Inspect and Adapt

January 13th, 2012

Are you an ADAPTIVE ScrumMaster?

As a Certified Scrum Coach (CSC) I do a lot of work with ScrumMasters in organisations who are looking to find new ways to engage their teams and move their Scrum implementations forward past the basic Scrum framework. When Coaching ScrumMasters I recommend they try to become more ADAPTIVE. As you might have guessed from the fact that the word is capitalised, it is an acronym for a number of behaviours. Following on from my blog post about ScrumMasters getting RE-TRAINED, an ADAPTIVE ScrumMaster:

• Helps the team to hold themselves ACCOUNTABLE
• Leads the team to DIVERGE before they converge
• Helps the team take ACTION to improve
• Asks POWERFUL questions to make them think about the root cause of their challenge
• Encourages the team to TRY something new
• Ensures everyone is INVOLVED as much as possible
• Makes data VISIBLE to help the team investigate and the organisation improve
• Names the ELEPHANT in the room

A good Scrum team is mature enough to explore many options before making commitments to each other and then hold themselves accountable as to whether they achieve them or not. If they don't manage to achieve their commitments (or even if they do!) they will treat that as a learning opportunity and find ways to improve, feeling comfortable enough to experiment with new ideas or theories.

Self-organisation is a very new concept to many teams and so the help of an attentive ScrumMaster is incredibly important to facilitate this new way of working and, of course, an investment of time for them to grow. ScrumMasters often need to develop their enabling and people-facilitation skills and this is something that comes with time and practice but can be helped along tremendously by learning from existing techniques. I am lucky enough to have been exposed to multiple teams in varied industries across multiple countries over the last 10 years. Along the way I have picked up, and created, many techniques that have been helpful to teams working with Scrum.

If you would like to learn more about these areas and, in particular, learn some specific tools, techniques and games related to them, then perhaps you might consider attending my Advanced ScrumMaster class. 

One of the things I focus on in my Advanced ScrumMaster class is providing tools, techniques and games to help ScrumMasters be more ADAPTIVE. It's good fun, practical and hands-on with techniques you can take away and use with your teams straight away. You don't need to BE "advanced" to attend and you don't even have to be a ScrumMaster (Product Owners have found this class equally valuable) so don't worry about that! If you are part of a Scrum team, or even just work with a Scrum team and are keen to find new, fun and interesting ways to help them improve then pop along.

Category:

Games / Scrum / scrum master

Tags:

Accountability / Adaptive / Advanced / Agile Adoption / Asm / Divergence / Elephant / Experimentation / Involvement / Scrum / Scrummaster / Training / Visibility

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January 3rd, 2011

Thoughts on Co-Training

Learning To Share “Share everything. Don't take things that aren't yours. Put things back where you found them” - Robert Fulghum   So another wonderful Christmas has just passed and my two children had more new toys than they knew what to do with. Of course that didn’t stop them wanting what their sibling had, nor did it stop them from being very protective of their new possessions; even the ones they weren’t playing with. Learning to share is a very useful skill that all humans need to acquire at some point in their lives, opening up as it does the possibility of a greater than zero sum game; and, for me, it seems to come into ever greater focus around this time of year.    I am one of a group of tra... read more

Category:

Scrum

Tags:

Co-training / Pairing / Sharing / Teaching

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