Personal Thoughts
Robert Galen
We've Moved
We've Moved
Walking Their Talk, Sustainability, Inspiration
Robert Galen
Sustainability

I saw this wonderfully courageous and informative post by Sabine Canditt the other day where she wrote about Sustainable Scrum. 

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/sustainable-scrum-responsible-choice-sabine-canditt-x0gef

After just completing a The Week program facilitated by the amazing Ann-Marie Kong, it touched my heart.

That said, I wanted to highlight one comment reaction/interaction between Sabine and Erich Bühler 

Erich said—

Thank you for bringing this approach into the world! Scrum does provide an iterative approach for teams to create value, but its scope is limited to the product level and struggles with dynamics across the whole organization for several reasons.
Without updating the underlying business and financial model at a strategic level, Scrum alone cannot transform organization-wide sustainability.

Sustainability
Short-takes, Inspiration
Robert Galen
Sandy’s Take
Sandy’s Take
Short-takes, Personal Thoughts
Robert Galen
The Human Aspects of Agile Coaching
The Human Aspects of Agile Coaching
Coaching, ACGW, Personal Thoughts
Robert Galen
Keys to Building your Coaching Relationships

I talk a lot about the first step in coaching any client (individual, system, team, etc.) is to build a relationship, gain empathy and understanding, and then gain an idea of where/how to help initially. So, do NOT start to coach until you’ve done some relationship-building. 

But what does a coaching relationship, or a professional relationship in general, look like? What are aspects of that? Here are a few things that come to my mind—

  • Making + taking the time.

  • Explaining what you do—what is Agile Coaching.

  • Building some empathy; walking in their shoes; understanding where they are coming from.

  • Meeting them where they are.

  • Listening; reflective listening; building metaphors together.

  • Connecting with their language, not yours.

Keys to Building your Coaching Relationships

High-performing Teams

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Dynamics Impacting Agile Teams, part-2

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Dynamics Impacting Agile Teams, part-2

Continued from Part-1…

1. T-Shaped nature of the team? (1)

Perhaps the best way to think of T-shaped-ness is the flexibility of everyone on the team to the overall work. Do people focus only on a narrow/deep skill area (I-shaped) or do they try and occasionally flex to help in areas where they’re less skilled, but willing to learn, pitch in, and help (T-shaped)? One of the easiest ways I’ve found to determine this is measuring the times you hear: “that’s not my job, or I’m waiting for Blarg to finish their part” within the team.

2. Visualization of work and tooling (1 and 3-)

How well does the team visualize their work? This includes the word itself (product backlogs, sprint backlogs) and artifacts around the work (DoD, charters, roles & responsibilities, etc.). I’ve always thought that the higher the maturity and performance of the team, the less they rely on tools and the more they rely on visualization and collaboration around the visuals. Related to this is the notion that the visuals are kept up-to-date in real-time or always reflect the current reality.

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Dynamics Impacting Agile Teams, part-1

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Dynamics Impacting Agile Teams, part-1

We were talking in the Moose Herd the other morning and Cory Bryan brought up the topic of factors that influenced agile team maturity, performance, and health. We immediately discussed the obvious factor of team size. Chatting about how team cohesion and maturity could offset any negative aspects of the team is larger.

Team distribution also came up, that is remote vs. onsite and geographic distribution. Again, we leaned into the idea that a more seasoned team could probably deliver “in spite of” the challenges of being distributed.

It was a really good topic to explore. And, as we explored it, I brainstormed in my journal and jotted down as many factors that I could think of that directly impact the formation, growth, dynamics, and ultimate success of any agile team.

I also tried to evaluate as to whether each factor was:

  1. Entirely within the team’s control

  2. Entirely an organizational factor

  3. Or something in between, 3- meaning towards Org and 3+ meaning towards the team.

I think this twist nuanced the list a bit. Anyway, I thought I’d share these thoughts with you…