Posts Tagged scrummaster
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]
SaMoLo in Retrospectives
Posted by David Bland in agile, extreme programming, retrospectives, scrum on May 11, 2010
SaMoLo, or the Same as, More of, Less of technique, is a fine tuning facilitation exercise with roots in early XP.
‘Same As’ are those traits that you value and don’t want to lose. Many traditional feedback methods end up glossing over these items and as a result the behaviors that should be reinforced, aren’t.
‘More Of’ are those traits that you want to encourage. It may be a newly acquired skill or the beginning of a behavior. Or it may be an area where something is lacking and you want to help ther person find a way of bridging the gap.
‘Less Of’ are those traits that have simply gone too far. They may be great traits, but eventually someone will ‘out Herods, Herod’ and things need to return to normal. – fairlygoodpractices.com
Thanks in part to Jeff Nielsen, I’ve discovered that SaMoLo can also be the sweet spot for easing new teams into iteration retrospectives.
- It is easy to remember
- More engaging than What worked? What didn’t?
- Takes 30 to 40 minutes
- Pairs well with other exercises
In a recent iteration retrospective I paired the SaMoLo technique with… [Read More]
The Daily Standup Trap
Posted by David Bland in agile, scrum on April 21, 2010
The 15 minute daily standup, or daily scrum, is one of the more widely adopted artifacts of the iterative software movement. Even companies who only dip their toe into Agile practices typically adopt this since it seems so easy to do.
- What did you do yesterday?
- What will you do today?
- What is blocking progress?
While you can certainly take these questions and use them as the basis for your daily standup, you may be surprised at how your team actually responds to them. Some may find these questions laughable and not take them seriously. Some may become defensive, even if they have no reason to be. Some may clam up and provide almost no detail at all, while others ramble on about every minute of their day… [Read More]
Everyone Has a Voice in Retrospectives
Posted by David Bland in agile, retrospectives on March 1, 2010
It can be difficult to get team members to be vocal in retrospectives. I’m always wary of the stronger personalities controlling the conversation, and I’ve found that going around the room calling people out by name can have mixed results. After reading a recent article on effective retrospective formats, I decided to write my experience [...]
Distributed Video Standup
Posted by David Bland in agile, scrum, tools on November 24, 2009
Distributed Teams need high bandwidth bidirectional communication to succeed, and the organization should provide these tools for collaboration. Luckily for us, Video Chat and Broadband are becoming more and more affordable so this is no longer an unrealistic goal. With a decent Video Chat setup you can teleconference with teams around the world and pick [...]
