Survey Results: Scrum Master Problem Dealing

TL;DR: Scrum Master Problem Dealing — The Survey Results

Scrum Master Problem Dealing: We all know it; changing the way we work is extremely difficult. It requires us to find novel solutions to wicked challenges, to deal with cultural baggage (‘the way we do things here’) and to bring along the people needed to make a change successful. And yet, this difficult challenge is a core responsibility of Scrum Masters: How can your organization work effectively with Scrum if it is not considering the entire system?

But how do Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches go about this? What strategies do they use to change the system? Who are their most important allies? And what else can we learn from them?

We teamed up with The Liberators to identify what works in the field. We gathered both quantitative as well as qualitative data from a survey completed by over 200 participants.

Survey Results: Scrum Master Problem Dealing — Age of Product
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Agile Failure Patterns in Organizations 2.0

TL;DR: Agile Failure Patterns — Why Agile is Simple and Complex at the Same Time

Agile failure seems to be increasingly more prominent nowadays despite all the efforts undertaken by numerous organization embarking on their journeys to become agile.

The funny thing is: Who would disagree that the four core principles of the Agile Manifesto

  1. Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
  2. Working software over comprehensive documentation
  3. Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
  4. Responding to change over following a plan

— are derived from applying common sense to a challenging problem? Moreover, the application of those principles might be suited to fix numerous organizational dysfunctions and reduce an error-prone and complex social setting to maybe just a complicated one?

Age of Product: Agile Failure Patterns in Organizations
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Team Building Mental Models

TL;DR: Team Building Mental Models

Team building has always been a challenge, not just since the advent of agile frameworks and the resulting emphasis on self-organization, engagement, and achieving a valuable objective. This post covers four team building mental models — or concepts — that have proven useful in understanding the context of creating agile teams: from Taylorism to Tuckman to Lencioni to Dan Pink.

Team Building Mental Models — Age of Product
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Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations [Review]

TL;DR: Accelerate

Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim latest book Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations [advertising] describes the factors that drive high-performing tech organizations, derived from the data that has been aggregated with the State of DevOps Report since 2014.

Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations

Accelerate” [advertising] is a must-read book for anyone involved in building agile organizations and teams. It lays out a path to success based on a statistical analysis of data. It also puts an end to the popular narrative that ’becoming agile’ is somehow a fuzzy process. The data shows that there are patterns at all levels that successful agile organizations share.

In other words: becoming agile can be data-driven. (A hypothesis that I shared in How to Measure Agility of Organizations and Teams—The Results of the Agile Maturity Survey earlier.)

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Reverse Retrospective — Aligning Scrum Team and Scrum Master

TL;DR: The Reverse Retrospective

Are you—as a scrum master or agile coach—experiencing more communication kerfuffles with “your” team? Is its speed of improvement stalling? Are you under the impression that the team is slipping back into old habits and patterns? Maybe, it is time to run a reverse retrospective where you share your observations with the team.

Learn how to run a reverse retrospective to realign with your scrum team.

Reverse Retrospective — Aligning Scrum Team and Scrum Master
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