squad health check Archives - Page 2 of 4 - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

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.

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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.

Tinatin Tabidze: Maximizing Agile Team Success, A Scrum Master’s Guide to Self-Organizing Teams

In this podcast episode, Tinatin focuses on the idea that the less a scrum master is needed, the more successful they are. She emphasizes the importance of helping teams become more self-organizing and notes that the path to achieving this will vary for each team. Tinatin stresses the role of the product owner in promoting self-organization, and she suggests checking the team’s level of participation in ceremonies as a starting point for evaluating the team’s self-organization. She also encourages scrum masters to be honest about any areas where the team may be lacking in self-organization, and to discuss these areas with the team in retrospectives. Tinatin reminds scrum masters to keep themselves accountable for the level of self-organization in their team, and asks the question of how to take teams to the next level.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Squad Health Check

Tinatin discusses the Spotify squad health check, a process of self-reflection for a team to evaluate their performance. She emphasizes the importance of regularly conducting health checks and tailoring retrospectives to the current sprint. Tinatin suggests using ice breakers to start the health check, then moving into an inspection of the completed sprint by checking metrics and the improvement backlog. She emphasizes the importance of evaluating what happened in the last sprint to identify areas for improvement.

About Tinatin Tabidze

Tinatin Tabidze is a Scrum Master currently working in Stuttgart, Germany. Originally she started out as a project manager. She has experience with multiple scrum and kanban teams, working with scaled agile frameworks.

You can link with Tinatin Tabidze on LinkedIn.

Tinatin Tabidze: Building Trust in Agile Teams, Insights from a Scrum Master

Tinatin discusses the importance of the scrum values in a team and how well the team is living those values. She highlights the importance of team health checks to identify inefficiencies, which can often result from a lack of collaboration and trust between team members. Tinatin uses the example of the Spotify Squad health check (mentioned several times here on the podcast) that reveals a lack of trust between developers and testers, and offers tips for identifying a lack of trust in a team, such as monitoring levels of comfort among team members, monitoring communication, and observing meetings for signs of discomfort or silence.

Featured Book Of The Week: Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Sutherland

In Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Sutherland, the author describes how to optimize work through Agile methodology and Scrum principles. In this episode, Tinatin also refers to Scaling Lean and Agile Development by Craig Larman, and Bas Vodde. Bas Vodde has been a previous guest on the podcast. And she also refers to Strategize: Product Strategy and Product Roadmap Practices for the Digital Age by Roman Pichler.

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About Tinatin Tabidze

You can link with Tinatin Tabidze 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.

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.

Usman Kotwal: Helping Agile teams focus on outcomes

When we start working with a team, we need to understand what is their situation, so that we can decide what to start with. As we start to understand the team’s situation, we might need to focus on the organizational impediments to help the team progress. Some useful questions to ask are: is the team engaging with the stakeholders? Are they able to interact with customers/users? Do they have clear impact metrics for their product? What is the level of engagement in the team?

All of these questions help us, Scrum Masters, understand if the team is ready to focus on, and work on outcomes.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Retrospectives for Scrum Masters starting with a new team

The Team Health Check is one of the formats we talk about as a possible “getting started with a new team” format. Usman also recommends the Sailboat Retrospective for Scrum Masters getting started with new teams.

Once we are “in the rhythm” with a team, Usman recommends some more “free” formats like 1-2-4-all or something from Liberating Structures. Finally, his recommendations is: “help teams make their own choices, as they are much more committed to those”

About Usman Kotwal

Usman is a Scrum Master and Agile Coach in the field of data analytics in life sciences. He considers his learning journey to continue forever when it comes to bringing forward change in the ways we work collaboratively. His mission is to help guide the way to empowered product teams.

You can link with Usman Kotwal on LinkedIn.