Last week, about 30 members of the Hands-on Agile community in Berlin came together to identify opportunities for personal and professional growth for the coming year, using Liberating Structures’ Ecocycle Planning in the process, to further your Scrum Master career 2020.
Read on and learn in this post what opportunities you have to advance your career as a Scrum Master or agile coach in the next year.
Join the Agile Camp Berlin and experience two energizing days with 200 agile peers focusing on community, sharing, and learning. We will practice games and exercises—from Liberating Structures to paper snowflakes and airplanes to building castles with 50 other folks you have never met in your life. We will share tips & tricks, lessons learned, war stories from the agile trenches, and enjoy the company of 200 like-minded people at a perfect venue for our purpose: the Evangelische Schule Berlin Zentrum, one of twelve organizations that Frédéric Laloux describes in his book “Reinventing Organizations.”
TL; DR: The Agile Movers & Shakers Interview with Viktor Cessan
Welcome to the Agile Movers & Shakers interview series. Today’s guest is Viktor Cessan. Viktor has dedicated his career to helping companies consciously design organizations that keep motivation, engagement, and performance levels high. In the 14 years since he started working with Agile methodologies, he has helped companies such as Spotify, H&M, King, Avanza Bank, Telenor, and Sony Ericsson work more effectively.
Viktor has coached teams of as few as 5 members to organizations with more than 200 people, enabling them to greatly improve their effectiveness as well as levels of happiness and well-being. He specializes in working with executive teams to help implement company-wide agile transformation.
Viktor runs training and workshops on a wide variety of topics such as agile team dynamics, product ownership, leadership, and management. His case study detailing his work with Avanza’s agile transformation has been downloaded and shared thousands of times.
Viktor holds a diploma in professional coaching (ICF), is a Certified Scrum Professional (CSP), Certified Scrum Master (CSM), and Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO). And in addition, he has extensive experience in/with FIRO, SCARF, Virginia Satir’s work, and Tuckman’s and IMGD.
During this Liberating Structures strategy for Scrum meetup we addressed dealing with uncertainty — a particularly useful skill in highly competitive markets. Learn more about how to train and grow the resilience of your team when dealing with the unexpected.
There has never been a shortage of articles claiming that Agile is either dead, failing, disrespectful, or useless, with authors ranging from respected signatories of the Agile Manifesto to click baiters to people who never experienced the real thing in the first thus lacking a standard for comparison. (See the links below.)
The question from my perspective, though, is: Have we finally have reached peak agile?
TL; DR: Faking Agile Metrics — An Eye-Opening Exercise
Imagine you’re a Scrum Master and the line manager of your team believes that the best sign for a successful agile transformation is a steady increase in the Scrum Team’s velocity. Moreover, if the team fails to deliver on that metric something is wrong with the Scrum Team. Alternatively, something is wrong with you as you are the Scrum Master and hence responsible for the team’s performance. (Apparently, not faking agile metrics, or being transparent in this case, does not seem to be valued here.)
Learn more about how to coach these kinds of line managers and help them overcome their preference for the industrial past with a simple exercise on how to cook the agile books.