team topologies Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Takunda Noha: How to Convince the Organization for Cross-Functional Collaboration to overcome Missing Deadlines and Integration Problems

In this episode, the focus is on the challenges faced in a delivery factory where multiple teams are required to collaborate in order to deliver a feature. However, these teams were siloed and lacked collaboration, leading to missed deadlines and integration problems. The first step was to gather facts and data to identify the causes of delays. The next challenge was to create a vision for a cross-functional team, but faced resistance from other teams. Persistence was key in convincing the organization to adopt a cross-functional approach. Although the team faced initial failures, the advice is to have a thick skin, learn from failures, and try again. To help understand and navigate this type of challenges, Takunda recommends the book is Team Topologies by Skelton and Pais, who have been previous guests on the podcast.

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About Takunda Noha

Takunda is a seasoned change agent. He specializes in turning dysfunctional teams into high performing teams.

You can link with Takunda Noha on LinkedIn.

BONUS: From Scrum Master to Engineering Lead, how to prepare the transition with Tim Bourguignon

We start this episode, reflecting on Tim’s journey of realizing the importance of working collaboratively and embracing agile methodologies. Tim noticed early on that he drifted to teaching and providing assistance to others rather than actively developing software. After a while, he moved to consulting in Agile, and in that role, he noticed recurring patterns and struggled with unclogging processes that seemed to be missing something crucial. Over time, frustration set in. He felt like he was fighting an uphill battle and highlighted the disruptive nature of Agile, which aimed to uncover and solve problems but often revealed bigger and deeper underlying issues.

The big problem with Agile adoption, and what we can do to prepare for it

Continue reading BONUS: From Scrum Master to Engineering Lead, how to prepare the transition with Tim Bourguignon

Oguz Ozyurt: Helping Scrum Teams by Establishing Trust and Shared Understanding with Product Owners

In this segment, guest Oz emphasizes that we all work in a complex environment and are change agents. Oz shares a story about a team that faced problems with its product owner, who would add stories to the sprint backlog without refinement and interrupt the team even on the last day of the iteration. As a result, the team lost trust in the PO.

To address this challenge, Oz recommends making sure the team has an agreement on how to bring new stories into an ongoing sprint and discussing the team agreement with the PO. Oz also suggests bringing up the topic in the retrospective when the PO introduces a surprise story. Oz acknowledges that these conversations can be difficult, especially when the PO is a good friend of the team’s manager, but emphasizes the importance of building trust and ensuring shared understanding.

Featured Book of the Week: Leading Change by John Kotter

In this segment, Oz recommends “Leading Change” by John Kotter, which outlines eight steps for organizational transformation and is useful for anyone looking to apply these steps to a change process. Oz also suggests “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek for its insights on inspiring others and finding the purpose behind the work. Finally, Oz recommends “Team Topologies” which provides guidance on building and managing modern teams, a key responsibility for Scrum Masters. The authors of Team Topologies, Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, have been previous guests on the podcast.

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About Oguz Ozyurt

Oz came from a technical background, and has worked across multiple industries, applying agile practices toward the technical and non-technical areas. He is passionate about agile, he has leveraged his passion for delivery value and agile practices by coaching, teaching, mentoring many teams to transform from traditional software development life cycle to Agile principles and practices.

You can link with Oguz Ozyurt on LinkedIn.

Jurgen Appelo: Being a Product Owner for your own business, the challenges

This week Jurgen is with us to talk about his latest project: unFIX.work.

Jurgen shares his own experience as a product developer (Mindsettlers), and the critical lessons he’s learned as a Product Owner for his own business.
We discuss how hard it is to define the real problem, as seen by our customers, and the market at large.

In this episode, we refer to Kathy Sierra and her idea of “make your users awesome”, we refer to the Jobs To Be Done Framework, and the work by Clayton Christensen, and discuss the ideas in the book Team Topologies which has been featured here on the podcast.

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 Jurgen Appelo

Jurgen Appelo is an entrepreneur, an author, and keynote speaker who applies Agile to his life and his businesses. He’s also prolific writer on all topics business and agile. He wrote Management 3.0, How to Change the World, Managing for Happiness and his latest book about entrepreneurship and product development: Startup, Scale up, Screw up.

You can link with Jurgen Appelo on LinkedIn and connect with Jurgen Appelo on Twitter.

BONUS: How to setup Agile and DevOps teams, Team Topologies interview with Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais

Setting up teams to work collaboratively is one of the challenges that organizations go through when adopting Agile. The functional team setup (all DBAs, all testers, all windows devs together, etc.) is not acceptable for teams that want to quickly develop and deliver products and services to the market. But neither is it possible to have all possible skills (sometimes 10’s of skills) in one team because organizations simply don’t have that many people with certain skills.

In this episode, we talk about the possible team topologies, and how each of those affects our ability to deliver in different organizations.

How we set up teams directly affects the quality of the software teams deliver

Continue reading BONUS: How to setup Agile and DevOps teams, Team Topologies interview with Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais