14 Wow! Moments from my Scrum MasterClass
08-12-201217 Things to Try on Monday Morning
10-12-2012- How to create interest in Scrum
- Change management
- How to address Senior Management and get them on board
- Team Skills
- Scrum of Scrums
Change management. This could mean managing changes to a product or managing change in an organization. The Product Backlog is the instrument for doing the former and the Product Owner is responsible for deciding what changes are made to the product my managing the Product Backlog. I think “change management” to describe organization change in an oxymoron (kind of like “military intelligence” or “beatings in my interest.”) I prefer to think of this as how to lead and inspire change. If you tell people what to do or what to change to, you risk provoking a grief response, and most people will fight the change. I have found the basic storytelling approach of get people’s attention, eliciting desire, giving them time and opportunity to digest and ask questions, then following up with facts and proposals to be a very effective approach. I touched on this in my recent PMI Webinar.
How to address Senior Management and get them on board: In my eyes, three books should give you the talking points you need to address Top Management: The Leaders Guide to Radical Management (Denning), Innovators Dilemma(Christensen), Lean Startup (Ries), The Ultimate Question (Reichheld) all address critical topics and should give you the talking points you need to argue convincingly for your Agile cause.
Team Skills. What I call ‘Fearless Trust‘ is the basis for effective teams. Create an environment of Fearless Trust and the rest will be much easier. Dare I say it will take care of itself? No, but see The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Lencioni, and this will get you off to a great start!
Scrum of Scrums – Once upon a time, people thought ScrumMasters would coordinate across teams. The approach was called Scrum of Scrums and the meetings were usually held once per week. The ScrumMasters would answer 4 questions:
- What did you team accomplish last week?
- What does your team plan to accomplish next week?
- What impediments does your team have?
- What impediments does your team expect to produce this week?
People quickly discovered that there are many topics which need coordination for which other people are more qualified to address than the ScrumMaster. So today, one talks about Scrum of Scrum of ScrumMasters, SoS of Designers, SoS of DBAs, etc. Check out this case study from Spotify for an interesting insight on how to organize and scale teams to be truly successful.
I think that covers it for the latest MasterClass. I hope I covered everything — of course I welcome questions and do my best to answer them! And you can look for other Q&A postings to see what came out of other workshops and courses….
