system Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Daniel Westermayr: Connecting data with emotions, the key to triggering change

In this episode, Daniel emphasizes the importance of understanding the success of a system and how it is constrained by the way it has been set up. He explains that the ultimate goal of Scrum is the success of the product or organization, and that the key to successful Scrum is to look at the success of the system. We also discuss how the process and system of software development, broadly, has not yet been fully understood by the very software industry and community.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: Connecting data with emotions, the key to triggering change

In this segment, Daniel focuses on the importance of connecting data with emotions in retrospectives. Daniel shares his preference for retrospectives that collect data with the emotions of people. He emphasizes that not everyone sees the same thing in the same data or events and that different perspectives can help understand positive things. Emotions are a driving force for change among the people we work with, and understanding them can help drive change management efforts. Daniel mentions the Timeline retrospective and the importance of using emotional intelligence to improve teamwork and product development.

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About Daniel Westermayr

Daniel is a Kanban Trainer with a knack for all things Lean and Theory of Constraints. He wants to help teams achieve and measure their continuous improvements.

You can link with Daniel Westermayr on LinkedIn.

Salvatore Rinaldo: When helping a Scrum team is unable to stick to a Sprint plan, look outside the team

Salvatore was working in a startup with a team that, on paper, was a star team. However, when he started to observe how they worked, he noticed that the team was rarely sticking to what they had planned for the Sprint, and even the PO was at a loss on how to help the team stay on track and focus on what they had planned. In this segment, we refer to Cost of Delay, one of the topics discussed in The Principles of Product Development Flow, and share some tips on how to help a team that is stuck in this situation.

Featured Book of the Week: The Goal by Elyahu Goldratt

In The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu Goldratt, Salvatore found the principles behind lean thinking as well as a model that helped him in his work as a Scrum Master. The Goal is a book where Theory Of Constraints is introduced to a business focused audience concerned with improving the performance of their businesses. In this segment, we also refer to The Principles of Product Development Flow: Second Generation Lean Product Development by Don Reinertsen, which helped Salvatore understand how the flow of work can be investigated and improved in organizations.

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 Salvatore Rinaldo

Salvatore is an Agile Coach and Scrum Master based in London. His background is in telecommunications and software engineering. For the past 7 years, Salvatore has been helping organizations leverage Lean, agile, Flow principles and system thinking to achieve better business agility.

You can link with Salvatore Rinaldo on LinkedIn.

Jac Hughes: “The Scrum Master must help manage the system”

Jac shares with us a workshop he uses to help the teams he works with identify the system around them. This is the system that may be helping them (keep), or preventing them (change) to reach their goals. During this episode we talk about some specific tools that help us facilitate this workshop, like for example, the Moving Motivators from Management 3.0.

About Jac Hughes

Jac is a scrum master who has a passion to help teams become empowered, autonomous but mostly importantly productive. Jac has served 7 years in the Royal Navy before moving into the world of IT.

You can link with Jac Hughes on LinkedIn.

Woody Zuill: “The system is where it’s at”

Woody Zuill discusses systems, and tools to help us understand the system. We also discuss how important retrospectives are, and how to go about increasing the amount, and value of your retrospectives: Just-In-Time retrospectives.

About Woody Zuill

Woody Zuill, an independent Agile Consultant, Trainer, Coach, and Guide and has been programming computers for 30+ years. As a pioneer of the Mob Programming approach of teamwork for software development he has been sharing presentations and workshops on Mob Programming for conferences, user groups, and companies all over the world. He is considered one of the founders of the “#NoEstimates” discussion on Twitter.
You can connect with Woody Zuill on LinkedIn or contact Woody Zuill on Twitter.
If you are interested, check the MobProgramming conference.

Sebastian Schürmann looks at the system from different perspectives to understand the system conditions

Whether you use the Lean Waste approach, Dan Pink’s autonomy-mastery-purpose or any other model what is important is that you use some models to understand the system that affects the team’s performance. Sebastian shares several models that you can use to assess and measure those system conditions that many of us forget to take into account. This episode also includes a long reading list:

About Sebastian Schürmann

Sebastian has an extremely strong work ethic, a great passion to his work, unwavering desire for excellence, and unabated willingness to share his rich knowledge.
Driven by his strong work ethic, he takes several key roles: as scrum master, agile coach, mentor, as protector of the young development teams, after all, a humble leader who takes risks and responsibilities at extremely critical moments, creates a vision which the other follow by heart – with excellent outcome.
You can find Sebastian Schürmann on twitter, and link with Sebastian Schürmann on LinkedIn.
You can find Sebastian Schürmann’s website, and his blog.