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Elly Griffith-Ward: How to help an overwhelmed team deliver! Flow lessons for Scrum teams

The team Elly was working with had a very large number of items in progress (high WIP). This was also a result of the team being under a lot of pressure to deliver. The team was motivated to deliver, but was also feeling down because of the inability to deliver all they wanted, when they wanted. Elly started to help the team by understanding their context, and then trying to understand where the work was being held up. She started learning Value-Stream-Mapping, a technique that helped identify the bottlenecks, something she had learned about in the book The Goal by Goldratt. Through that research work, Elly found out some options to improve the flow of work for that team. Listen in to learn what those were, and what technique she used to help the team! In this segment, we talk about the concept of Shifting Left, and Extreme Programming.

Featured Book of the Week: Nonviolent Communication by Rosenberger

In Nonviolent Communication by Rosenberger, Elly found a book that helped her as a Scrum Master, but also in other aspects of her life. The book offers a model of communication that tries to focus on resolving conflicts, and helps us become more self-aware of how we communicate with others. In this segment, we also talk about the hand-brain model, and the two thinking/acting systems (System 1 and System 2) that Kahneman describes in the book Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow.

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 Elly Griffith-Ward

Elly is an Agile Coach at a major e-commerce company. Previously in user research (and a royal food historian). She aims to 1) improve the experience of work through reducing mental load, improving communication and forming strong teams 2) shift the focus from managing the worker to managing the work by focusing on flow and waste.

You can link with Elly Griffith-Ward on LinkedIn and connect with Elly Griffith-Ward on Twitter.

Bevan Williams: Helping an organization increase their speed with a change process you can use

When Bevan started working with this organization, he heard the CEO say that the development was too slow. So the change started with a clear mandate, which Bevan and the team took on and started working with. They used tools like Value Stream Mapping, and went through a process to involve the teams in defining and ultimately overcoming their slowness. In this episode, we refer to Clean Language and Systemic Modelling by Caitlin Walker.

About Bevan Williams

Bevan is an Agile Coach & Trainer at Think Agile. His career has been driven by his passion of creating inclusive environments where people can be at their best. 

You can link with Bevan Williams on LinkedIn and connect with Bevan Williams on Twitter.

Leland Newson: Introducing change in a Scrum team with Lean and Value Stream Mapping

While trying to help a team, Leland discovered a set of tools and ideas that helped him and the team find a new way to work that improved their performance. Focusing on improving the flow in the team, became a directed change approach that helped the team improve, and at the same time became a vehicle for introducing change in the team.

In this episode, we refer to: 

About Leland Newson

Leland is a SAFe Release Train Engineer and servant leader who is passionate about helping improve the work environment and helping teams uncover better ways to development software. He focuses on collaboration, shortening feedback loops, improving the flow of work through the system and increasing the team’s adaptability so they can quickly respond to changes and satisfy customers through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.

You can link with Leland Newson on LinkedIn and connect with Leland Newson on Twitter.

BONUS: Manuel Pais interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 4

How do we get started with Continuous Delivery? Manuel suggests that we run a Value Stream Mapping session with all the teams involved in the release process to learn about the “current state” of the release process. 

We also review the most common challenges and blocks for teams that are starting to adopt Continuous Delivery. 

Read on to learn about the different motivations businesses have to adopt Continuous Delivery, and Manuel’s 3 steps from bi-weekly release to Continuous Delivery.

Continue reading BONUS: Manuel Pais interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 4

BONUS: Morten Herman interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 3

Morten’s adoption story starts with a team at eBay Denmark. The team had started working in a more continuous mode, but there was a lot of “release friction” as Morten calls it. You are probably familiar with that friction: it takes a long time to release; the site needed to be “closed” for every release; the team would need to come in at night during the weekend, etc. 

That’s the reality for many teams. No surprise they prefer to release less often. In this segment, we explore that story, and also the steps the team took to go from “high friction” to “no friction”. 

Read more to find out how Dev and Ops are different and why that matters when adopting Continous Delivery.

Continue reading BONUS: Morten Herman interview – Continuous Delivery for Scrum teams, Part 3

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Motivate your team with the right metrics, and the right way to visualize and track them. Marcus presents a detailed How-To document based on his experience at The Bungsu Hospital
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Read about Visualization and TRANSFORM The way your team works
A moving story of how work at the Bungsu Hospital was transformed by a simple tool that you can use to help your team.
Read about Visualization and TRANSFORM The way your team works