Spikes And Stories

Scrum tips and agile insights from a Silicon Valley agile coach

What’s the Difference Between a Scrum Master and Agile Coach?

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A Medium follower asked me a few questions recently:

What’s the difference between a Scrum Master and agile coach? How can they both be involved in Scrum? Why is it seen as a natural ‘progression’ to move from Scrum Master to agile coach?

These are popular questions, and I’ve run across many–maybe too many, in fact–who have answered them in varying ways.  Maybe I should add my answers to the pile.  After all, I often describe myself as “a confused soul who can’t decide whether he’s an agile coach or a Scrum Master.”  Before I begin, my philosophy today is a simple one:

The name of a thing is not the thing.  Forget titles.  Forget hierarchy.  Focus instead on those around us and the value we create for those we serve.

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Six Reasons Agile Teams Deliver Frequently And Why It Matters

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Teams that don’t deliver working product frequently aren’t agile.

I hold firmly to this truth for many reasons.  For example, how can we iterate on a product that isn’t real?  Wouldn’t you agree that continuous improvement is at the heart of agility?  So if the product isn’t real, how can we be sure we’re learning the right lessons?  And how is “frequent” defined in this context? For that last question, read this blog post about metrics where I talk about what metric matters most.  It’s a simple one and one that’s typically easy to measure:

How often are we delivering working code to our target environment?

So why does this even matter?  What do these frequent deliveries get us?  Here’s six reasons agile teams delivery frequently: [Read more…]

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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