Spikes And Stories

Scrum tips and agile insights from a Silicon Valley agile coach

What’s Your North Star?

by 4 Comments

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:

[Read more…]

Breaking the status quo as Scrum Master

by 2 Comments

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?

[Read more…]

Practical Advice for Managers in an Agile Shop

by 2 Comments

In my last blog post, I wrote about the side effects of manager as Product Owner.  In it, I talked about how I believe these roles should be filled by different people.  So if the manager isn’t directing the work, what’s s/he doing? How does a manager help his/her people when they’re distributed across multiple teams?  The Scrum Guide is silent on the topic, and although I offered up some of my own opinions in Managers in an Agile Shop, I didn’t offer much practical advice.  Let’s fix that.  Today, I’ll bias my advice toward the actionable, and I think it all can summarized in these wise words by Ed Catmull:

It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks.  It is the manager’s job to make it safe to take them.

[Read more…]

What Metrics Will My Team Find Useful?

by 6 Comments

Let’s try something different today.  I’d like to tell you a story.  To do it justice, I won’t write about it.  Instead, I’ll share a video where I told this story to an agile group here in Silicon Valley, and it began as I wrestled with several questions:
 
  1. Can data help our teams improve?  If so, what kind of data?
  2. How do we responsibly use this data?
  3. Can metrics help the teams and the organization embrace a culture of experimentation?
  4. Data isn’t enough.  How can we tie it to the motivations and passions of our team members?
In the video below, I share my experiences as I attempt to answer these questions while I worked with the teams at Study.com.  However, before we begin, I want to mention a few things:

[Read more…]

%d bloggers like this: