Stacey Taurah Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Stacey Taurah: Putting people first, a Product Owner lesson that Scrum Masters can amplify!

The Great Product Owner: Putting people first, a Product Owner lesson that Scrum Masters can amplify!

Great Product Owners put people first in their decision making. Whether it is the team, or the customers, or the stakeholders, they focus on the interaction and the improvements they can deliver to those people. Great PO’s consider the input from everyone in the process, and help the Scrum Master make work fun, because teams that have fun, are more creative and more productive!

The Bad Product Owner: Why PO’s want to act as dictators, and how we can help Agile teams change the dynamic

Sometimes Product Owners behave like dictators. They want to tell the team exactly what to do, and sometimes even how to do it! This pattern can be promoted by a PO with technical background, but it hides a seriously negative dynamic! Listen in to learn why PO’s sometimes want to act like dictators, and what to do about it.

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 Stacey Taurah

A seasoned agile coach with a squiggly line into tech and delivery. From forensics to frameworks and all that’s in between.

You can link with Stacey Taurah on LinkedIn.

Stacey Taurah: Focusing Agile teams on “the most important thing”, a retrospective format

“Can I make one person’s day a little bit easier?” This powerful question helps Stacey focus on her role as the Scrum Master for Agile teams, but it also helps her be pragmatic about the choices that inevitably come. In this episode, we also talk about the importance of collecting feedback often, and one question that helps us focus on the team at all times!

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Focusing the team on “the most important thing”

Stacey shares with us a format she designed to help the team focus on “The Most Important Thing”. This format focuses each team member on the thing they most care about, and uses familiar facilitation techniques to avoid taking too many actions out of the retrospective.

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 Stacey Taurah

A seasoned agile coach with a squiggly line into tech and delivery. From forensics to frameworks and all that’s in between.

You can link with Stacey Taurah on LinkedIn.

Stacey Taurah: Helping Agile teams adopt a new way of measuring their performance

Stacey shares with us a different way to look at team performance and team health. The story starts with the need to help teams learn about how they are performing as a team (not only software development professionals). At first, Stacey tries to help teams understand how important it is to look at the team’s health, but that’s not an easy process. Listen in to learn about how Stacey went from skeptic teams, to enthusiastic teams in this change process!

In this episode, we refer to the Kübler-Ross change model (aka Kübler-Ross change curve or the five stages of grief).

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 Stacey Taurah

A seasoned agile coach with a squiggly line into tech and delivery. From forensics to frameworks and all that’s in between.

You can link with Stacey Taurah on LinkedIn.

Stacey Taurah: Counterintuitive! When an Agile team of A-players started acting like a team of C-players!

This team had people with an excellent technical background, and they were all driven and focused on delivering. It was therefore a surprise to see how the team started to act disengaged, and to see how the team was unable to deliver. When looking into it, Stacey found out that the team – even if it was filled with great people – was not working as a team. Listen in to learn about what drove this team apart!

In this segment, we refer to the Impostor Syndrome, a phenomenon that Scrum Masters often need to deal with.

Featured Book of the Week: The Goal by Godratt

In The Goal by Godratt (already mentioned in previous episodes), Stacey found important tips and lessons on how to have conversations about planning and resourcing with the whole business, and to understand that sometimes, what seems like a blocker can be solved by using the Five Focusing Steps of Theory Of Constraints.

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 Stacey Taurah

A seasoned agile coach with a squiggly line into tech and delivery. From forensics to frameworks and all that’s in between.

You can link with Stacey Taurah on LinkedIn.

Stacey Taurah: How to step back, and help Scrum teams adopt Agile at their own pace

Stacey started as a very enthusiastic Scrum Master. She felt the role suited her, and she wanted the teams to “get” Agile and Scrum! In that role, she felt she knew all about Scrum because she knew it “by the book”. However, in practice Stacey found – in retrospective – that she was pushing the process to the team. Since then, she’s learned that we must help the teams adapt, and change, not push the process to the team. In this episode, we talk about what that means in practice, and how the Scrum Master can help teams adopt Agile and Scrum at their own pace.

In this episode, we refer to the Shift Left movement.

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 Stacey Taurah

A seasoned agile coach with a squiggly line into tech and delivery. From forensics to frameworks and all that’s in between.

You can link with Stacey Taurah on LinkedIn.