Posts by Marc Applebaum, PhD
Is Anonymous Feedback Useful?
How does feedback happen on your Team? A Scrum Team member recently told me that she receives feedback anonymously from her Teammates and the business as a whole, so she’s never told who made what comment in their feedback process—that’s normal in their organization. As someone who has facilitated numerous feedback processes, this surprised me…
Read More
What Happened to my Team?
COVID-19’s Impact on Team Health
COVID-19: A silver lining? In the pandemic’s early days, a Team Leader told me, with an obvious sense of relief, that his people were doing really well despite the turmoil. Productivity had actually increased after the Team’s shift to working from home. They were working hard–it seemed like the transition had definitely improved the Team’s…
Read MoreScrum Guide: A Sacred Text?
As practitioners, the Scrum Guide is an important document and embodies core shared values, aims, and language. With any important, foundational text, the question comes up: how should we relate to it? Specifically: should we view the Scrum Guide as something like a Sacred Text, or in some other way? By “Sacred Text,” we mean…
Read MoreWhen A Team Graduates From Its Coach
When a Dev team, their Agile Coach, and Team Facilitator are working well together, it’s a great thing to see! The Agile Coach helps a number of teams to strengthen their use of Scrum, improve technical skills, and identify a team kaizen each Sprint. Each of these teams has a Facilitator whose role is to…
Read MoreZombie Standups (And How to Bring them Back to Life)
Are you Trapped in a Zombie Standup? Do you find yourself tuning out during Standup (Daily Scrum)? Do you feel like everybody’s monotonously reciting laundry list answers to the Three Questions: what you worked on yesterday, what you’re working on today, and…maybe…what impediments you’ve run into? When it’s your turn, do you find yourself facing…
Read MoreLeader-less Scrum?
Is your Scrum vocabulary missing the word “leader”? Is the idea of recognized leaders something you think belongs to the waterfall world, not agile? Some people were trained that in Scrum the only acceptable uses of leader refer the Scrum Master’s servant leadership or Dev team members’ situational leadership. Do you have a vague sense…
Read MoreSleepwalking Through Scrum
How do we recognize when the way we’re “doing Scrum” is impeding our Agility? Two alternative scenarios are possible: The Team has fully internalized Agile practice in the past but now seems to be sleepwalking through the Ceremonies: the Team’s Agile practice has gotten stale, we’re sleepwalking through Scrum. The Team hasn’t experienced Agile practice…
Read MoreOne Step Back, Two Steps Forward
We were humming along as a Team; suddenly it feels like everybody’s got two left feet. What’s going on? Sometimes when a Team hits a rough patch, after a period of really working well together, it’s hard to understand what went wrong? We’ve faced tough challenges before… this feels different.
Read MoreTo Empower Your Scrum Teams, Provide Mission Protection
Scrum coaching and training usually focuses on strengthening your Dev Teams’ collaboration, empowering Scrum Mastering and Product Ownership. These ingredients are all required for Scrum Teams to achieve high-quality results. But a key ingredient is missing in creating the conditions for success: what 3Back calls Mission Protection.
Read MoreTo Build Trust, Risk Being Candid
Search Google Books on trust and candor and the first listings you’ll get are business examples. Why? Because for a Team to respond agilely, we need to be candid with each other and have a basic trust in each other. Naturally, we’ve all experienced being on a Team where this wasn’t the case, and our whole Team was held back as a result.
Read MoreReawakening Retros: Good Habits Versus Bad Routines
“We had a few good Retrospectives, but they stopped working;” “I don’t know what the point of this is anymore;” “Maybe this Retro thing was a good idea once, but we need to try something else.” “Can we just finish this so we can get back to work?” These are the kinds of things we say when a repeating process like Team Retrospectives, that used to work or maybe seemed to work once, has stopped feeling useful.
Read MoreLeading A Team From The I-Stage To The We-Stage
Teams, like people, grow through developmental stages. I would like to focus on one of the key challenges a Team faces: moving from the I-Stage (where everybody is focused on personal knowledge and expertise) to the We-Stage (where the group becomes a genuine Team that is synergizing their collective abilities).
Read More