Nick Nielsen Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Nick Nielsen: The Product Owner that knew how to nurture an Agile culture in the team

The Great Product Owner: The PO that knew how to nurture an Agile culture in the team

This Product Owner had a clear willingness to learn, and to accept a new role that was new to them. Through that, the PO was able to help build an agile culture, a culture of “being agile” instead of “doing agile”. In this episode, we hear how a team is an ecosystem and has its own culture that needs to be nurtured by the Scrum Master, and the Product Owner.

The Bad Product Owner: When the PO’s lose focus on value, a PO anti-pattern

This PO was not able to focus on the value the team was helping to create. When this anti-pattern happens, then the team ends up being focused on “just doing the work”, and is not able to bring their technology perspective into the creation of a clear value, or impact on the user.

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 Nick Nielsen

Nick completed his education at Aarhus University in Denmark and currently works in the Digital Organisation at Grundfos, the worlds biggest pump manufacturer. He views him self as a pragmatic Agile Handyman.

You can link with Nick Nielsen on LinkedIn and connect with Nick Nielsen on Twitter.

Nick Nielsen: How to NOT adopt Agile/SAFe and what to do instead, a real-life story

In this episode, we hear about a company that was going through a long, 3.5 year journey of Agile transformation. When Nick joined, they had just decided to adopt SAFe, as a way to scale their use of Agile methods. Unfortunately, this is not a story of complete success, as we hear about how a traditional consultancy tried to impose SAFe on the organization, with a top-down, linear (aka Waterfall) plan of adoption. Fortunately, however, the Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters in that organization were able to turn the adoption around, and make it succeed! Listen in to learn about how NOT TO adopt Agile/SAFe.

In this episode, we refer to the 1-2-4-all technique from Liberating Structures, and the Lean Change Management approach to change and transformation.

About Nick Nielsen

You can link with Nick Nielsen on LinkedIn and connect with Nick Nielsen on Twitter.

Nick Nielsen: Helping Agile teams survive the conflict of values between Agile and Waterfall

In this story, we hear about one person that joined an Agile team, but was not ready to adopt the Agile mindset and values. What happened next was a warning for all of us that face similar situations. We discuss what happens when people join a team with very different mindsets and values than their own, and how Scrum Masters can prepare for that situation.

Featured Book of the Week: Accelerate by Gene Kim et al.

In Accelerate by Gene Kim et al., Nick found out about the DORA metrics, and how metrics can be a key source of insights for Agile adoption, and continuous improvement. Nick describes how the book helped him create his own dashboard for Agile adoption the organizations where he works.

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 Nick Nielsen

You can link with Nick Nielsen on LinkedIn and connect with Nick Nielsen on Twitter.

Nick Nielsen: Failing to help a team become a real team, a Scrum Master anti-pattern

Agile is about learning and becoming resilient. This is true both for teams as well as for Scrum Masters. In this episode we talk about how someimtes we fail to help teams become “teams”. This tsory starts with a team that had changed its composition, abnd some external consultants were brought in.

In this episode, we talk about Heidi Helfand’s work on Dynamic Re-teaming, and the Tuckman’s stages of group formation.

About Nick Nielsen

You can link with Nick Nielsen on LinkedIn and connect with Nick Nielsen on Twitter.