by Shiv Sivakumar | Oct 26, 2020 | Agile
Suppose you as a trainer have conducted several editions of a highly experiential program, say, in leadership development, where class interaction and participant activities in a physical classroom played a vital role. And now, you are required to deliver the program...
by Shiv Sivakumar | Sep 4, 2020 | Chow
You are an Agile coach, a new recruit in the organization – a Global In-house Center (“captive” software arm) of a major financial services organization. Prior to this job, you have been a Scrum Master and a coach for over five years in a fin-tech product...
by Shiv Sivakumar | Sep 4, 2020 | Agile
If you are an Agile team coach, at some point you may have taken over from another coach or on-boarded a new coach to take your place. When I did a snap poll of our fellow-coaches, it turns out that there is much scope for improvement in on-boarding situations....
by Shiv Sivakumar | Aug 23, 2020 | Chow
Mike Wallace is a recently-promoted Scrum Master for a project team. He has taken over when the team had been struggling with low Say/Do ratio and highly-fluctuating velocity. Mike and his team had gone into the causes for this situation in the past and incorporated...
by Shiv Sivakumar | Aug 17, 2020 | Agile
Raju Kulkarni, Scrum Master, sat in his Pune office fuming about the attitude of his onsite Product Owner, Nigella White located in Seattle. Nigella had many teams like Raju’s in Dublin in addition to Pune. She had just joined the organization and had relocated from...
by Shiv Sivakumar | May 9, 2020 | Chow
Refer to the blog WFH – Child’s Play for the context of this CHOW. The Child has been overhearing her WFH Dad’s calls for quite a while now. Since Dad always had his ear phones on, the Child could hear only one side of the conversations. Despite that, the Child...
by Shiv Sivakumar | May 4, 2020 | Mindfulness
WFH, a child’s play? May be not from an actual 4-year old child’s point of view! The context is a virus-forced lockdown in my daughter’s home in Chennai and my son-in-law’s WFH for a major bank. The 4-year old (my granddaughter) aka the Child is trying to make sense...
by Shiv Sivakumar | Oct 18, 2019 | Chow
Farhan (Scrum Master) and his team of five people have been working on maintenance and new features for a product – an application that is core for their company’s operations. The current team has been stable now for the past two years since the launch of the first...
by Shiv Sivakumar | Oct 16, 2019 | Agile
Photo by Color Crescent on Unsplash Who hasn’t experienced dreary sprint retrospectives? I am sure you have too – as a Scrum Master (SM), team member or coach. How you have dealt with them depends on your role and motivation. You could have taken them...
by Shiv Sivakumar | Oct 14, 2019 | Chow
Anand is a software engineer who had started his career a couple of years ago in a large multinational software organization. Most of his work there had been in teams which had adopted a somewhat waterfallish approach for development. As the teams approached release...
