Link Roundup #6


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Retrospective Activity - Moving Motivators

A while back my perusal of Management 3.0 posts led me to an exercise called Moving Motivators . I did it by myself and thought it was interesting, and I've been wanting to try more exploratory kinds of activities with my team in our retrospectives. I thought this might be a good one, but I was determined to start small. We had an hour set aside for the entire retro, and I thought ten minutes was a good slice for something like this while still letting us talk about the sprint. This an existing team that has had several members join recently, one of whom has previous experience with this same group but has been on a different team for a long while now, and two who do not. So I thought this might be both fun and useful as an introduction of sorts. I printed out a bunch of card sets and asked everyone to spend a few minutes sorting them. (Mine had changed even since the last time I did the exercise.) Curious though I was about everyone on the team, I had them pair up and spend a ...
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"Borrowing" People

So here is a new thing for this blog, and maybe I can turn it into a series, who knows. As I've said many times, I feel strongly that getting your Scrum Master certificate is less an achievement in itself than an announcement that you have begun your apprenticeship. Now that I've been doing the job for a year, while I obviously have a lifetime of learning ahead, I can no longer consider myself a raw newbie. This seems like a good time, then, to start being more conscious about what I've learned so far. The topic of this post is something that I intuited early on was a terrible idea, and while I did object then, it wasn't very strongly. I should have pitched a much bigger fit than I did as a brand-new, part-time Scrum Master.  Team Alpha has five members. Three of them have what I shall describe as high borrow-value. This  is to say that they have expertise that places them in high demand for projects outside their nominal department. Note that they are in high deman...
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Agile Transitions as Self-Sustaining Reaction

Weird confession time? I used to be a little dubious about the long-term role of coaches and even of Scrum Masters or equivalent in an Agile organization. Once you’ve taught people the rules, what else is there to do? People are smart, and Agile methods as a rule aren’t complicated. I wondered—how could it possibly take more than a year or so to get this thing going? Then I spent several years observing an Agile transition from its initial push phase through to a kind of equilibrium, and I have gained a different understanding of the roles and the process in such a transition. I’m going to call these roles Primary Agile, because their work centers on fostering agility— and nothing else . Agile transitions can be thought of as something like a chemical reaction. The system starts in one state, and by adding some ingredients and – most importantly – energy, the system changes into a different state. For most organizations, that end state is going to be very different from whe...
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