Posts Tagged ‘agile coaching’
One 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 MoreScrum Handbook: Servant Leadership And Scrum Mastering
Scrum Mastering is a servant-leadership role. That’s a given. The phrase servant leader, first coined by Robert K. Greenleaf in his groundbreaking essay, The Servant as Leader, defined the role as focusing “primarily on the growth and well-being of people and the communities to which they belong. While traditional leadership generally involves the accumulation and exercise of power by one at the ‘top of the pyramid,’ servant leadership is different.”
Read MoreWhat Makes A Good Stakeholder?
Stakeholders are the reason we develop Product in the first place. Stakeholders are those people that have needs, wants, and desires. (In an IT setting, these may be referred to as desirements, a processing task or type of output that is desired, but not absolutely necessary.) As a Scrum Team, we are trying to identify work that satisfies our Stakeholders.
Read More2 Very Compelling Reasons To Never Ever Have The Boss Be The ScrumMaster
Boss’s Day is October 16th. Regardless of how you commemorate this Hallmark card-inspired holiday, it goes without saying that the Boss plays a significant role in your Agile work environment. It also goes without saying that being a successful ScrumMaster[1] is hard. The ScrumMaster’s ability to be the eyes and ears of the Team requires a particular skill set.
Read MoreHow To Solve Toxic Team Norms
How is it that Teams sometimes encourage people to be less accountable, in the guise of caring for them? As Dan Rawsthorne and Doug Shimp described in The Well-Formed Team™, Team Members do whatever chores are needed to support the work they are supposed to be doing, and are given slack but don’t get to slack off.
Read MoreThe Rise and Fall of Insurgent Scrum
Back in January, I identified three originators of an organization’s move to Scrum: a top-down initiative, a move from the middle outward, or a bottom-up approach called Organic Scrum. I laid out 3 organizational requirements for Organic Scrum to thrive. There is, however, another way in which Scrum can get started in an organization…
Read MoreAgile Consulting: A Tale of Two Risks
My work as an Agile Consultant comes in many shapes and sizes. In this consultant role, I work on the skills and standards needed for my clients to be proficient in their line of work. On this particular occasion, I was working with a client (we’ll call this client Acme Marketing and Technology) who delivers technology and marketing services in a Scrum/Agile-like manner…
Read MoreThe 3 Major Risks Of Skipping Retros
Ahhh….the New Year. You can practically smell the eagerness and enthusiasm of resolutions in the air. It’s time to start fresh, set some personal and professional goals, and give them the old college try until…ah…around January 10th or so. What happens around January 10th?
Read MoreThe Trouble with Agile
As our thoughts turn towards closing out the year, I am struck by the reoccurring theme that rose to the surface during several of my Agile/Scrum training engagements. Every one of these engagements began with one or more standard Agile/Scrum training courses, which is always a good thing. The disturbing part was the degree to which the training revealed…
Read More7 Signs Your Team Needs an Outside Coach
As a Coach called into an organization to do something very specific, say, help get teams over the hump on continuous deployment or test-driven development or acceptance test-driven development or something like that, a conversation with the sponsor frequently goes something like this…
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