velocity Archives - Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast

Zach Stone: Evolving Our Perspective On Scrum Master Success With Experience

In this episode, Zach discusses his evolving perspective on success as a Scrum Master. Initially valuing predictability, he now prioritizes the impact of Scrum events over strict adherence. He acknowledges the risk of losing sight of purpose when fixating on predictability and velocity. Shifting from an adherence mindset to a goal-oriented, customer-centric approach, Zach emphasizes the importance of clear product goals in boosting team motivation. Success, for him, is now defined by the meaningful impact achieved through Scrum events, aligning teams with overarching objectives and driving tangible results.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The Rosebud and Thorn Retrospective Format

In this episode, Zach shares his preferred retrospective format, the “Rosebud and Thorn.” He appreciates its simplicity and authenticity, as it prompts participants to share both positive and challenging aspects. The retrospective serves as a communication gauge for the team, revealing their dynamics and communication quality. Zach emphasizes the format’s value in assessing team functioning throughout the sprint. Additionally, he advises adapting facilitation strategies for remote sessions, especially those lacking camera visibility, ensuring effective retrospectives regardless of the setting. The “Rosebud and Thorn” emerges as a powerful tool for insightful and meaningful reflections.

How can I, as a Scrum Master, supercharge my facilitation?

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About Zach Stone

Zach has worked as a process facilitator for over 17 years, as a specialist in behavioral science. He co-founded a firm that uses techniques to rebuild war zones for organizational dynamics. He has been an agilist for the past 7 years and was recently a speaker at the Global Scrum Conference. He lives in Santa Fe with his Wife and spends his time exploring canyons and trails.

You can link with Zach Stone on LinkedIn.

Nousheen Manzoor: Reflecting on success for a Scrum Master, without getting stuck on velocity as a metric

Velocity can be a tempting metric for Scrum Masters to follow, but that’s no measure of success as Nousheen reminds us. In this segment, we talk about how important it is to create an environment where the team itself can work on improving their performance, and how to include 3rd party (e.g. a client) feedback in your own assessment as a Scrum Master.

Featured Retrospective Format for the Week: The WADE Matrix, a great retrospective for the end of a tough project

In this segment, we talk about the WADE Matrix retrospective format, which can be used as an in depth reflection and a closure technique for a project that just ended. In this segment, we also talk about some techniques you can use to help a team create a lot of ideas in a retrospective, even if they are usually silent.

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About Nousheen Manzoor

Nousheen believes that the future of leadership is kindness and empathy, and the same goes for any role which involves individuals and teams, like the Scrum Master role!

You can link with Nousheen Manzoor on LinkedIn.

Robbie Ross: The anti-patterns in Scrum teams that focus on velocity

Very often teams compare themselves to other teams. Even when successful, the comparison is inevitable, and sometimes even pushed/fostered by stakeholders. Robbie shares a story of a team that got stuck in the comparison of velocity with another team. And even if the team was working great, they were still trying to “achieve” the same number of story points that the other team was doing. Even when asked not to focus on the number, the team worked on getting their velocity higher, and higher, but not because they were working better, just because they were assigning more story points to the same work! In this episode, we discuss this and other anti-patterns that emerge when teams start focusing on the velocity, rather than the impact of the work they have ahead.

Featured Book of the Week: Scrum, the art of doing twice the work in half the time by Sutherland

In Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, by Sutherland Robbie found an inspiring book that helped him find the Scrum Master career. He describes the book as filled with solutions and valuable even for people with significant experience!

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 Robbie Ross

Robbie is an Agile Practice Manager at Jumar Technology with a passion for working with and empowering teams to foster an Agile environment at scale. He’s also a Certified Scrum Master, Kanban practitioner and Agile community member helping teams release their genuine potential to deliver value. Quite a career shift since completing a Sports Science degree at University.

You can link with Robbie Ross on LinkedIn and connect with Robbie Ross on Twitter.

Tony Richards: Metrics for Agile teams, and how to avoid the velocity metric trap

Stop me if you have heard this before. There was once upon a time a company that was working well, and leadership, wanting to make it even better started following up team velocity… Already? Well, that’s expected, this is a very common anti-pattern (the velocity tunnel vision). But this episode goes into a deeper discussion of what anti-pattern, and most importantly, what Scrum Masters can do to get out of that. We discuss metrics, their impact, and which to use when working with Agile teams.

Featured Book for the Week: An Everyone Culture by Kegan et al.

In An Everyone Culture: Becoming a Deliberately Developmental Organization by Kegan et al., Tony found an insightful description of a leadership model that focuses on the potential of an organization, on how to improve the chances for success in any organization.

About Tony Richards

Tony coaches Agile teams across the UK and currently serves as program advisor to the Scrum Alliance. His most recent client is applying Scrum and Kanban in the engineering and production of physical goods.

Tony is also in the organizer team for the Scrum Gathering in sunny Lisbon this year, and he’s busy working with a great team of volunteers to review and build a program of great talks and workshops.

You can link with Tony Richards on LinkedIn and connect with Tony Richards on Twitter.