CHOW #127 – Brand Image of Scrum Masters
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the […]
Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do […]
Sprint Planning in distributed teams… Patterns… SAFe
The title may have intrigued you, here is how it evolved. A few teams that I coach wanted to know about Scaling Agile and particularly Scaled Agile Framework and I was thinking on how best to introduce that in a contextual manner. The patterns I had seen emerge during my coaching interactions with the teams […]
Enabling self-organization of Agile teams
As an agile coach, I knew how self-organization manifests itself in various ceremonies. There is a brilliant blog by JV – one of my colleagues at PM Power – that elucidates the behavior of self-organizing teams in various ceremonies. I would observe the behavior of the team in many of these ceremonies and guide the […]
Being Mindful or being concerned- Part II
In Part I of this blog – I had looked at a possible way of construing the tango of being mindful and being concerned about risk. So, it seems like that the cocktail of being mindful and also being concerned about risk, appears explosive. So, is there a possibly different approach to being mindful and still […]
Being Mindful or being concerned about Risk
When we notice the literature and trends in management, there’s a huge shift towards mindful leadership. When you reach out to the millennial workforce, they more than the earlier generation, are looking for the leadership to be mindful. So what impact could it have on some areas like risk management? Is it going to be […]
Motivating teams
A frequent question or topic of discussion with Scrum Masters, in course of coaching, is on motivation. How does one motivate the team members? A difficult question, which does not have “a” right answer/ approach. As a leader, one needs to deliver what is expected of him or her, this delivery is done by the […]
Seven pillars of Servant Leadership
Often I get asked by Scrum Masters, who are in the process of adopting Agile Scrum, on references to servant leadership. How should one go about changing from “command and control style” to “servant leadership”. I used to share relevant examples from my experiences that has helped teams self-organize. Highlight instances, based on my observations […]
Communicating with the End in Mind
Most of us are familiar with the Basic Communication Model – with sender, channel and receiver. We all understand that the responsibility for effective communication rests with both parties, with a slight onus on the sender. What I have experienced is that by including an element, that focuses on the outcome, enhances the effectiveness of […]
Keeping Daily Scrum Focused (2)
Here is an update from Rekha, one of the team member from the teams I was coaching. I am working on TSK-206, I took the build, tried to test on ST-OS1 setup, was unable to test. Then I tried ST-OS3, then Nithin told me that he had changed the environment to test earlier build, he […]