Posts Tagged ‘scrummaster’
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How Scrum’s ‘Guardrails’ Protect Teams From Chaos
As we stated before, Scrum is for developing in Complicated/Complex environments. This ties nicely to the Cynefin (ku-NEV-in) framework, which breaks Decision-Space into four areas: Clear, Complicated, Complex, and Chaotic. The detailed definitions aren’t important to us right now; the only thing we need to know is that Chaos is very bad. Chaos makes things…
Read More6 Signals of Collective Conflict Avoidance
The primary goal of Scrum Mastering[1] is to enable a Well-Formed Team™ (WFT). Ideally, a Well-Formed Team[2] would take on most of its own facilitation and coaching. However, some Teams get stuck in earlier stages of maturity that we describe as Collective Conflict Avoidance. Collective Avoidance is a norm that needs to be thoughtfully and…
Read MoreA Day In The Life Of A ScrumMaster
The daily life of a ScrumMaster is anything but mundane. Play along with one ScrumMaster as she facilitates, plans, and runs interference all in the name of becoming a Well-Formed Team™.
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 MoreTop 10 Tips To Becoming A Better PO
Seasoned PO’s (Product Owners) share a certain kinship bred from their time spent navigating the PO world; a world full of balancing, prioritizing and clarifying. We decided to capture their PO knowledge and ask them, “What do you know now that you wish you had known when you were a new PO?” From this question came a glut of useful, real-world tips that we offer to you. We present to you, our top 10 tips to becoming a better PO.
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 MoreThe PO and SM: A Match Made in Agile
Every year as the middle of February approaches, our world is taken over by little red hearts, cherubic cupids hoisting arrows and foil wrapped drugstore chocolates. The heavily scented fragrance of Valentine’s Day is in the air. For us at 3Back, even though the holiday has come and gone, our thoughts turn to partnerships that stand the test of time; a Scrummy yin and yang where complementary forces interact to create something great. We think we found it.
Read MoreSHHHHH!!! 5 Ways to Quiet Organizational Noise
Throughout our day, we experience an inordinate amount of noise. Whether it’s the garbage truck barreling down our road at 5 am, the dog that excitedly greets every passerby or the co-worker’s emphatic phone conversations on the other side of the paper-thin cubicle wall, noise is everywhere.
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 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 MoreSo What Is Technical Debt in Scrum, Anyways?
Technical Debt is what makes code hard to work with. It is an invisible killer of software and must be aggressively managed. In this post, I define Technical Debt and describe some of the issues…
Read MoreThe 3 Key Ingredients to Successfully Grow Organic Scrum
Whenever I step into a coaching engagement, one of the first pieces of information I track down is where the initiative for the move to Scrum originated.
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