Illustrated Agile
An important dynamic of becoming a fluid and well-functioning Scrum team is when team members are continuously pulling. As opposed to being pushed or waiting to be pushed, the team is in constant motion, pulling from a queue of features that should deliver value to customers. The product owner establishes the queue of features by […]
Hiring a Scrum Master? Interviewing a Scrum Master? Here are 28 interview questions or scenarios to consider: Phone Interview Questions I would use these questions to quickly determine if a candidate has a base understanding of Scrum and should be brought in for in-person interviews. In two minutes or so and at a high level, describe […]
One of the attributes of a healthy Agile organization are teams being in a state of flow. You can easily tell when a team is in flow. There is a sense of purpose and vision, there is very little stress, there is laughter and comraderie. They are committed to each other, and when a challenge […]
I believe retrospectives can be a powerful component to building an organization focused on agility and continuous improvement. But beyond asking what we can do better and what we should stop doing, the retrospective can also become a time of acknowledgment and an oasis in an otherwise stressful and demanding world. First, the retrospective can […]
Leadership is hard and the leadership journey is littered with many lessons learned along the way. While its obvious leaders are human and will always make mistakes, leadership behavior will always have a direct impact on the well-being and satisfaction of the people they are privileged to lead. It’s been said people don’t leave organizations, they leave […]
As we continue our Agility transformation, we have been establishing how our leadership teams will engage with our product teams now that we have become an Agile organization. We have focused primarily on when and how organizational vision is created by senior leadership and how that vision is translated to our product teams with the […]
In an earlier post explaining our Agile Ecosystem, I mentioned the use of communities of practice as an integral part of an Agile organization. Well-functioning communities, with clear vision, autonomy, and focus, can become an important component in sustaining your transformation to Agility and the engine for continuous process improvement. Communities of practice are domain-based […]
One of my Scrum Masters used Retrospective Cookies from @weisbart this morning. These fortune cookies are made with thought-provoking questions inside and are delivered in a Chinese quart container. The dialog that ensued was vibrant and meaningful and having a little snack during the meeting doesn’t hurt either. Give them a try if your retrospectives […]
Meetings, meetings. I hear complaints about meetings just about every day including, believe it or not, Agile or Scrum meetings. Too many, too long, too boring, too many slides, too many people, too few people, and the most popular, uninterested meeting participants typing away with laptops or with mobile phones in hand. In thinking about […]
When we were heading into the last phase of our transformation to Agilty, an ecosystem began to emerge. At the time, I wasn’t sure if this was intentional but nonetheless, there it was. Simple, focused, and obvious. I set out to map this ecosystem and before too long this sketch emerged. With this post, I’ll […]
Your team has struggled for the past couple sprints with production deployments having not gone smoothly. Defects are being reported and perhaps some complaints are creeping in around a poor customer experience. Throw in a couple rollbacks or hot-fixes and a trend is clearly starting to emerge. Developing software is not easy…throw in a complex […]
Last year, I posted the original four questions that every good Scrum Master should be asking. With a few more months under our belt and having the opportunity to observe 12 product teams with 7 Scrum Masters every day, I have been able to glean four more questions for Scrum Masters to be asking themselves. […]