Spikes And Stories

Scrum tips and agile insights from a Silicon Valley agile coach

A Guide to Surviving Your First (Or Hundredth) Retro

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Ask most Scrum Masters, and they’ll tell you their favorite event is the retro.  It’s rewarding to create space for learning or to inspire a conversation between team members as they discover brilliant, new ways of working together.  And you’d think that after the 750+ retros that I’ve facilitated that I’d have it down to a science.  I don’t.  Humans always find a way to surprise me.

Do you know who has it worse though?  New facilitators.  And although I’ve written about retros previously, it’s mostly been about theory.  Not today though.  Today, let’s talk practical.  Below is a list of questions I ask myself as I prepare for every retro.

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What’s Your North Star?

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What’s my plan?  That’s a question I was asked recently.  It occurred to me in that moment that I didn’t have one.  Sure.  I had a vision, I knew the next few steps, and I knew where I wanted my teams to get.  However, the longer term was fuzzy, and it depended on how a few bets panned out. Those bets would tell me if I should amplify or dampen something we were doing.  So if I didn’t have a plan, what did I have?

I realized what I had instead was a north star.  Well, maybe a few of them.  Or maybe they’re better described as a set of heuristics?  Guiding principles?  I don’t know what to call them.  What I do know is I’ve collected them over the last decade as an agilist, and they drive my decisions and how I interact with world around me.  They look something like this:

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Breaking the status quo as Scrum Master

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Editor’s Note: Tanner here. I’m usually the one doing the writing but not today.  I ran into Sjoerd a few days back.  Awesome guy, great writer, and he has some refreshing perspectives on agility and Scrum Mastery.  Also, he’s been gratuitous enough to share his thoughts on my blog with all of you today.  For more from Sjoerd, click here.

Hey Scrum Master!

Here is to you, the battering ram, breaking through barriers that are barring your team from awesomeness.

It takes a lot of courage to be touching the raw nerves, to address the elephant in the room, to being radically transparent and enabling continuous improvement.

Introducing Scrum will involve dragging the company through its own dirt, exposing toxic politics and power plays. These invoke emotional reactions.

So how do you, as Scrum Master, keep breaking the status quo, without being a constant pain in the ass to your colleagues?

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Is Your Scrum Adoption Stalling?

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I often get asked what to do when a Scrum adoption begins to stall.  This is especially true to those in the earlier stages of adoption.  Whenever these conversations occur, it inevitably leads to the same answer.  I can’t help.  I just don’t understand your context or your organization.  Don’t misunderstand.  I want to help, but what can I do when I’m not beside you seeing what you see and hearing what you hear?

Today, I have an idea.  I emphasize questions over statements so it’s time to practice what I preach.  After all, it’s you who has all the answers, not me.  My role today is think through questions I’d ask myself if I were in your shoes.

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