learning Matrix with the Kudos section is an effective way to facilitate retrospectives and create a positive team dynamic.

How can I, as a Scrum Master, supercharge my facilitation?

About Johannes Lindman

Despite many years of experience Johannes still learns new things every day in order to stay relevant. This aligns with his curiosity on life and people.

You can link with Johannes Lindman on LinkedIn.

Angel Medinilla on the tools that allow us to see and manage the system as a whole

Systems affect teams’ and individuals’ performance. We need to learn to see the system to be able to manage it. Angel shares with us the tools he uses to understand and measure the system performance in a way that includes all aspects, from concept to cash.
In this episode we mention the book Lean Software Development by Poppendieck et al.

About Angel Medinilla

Ángel Medinilla (Spain, 1973) has 18+ years working experience in the ICT market. In 2007 he started his own Agile Consulting firm. Today, Proyectalis is considered the leading Agile consulting and coaching company in Spain, and one of the most well-known in Europe and Latin America,
He is a regular speaker at Agile conferences all over the world
He is the author of Agile Management (Springer) and “Agile Kaizen: Continuous Improvement Far Beyond Retrospectives’ (Springer). He also contributed to Beyond Agile: Stories of Agile Transformations, (Modus Cooperandi).
In 2015 he co-founded Improvement21, whose goal is to bring the continuous improvement habit to all kind of organizations in order to create better cultures, teams, processes and products.
You can connect with Angel Medinilla on LinkedIn, and contact Angel Medinilla on Twitter.

Antti Tevanlinna shares his tools to understand and change the system

Understand and change the system is perhaps one of the major challenges for Scrum Masters all over the world. In this episode Antti shares his favourite tools for that exact task:

Measure Lead Time, and how each action affects that metric. Use that metric to detect problems in how the system works at all times.
Create causal loop diagrams that help you understand what are the many effects, and causes in play within the organization.
Both of the tools mentioned are part of an arsenal of tools that you can find when studying Systems Thinking. To get you started, Antti recommends the book The V Discipline by Peter Senge.

About Antti Tevanlinna

Antti is an agile practitioner, who got started with agile in my own very first Agile project way back in 2004. He’s been through all kinds of roles, from team member, to management, to customer-facing roles.
You can connect with Antti Tevanlinna on twitter, and check Antti Tevanlinna’s blog.