Konstantin Ribel: Rebuilding Scrum Team Dynamics To Overcome Remote Work Anti-Patterns

Konstantin recounts a team’s struggle rooted in prioritizing individual tasks over collective effort. Daily meetings centered on status updates fostered a fragmented and siloed work environment. The team working remote made the issue even worse, making it hard to have face-to-face interaction and pair-working. All of these patterns resulted in underperformance. Konstantin advises regular team gatherings, emphasizing the importance of on-site collaboration. He underscores the human element, urging teams to function cohesively as people.

Featured Book Of The Week: The Miracle Morning by Hal Erold

In this segment, Konstantin delves into how his morning routine, inspired by “The Miracle Morning,” by Hal Erold has profoundly influenced his role as a Scrum Master. He emphasizes the critical link between personal and professional development, crediting the book “Extreme Programming Explained” for its condensed wisdom. Konstantin highlights Kent Beck’s mantra of “do more of what works” and expresses a preference for pair working, acknowledging its occasional impracticality. He consistently applies the insights gained from this book, advocating against the anti-pattern of delayed feedback in his work with teams.

Transform Your Agile Teams with Hard-Earned Lessons from Super-Experienced Scrum Masters

Do you wish you had decades of experience? Learn from the Best Scrum Masters In The World, Today! The Tips from the Trenches – Scrum Master edition audiobook includes hours of audio interviews with SM’s that have decades of experience: from Mike Cohn to Linda Rising, Christopher Avery, and many more. Super-experienced Scrum Masters share their hard-earned lessons with you. Learn those today, make your teams awesome!

About Konstantin Ribel

Konstantin drives organizational success through innovative thinking, simplifying processes, and building high-performing teams. With a strong track record in change management and process optimization, he leads agile transformations and applies systems thinking for adaptable, thriving businesses in dynamic industries.

You can link with Konstantin Ribel 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

Johannes Lindman: Failing Safely, Tips for Successfully Implementing Extreme Programming in a Team Environment

In this podcast episode, Johannes shares his experience with extreme programming and test-driven development. Johannes recounts his experience working with a team where he assumed a lot of things about their needs and desires. He quickly realized that his eagerness to bring his own value to the table was getting in the way of the team’s success. Johannes learned that it is essential to listen and watch the team and to ensure that they are asking for help rather than assuming that he knew what they needed. He advises that it is essential to slow down, be humble, and not be pushy.

Johannes also shares several tips for helping teams to fail safely, turning up the volume on transparency, and showing small failures. He notes that it is important to reflect on what is happening and to determine if the possible failure is catastrophic or not. If it is not catastrophic, then it is best to let it go and be patient for the right moment.

The inspiring story of how a failing hospital turned things around with Agile and Lean

Recovering from failure, or difficult moments is a critical skill for Scrum Masters. Not only because of us, but also because the teams, and stakeholders we work with will also face these moments! We need inspiring stories to help them, and ourselves! The Bungsu Story, is an inspiring story by Marcus Hammarberg which shows how a Coach can help organizations recover even from the most disastrous situations! Learn how Marcus helped The Bungsu, a hospital in Indonesia, recover from near-bankruptcy, twice! Using Lean and Agile methods to rebuild an organization and a team! An inspiring story you need to know about! Buy the book on Amazon: The Bungsu Story – How Lean and Kanban Saved a Small Hospital in Indonesia. Twice. and Can Help You Reshape Work in Your Company.

About Johannes Lindman

Despite many years of experience Johannes still learns new things every day in order to stay relevant. This aligns with his curiosity on life and people.

You can link with Johannes Lindman on LinkedIn.

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.

John Albrecht: Struggling and discovering the true meaning of Servant Leadership for Scrum Masters

The story that John shares with us, starts when Project Management transformations were a thing. He went through a PRINCE2 adoption process, which led to the emergence of the inevitable silos. John started searching for better alternatives and found Extreme Programming, Scrum and Kanban. As he tried to play the servant leader role that comes with Scrum, however, he discovered that there’s a good and a bad way to be a servant leader. Listen in to learn when to stop serving, and when to be a true leader! 

About John Albrecht

Agile Person, for the team by the team, used to be a developer. Got into Agile via Extreme Programming (XP), then Kanban, then Scrum. Some of his key ideas are Principles over Practices, #noestimates, love working with teams and organizations, the softer side, finding what they and customers need and what works for them.

You can link with John Albrecht on LinkedIn and connect with John Albrecht on Twitter.

You can learn more about John Albrecht’s work at Scrum Lake, and All Agile websites.

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