Peer Recruiting is the new hiring: Shortly, all creative, technology-based organizations will need to abandon the command & control structures that served the industrial world of the 20th century so well. Instead, they will reorganize themselves around autonomous teams to deal with the complexity and pace of innovation of the 21st century.
In such an agile world, recruiting will become a team decision, and the “human resources” department’s role will change into a supportive one. Recruiters will need to become servant leaders or facilitators, guiding the peer recruiting process.
The following guide to peer recruiting is based on my experience in participating in recruiting Scrum Team members over the last ten years. This first article will cover the Scrum Master role.
TL; DR: Self-Organization Does Not Work, Tools Don’t Matter—Food for Agile Thought #282
Welcome to the 282nd edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 30,507 peers. This week, we learn why self-organization does not work when your goal is creating a high-performance organization. We receive a free ebook on how to shift an organization’s focus from projects to products, and we ask: How much lean is in today’s “Agile?”
We then figure out how to breathe life into your Product (Development) Backlog by removing all ideas from it; we get advice on dealing with the executor, the manager, and the visionary among founders, and we address product managers’ obsession with tools.
Lastly, we discuss pragmatic, proven, and sometimes counter-intuitive approaches to develop faster.
Welcome to the Scrum Guide Reordered Audiobook Download Page
The Scrum Guide Reordered audiobook is based on about 95 percent of the text of the Scrum Guide 2020, extending its original structure by adding additional categories, for example, on self-management, commitments, or accountability. The audiobook of the Scrum Guide 2020 Reordered is a 22-minute long MP3 file. We are planning to make it available on other platforms, too.
The audio version of the SG 2020 Reordered allows you to get a first understanding of Scrum-related questions in a convenient manner—by listening to the content. For example, SG 2020 Reordered audiobook is good at relating specific topics—say “stakeholder”—with Scrum first principles such as Scrum Values, or empiricism.
TL; DR: Product-Led Companies, #NoProjects—Food for Agile Thought #281
Welcome to the 281st edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 30,412 peers. This week, we learn to identify product-led companies; we reflect on the effects of top-down decisions on imposing agile frameworks without identifying problems first, and we remind us of signs that an organization lacks the ‘agile mindset’ yet pretends to be agile.
We then gain insight into how to innovate within Google after being acquired—or not. We suggest embracing Pareto’s principle to execute an effective product strategy by ruthless prioritization, and we acknowledge the importance of picking appropriate metrics to guide our product teams to success.
Lastly, we appreciate introducing critical root cause analysis techniques, from ‘5 Whys’ to ‘Pareto Analysis.’
Scrum has proven to be an effective product delivery framework for all sorts of products. However, Scrum is equally well suited to build the wrong product efficiently as its Achilles heel has always been the product discovery part. What product discovery part, you may think now. And this is precisely the point: The Product Owner miraculously identifies what is the best way to proceed as a Scrum Team by managing the Product Backlog. How that is supposed to happen is nowhere described in the Scrum Guide. Consequently, when everyone is for themselves, product discovery anti-patterns emerge.
From sunk costs, HIPPO-ism, my-budget-my-features to self-fulfilling prophecies — learn more about the numerous product discovery anti-patterns that can manifest themselves when you try to fill Scrum’s product discovery void.
TL; DR: Managing Complexity, Difficult People on Software Projects—Food for Agile Thought #280
Welcome to the 280th edition of the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, shared with 30,344 peers. This week, we discover almost 50 different personality types you may encounter on software teams while managing complexity; we have a personal view on what success to a Scrum Master means, and we learn about the key takeaways from a development team’s transition from Scrum to Basecamp’s Shape Up.
We then delve into research outlining characteristics of organizations and tasks best suited to Agile. We also talk about chasing innovation, why it needs to be sustainable and the risks of taking it too far, and we embrace a one-hour virtual pre-mortem workshop before our team is heading into a high-stakes project.
Lastly, we download the brand-new free field guide on how to deal with complexity and uncertainty—courtesy of the EU’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) and Cognitive Edge.
