Posts Tagged facilitation
Rotating Team Roles
Posted by David Bland in agile, facilitation, scrum, team room on October 12, 2010
Generally there are two schools of thought when it comes to Scrum team facilitation:
1. A dedicated ScrumMaster facilitates each session.
2. Each team member takes a turn facilitating sessions.
I’ll illustrate how I’ve approached the latter and explain below why I’ve seen it work quite well.
Daily Standups
Typically I start out facilitating daily standups using techniques that I’ve spoken about before. I’ve found that it takes 1 or 2 iterations of playing the ScrumMaster role in the daily standup before the team members feel comfortable enough to step in. Once I step back, we rotate through the iteration so that ideally each team member has an opportunity to facilitate at least once.
7 Ways to Humanize the Distributed Team Experience
Posted by David Bland in agile, scrum on August 17, 2010
If you are involved in a distributed software team, chances are you know just how difficult it is to create personal connections. This is especially true in larger organizations where team members are geographically dispersed around the world and rarely (if ever) meet face to face in person.
I placed the emphasis this problem recently during my talk on distributed agile. My audience received, perhaps unexpectedly, a heavy dose of organizational culture from me instead of “here’s the 1000 different tools you can use” speech.
My message was simple, team members are not resources or metrics, and we should not treat them as such.
I felt the need to build upon that talk. As a result, here are my 7 tips for a sustainable and healthy distributed team experience:… [Read More]
A Mirror for the Team
Posted by David Bland in agile, facilitation, retrospectives, scrum on July 20, 2010
Alistair Cockburn once stated that Scrum is a mirror, and that organizations need to look into the Scrum mirror no matter how difficult it may be.
I would take that a step further and say that the ScrumMaster is the mirror for the team.
A team often unintentionally falls back into situations in which they’ve previously committed to improving.
For example, let’s say that in the last iteration retrospective the team decided that they need to expand the ownership of each story. The last iteration was a success, yet it seemed as though they were not collaborating effectively. Each user story had one developer doing most, if not all of the assigned tasks… [Read More]
Consuming Iteration Demo Feedback
Posted by David Bland in agile, scrum on July 14, 2010
You are nearing the end of your potentially shippable product demonstration and now you are faced with consuming stakeholder feedback before they leave the room.
So where do you begin?
Step 1: Soliciting Feedback
An empty whiteboard should haunt your dreams!
If you are allowing stakeholders, internal or external, to leave the room without providing feedback then you are neglecting a very important aspect to your software development cycle.
Issues are either being left unspoken or your customers are not engaged at the level they need to be for your team to succeed.
- Simply ask them.
- Avoid analysis paralysis.
- If they have scheduling conflicts send them an interactive demo link.
Tip: Be creative in soliciting feedback and do not take stakeholder avoidance lying down.
Passive Aggressive Facilitation
Posted by David Bland in facilitation, scrum on June 8, 2010
Practicing servant leadership as a ScrumMaster requires a great deal of empathy and patience. This includes suppressing actions that would otherwise cause harm to team morale and self organization if unchecked.
One trait in particular that is extremely counterproductive to the role is passive aggressiveness.
As someone who has been known to be snarky on occasion, I’ve had to practice my facilitation skills over time in a real team setting… [Read More]
