success – Page 26 – Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Zuzi Sochova on how to bring self-organization to a team

What helps teams self-organize? What are the things that support, or prevent self-organization? Zuzi explains and guides us through her own model for self-organization and how we, as Scrum Masters can help teams reach a level where they self-organize.

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.

Jeff Campbell on the Mathematical Proof of Value for Scrum Masters

How can we prove the value we bring to organizations? He discuss the value metrics for Scrum Masters and how you can look at your work from the organization’s point of view. We also discuss the effectiveness of meetings and how that affects our own performance. We mention a research paper that explores the differences between stand-up and sit-down meetings, a must read for all Scrum Masters. Read the paper to know when each meeting format is the most appropriate (PDF link): The effects of stand-up and sit-down meeting formats on meeting outcomes.

About Jeff Campbell

Jeff is an Agile Coach who considers the discovery of Agile and Lean to be one of the most defining moments of his life, and considers helping others to improve their working life not to simply be a job, but a social responsibility. As an Agile Coach, he has worked with driving Agile transformations in organisations both small and large. He is one of the founding members of www.scrumbeers.com and an organiser of www.brewingagile.org in his spare time. He is also the author of an open source book called Actionable Agile Tools, where he explains how he uses 15 of the tools he uses in his daily work as a scrum master and agile coach.
You can link with Jeff Campbell on LinkedIn, and connect with Jeff Campbell on Twitter.

Dennis Wagner defines success for Scrum Masters with the help of 2 key tools

To define success for us as Scrum Masters we need to define also what it means not to succeed. Dennis defines what is failure, and uses 2 concrete tools to check the situation all the time. The tools are 5 Why’s and a simple powerful question: “how are we succeeding?”
Each of these tools tackles a different purpose that Dennis explains in this episode.

About Dennis Wagner

Dennis is an Agile Coach with a lot of experience in the technical side of software development. Dennis has worked with teams in different industries, is thinking of writing a book about continuous delivery (bug him if you want to know more), and he loves, really loves his work.
You can connect with Dennis Wagner on LinkedIn and XING, and you can connect with Dennis Wagner on Twitter.

Matthew Heusser on how a Scrum Master can contribute to organizational success beyond the team

A common answer to the success question on the podcast is “when I’m no longer needed”, but that isn’t a great career advancing answer. So we explore what happens after “I’m no longer needed”.

About Matthew Heusser

Matthew Heusser is the co-author of Save our Scrum, co-chair of the enterprise track at Agile2015, And he is also an author at CIO.com. Matt Software is a delivery consultant/writer and Collaborative software geek since before it was cool.
You can find Matthew Heusser on LinkedIn, and connect with Matthew Heusser on Twitter.

Gitte Klitgaard asks us to Listen to the System

Listening, taking notes and asking questions are the tools that Gitte uses to understand that system conditions that affect the teams that she works with. Look at who talks to whom, who eats alone, how each team member reacts to each other.
How to get people to talk? Create the spaces for conversation to happen, like watercoolers, coffee machines, etc.

About Gitte Klitgaard

Gitte is a very pragmatic world-changer. She wants to make the world a better place today, not tomorrow. She’s also very experienced agile coach and regular speaker. But here’s the punch line: she talks about things that no one else talks about. She lives by the mantra “why try to fit in when you were born to stand out?” and she says that her best coaching tools are listening and making people think.
You link with Gitte Klitgaard on LinkedIn, and connect with Gitte Klitgaard on twitter.

Gitte Klitgaard on collaboration and responsibility as patterns for Scrum Master Success

Success for a scrum master is when people start to take responsibility for their work, and collaborate to get problems solved. Gitte also mentions the BIG MISUNDERSTANDING in the idea of cross-functional teams. We discuss the book: Flow by Csikszentmihalyi.

About Gitte Klitgaard

Daniel Hommel on why it matters that teams run experiments

There are many ways to look at success. Daniel chooses to look at it from the learning point of view. He wants to see teams learn, and run experiments. He mentions the book Lean Change Management by Jason Little as an inspiration for the experiment mindset. As Daniel puts it: being fast is good, but being able to change direction quickly is much better.

About Daniel Hommel

Daniel is a ScrumMaster and Agile Coach with a strong background in Software Engineering. His first touch point with Agility was starting to use the Extreme Programming practices in 2007. After some years of working more on the technical side in recent years his interest has shifted to facilitation, coaching, guiding continuous improvement and working with people in general. You can connect with Daniel Hommel on Twitter.

Natalie Warnert: the questions the team ask are your Success Metric

There are many ways to measure success, and it’s not easy to choose just one of them. Natalie chooses to focus on the questions that the team asks. Are they asking questions that challenge you? Are they asking questions that make you feel uncomfortable? Natalie also suggests you focus on how your own questions make you feel. The job of the Scrum Master is not easy, and the questions we ask are supposed to be a critical part of our job. HOw many uncomfortable conversations did you have last week?

About Natalie Warnert

As a developer turned Agile coach, Natalie Warnert understands and embraces what it takes to build great products. Natalie focuses teams on embracing Agile values to build the right product and build the product right. Natalie is currently coaching the Cart/Checkout teams for Best Buy Dotcom and recently earned her Master of Arts degree in Organizational Leadership and Strategic Management.
You can link with Natalie Warnert on LinkedIn, connect with Natalie Warnert on Twitter, read her blog at nataliewarnert.com, and visit her project page Women in Agile.

Marcus Hammarberg explains his recipe for team success

Many management approaches settle for measuring activity instead of outcomes. Marcus asks us to focus more on outcomes to be able to investigate the system conditions. After all it is outcomes that matter. He also asks us to be so precise about outcomes that we can measure it with a single metric. His process is:

Go for smaller and smaller iterations as a way to help teams “own” their work
Bring the outcome definition down to ground-level, so that everyone understands it
Everyone needs to understand the metric. Simplify it.
The metric needs to be one that changes often, so that we can use it as feedback.
Update the metric daily
Celebrate success

Marcus shared with us a discount code for all that purchase his book until October 14th, 2015. Don’t miss it, purchase the book at http://bit.ly/theKanbanBook, and use the code scrumkan.

Marcus is the Author of Salvation:The Bungsu Story, a fascinating account of a real-life crisis, and how Agile, Lean and Kanban saved the Hospital from bankruptcy! Twice! Get ready for the journey, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!

About Marcus Hammarberg

Marcus is a Software / agile consultant from Sweden on IT-sabatical leave in Indonesia, working for the Salvation Army hospitals there. And yes, using techniques from agile in that work even in non-software environments.
One of those approaches he is using is Kanban, as Marcus is the author of the book Kanban in Action with Joakim Sundén, don’t forget to go to http://bit.ly/theKanbanBook, and get the book with the discount code scrumkan.
You can link with Marcus Hammarberg on LinkedIn, and connect with Marcus Hammarberg on twitter.

Marcus Hammarberg measures his success in happiness points

Scrum Masters measure their success in many different ways, Marcus chose happiness in his last project with a software team. He walks us through that and suggests that we use Niko, Niko index as a tool to measure happiness.

Marcus shared with us a discount code for all that purchase his book until October 14th, 2015. Don’t miss it, purchase the book at http://bit.ly/theKanbanBook, and use the code scrumkan.

Marcus is the author of Salvation:The Bungsu Story, a fascinating account of a real-life crisis, and how Agile, Lean and Kanban saved the Hospital from bankruptcy! Twice! Get ready for the journey, it’s going to be a bumpy ride!