lessons learned Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Agile in Construction: Team Happiness as the True Measure of Scrum Master Success in Construction With Felipe Engineer-Manriquez

“The teams that are having fun and are light-hearted, making jokes—these are high-performing teams almost 99% of the time. But the teams that are overly sarcastic or too quiet? They’re burning out.” – Felipe Engineer-Manriquez

Felipe offers a refreshingly human definition of success for Scrum Masters: team happiness. After years of traumatic experiences in construction—days when he pounded his steering wheel in frustration during his commute—Felipe developed what he calls being a “human thermometer.” He can sense a team’s emotional state within 5 minutes of being with them. His proxy for success is a simple Likert scale of 1-5: 5 is Nirvana (working at Google with massages), and 1 is wanting to jump out the window. Felipe emphasizes that most people in construction internalize stress and push it down, so you have to ask directly. When he asked an estimator this question, the man quietly admitted he was at a 2—ready to walk away. Without asking, Felipe would never have known. The key insight: schedule improvements happen as teams move closer to a 5. And the foundation of it all? Understanding. “People do not have an overt need to be loved,” Felipe shares from his Scrum training. “They have an overt need to be understood.” A successful Scrum Master meddles appropriately, runs toward problems, and focuses on understanding teammates before trying to implement change.

Self-reflection Question: If you asked each of your team members to rate their happiness from 1-5 today, what do you think they would say, and what would you learn that you don’t currently know?

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Start/Stop/Keep

Felipe’s favorite retrospective format is Start/Stop/Keep—but his approach to introducing it is what makes the difference. He connects it to something construction teams already know: the post-mortem. He explains the morbid origin of the term (surgeons standing around a dead patient discussing what went wrong) to emphasize the seriousness of learning. Then he reframes the retrospective as a recurring post-mortem—a “lessons learned” cycle. Start: What should we begin doing that will make things better? Stop: What should we no longer do that doesn’t add value? Keep: What good things are we doing that we want to maintain? Felipe uses silent brainstorming so everyone has time to think, then makes responses visible on a whiteboard or digital display. The cadence scales with sprint length—45 minutes for a week, 2 hours for two weeks, half a day for a month. His current team committed to monthly retrospectives and pre-writes their Start/Stop/Keep items, making the facilitated session efficient and focused.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

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 Felipe Engineer-Manriquez

Felipe Engineer-Manriquez is a best-selling author, international speaker, and host of The EBFC Show. A force in Lean and Agile, he helps teams build faster with less effort. Felipe trains and coaches changemakers worldwide—and wrote Construction Scrum to make work easier, better, and faster for everyone.

You can link with Felipe Engineer-Manriquez on LinkedIn.

You can also find Felipe at thefelipe.bio.link, check out The EBFC Show podcast, and join the EBFC Scrum Community of Practice.

BONUS: The Product Owner role is still the hardest role in Scrum, and other Agile lessons from 2022

In this special Christmas BONUS episode, we cover some of the key lessons that Vasco collected throughout 2022. You get an insight into his lessons learned, but also the thinking process that led to them.

Listen in to learn about:

The results of a change management poll for Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, and what that says about our community
Product Ownership in 2022, and why the PO role needs a new approach in the Agile community
Why the concept of Antifragile can, and should be applied to the work we do as Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters
A BONUS reflection question for you to reflect on at the end of this year.

You can send your questions to podcast@oikosofy.com!

If you are interested in being part of a volunteer team that will be working on helping Product Owners during the year 2023, contact Vasco at Vasco@Oikosofy.com, and share why you’d be interested to be part of this work to help Product Owners!

Resources from this episode

About Vasco Duarte

Author of http://NoEstimatesBook.com, and daily podcast host at https://scrum-master-toolbox.org/. I try to give back to the community every single day in an effort to improve the IT and product industry all over the world.
Product Manager, Scrum Master, Project Manager, Director, Agile Coach are only some of the roles that I’ve taken in software development organizations. Having worked in the software industry since 1997, and Agile practitioner since 2004. I’ve worked in small, medium and large software organizations as an Agile Coach or leader in agile adoption at those organizations.

Building Skyscrapers and Shattering Dreams in Product Development | Guest post by Rainer Tikk

Rainer Tikk writes this guest blog post about what Product Development looks like from the perspective of a leader of a software organization in a mid-size bank. He’s the Head of Software Development at LHV, an Estonian bank betting on IT as a competitive advantage.

To a non-IT person, developing an IT solution might often seem like a mystical activity that boys with ponytails (and some girls) do in a dark basement somewhere. Moreover, software development, in general, is an expensive activity altogether and often takes more time than it really should. And even if there is money available to pay for the software development, more often than not, it’s almost impossible to find a developer to build the stuff you need.

Continue reading Building Skyscrapers and Shattering Dreams in Product Development | Guest post by Rainer Tikk

Sean Dunn’s experience of failure leading an army patrol

There are many similarities between the way teams interact in many industries, but in this episode we explore the similarity between a team leader in the army and the role of Scrum Master. Listen in while Sean explains his story, and what he learned from it that he still applies today in his work as Scrum Master and Agile Coach.
He also shares with us his recipe for dealing with failure:

Acknowledge that you are giving it your best. The prime directive also applies to ourselves, not just the teams we work with.
Ultimately, our goal is to learn, so step back and reflect. Develop a set of questions you ask yourself when things don’t go as you expected. Frame mistakes in the context of learning.

About About Sean Dunn

Sean is an Enterprise Agile Coach with IHS Global. He has been involved with agile development for 8 years as a developer, product owner, and agile coach. Prior to his exposure to agile development Sean spent 13 years in the Canadian Army. In fact, Sean is known to point out that the Army is far more agile than most people think.
That background in the Canadian Army influenced his view of Leadership and the role of Leadership in creating and developing great teams.
You can connect with Sean Dunn on LinkedIn, check out Sean Dunn on the Scrum Alliance or email him at sean.dunn@ihs.com
Check out Sean Dunn’s blog on leadership.

Zuzi Sochova started as a line manager, but understood how being a Scrum Master is different

There are many paths to starting our journey as a Scrum Master. Zuzi started as a line manager, but she soon learned the key differences between being a team leader and being a Scrum Master. She also explains why some companies still fail to improve, even when using Scrum.

About Zuzi Sochova

Zuzi help companies and individuals to be more successful. She teaches teams and their managers how to be more efficient, how to provide better quality and how to communicate and organize teams so that people have fun, they are motivated and have high commitment. Zuzi helps teams and managers find out how to handle customer relationship to help them improve customer satisfaction.
You can visit Zuzi’s website at: http://sochova.cz/, and link with Zuzi Sochova on LinkedIn, or connect with Zuzi Sochova on twitter, or your favorite conferece.