CHOW #314: Tips for speaking up in the presence of senior management
A manager, who has recently been promoted to that role, had difficulty speaking up in the presence of senior management. She confessed to her mentor that she tended to escape into active listening mode instead of speaking up. She pointed three kinds of interaction opportunities with senior management: She sought practical tips from her mentor […]
CHOW # 311 – Addressing Skill Gaps
Problem – Shiva is the scrum master of a newly formed scrum team. Team members are new to each other but they are enthusiastic and motivated. To sort out any teething problems quickly , the team has adopted a buddy system where two members are paired and they help each other in sorting out any […]
CHOW
Scenario: You are a new Agile Coach hired by a service company that has been struggling to transition from Waterfall to Agile methodologies. The Delivery Manager, “Waterfall Wix,” has been leading the team using traditional Waterfall practices for over 15 years. Despite training sessions and workshops on Agile, the team is still facing issues with […]
CHOW #308: Aren’t apples and oranges the same?!
Upon reading the blog Relative Size – 4 tips, the Scrum Master (SM) of a team I am working with as coach came to me with a question: Why are you emphasizing more time invested in backlog refinement to prepare for the next sprint instead of spending a lot of time in sprint planning? It […]
CHOW #307 – Structural remedies in Agile
Agile think tanks recommend that the modern-day organization should be a cluster of empowered teams, an entity that is like an organism able to adapt itself and thrive. Alas, when agile consultants walk into a new customer engagement, chances are what they see appears nowhere near such a cluster; instead, hierarchies and silos everywhere. Nathan […]
CHOW #306 – Is my team improving?
Shashikanth is the manager of the scrum teams you are coaching for the last few months. He has been very helpful and enthusiastic about the Agile Transformation initiative. He has heard that scrum teams tend to show an increasing trend in their velocity, once they are in a steady state. He is eager to see […]
CHOW #305: Sensing if you have an empowering environment
NetForYou is a product engineering organization developing networking solutions. They have been in business for more than 20 years. As the CEO of the organization, Vishwanath has taken empowerment to heart, repeatedly reinforcing it in communicating to his direct reports as well as the organization at large. But he is frustrated that his direct reports […]
CHOW #304: Travails of a young coach
As agile coaches, we have all had our initial travails, cutting our teeth in the first engagement and at times learning the hard way. One can walk down memory lane, maybe with a rueful smile! Here is a quiz of three questions which may make you reminisce! For those who are not coaches, it may […]
CHOW # 303 Growing pains in a Scrum team
You are the new coach assigned to a software team in a multinational financial company. The team has three senior members who have more than five years experience and four members with less than 2 years of experience. The Scrum Master (SM), Marina, is a strong technical person with 8+ years experience in the organization […]
CHOW # 302 : Together but not a team
Gladiators is a well-formed Agile team as per the prevailing practices – 5 Developers, 2 testers, 1 SM and 1PO. The team delivers complex technology solutions for the Cloud platform. Each of the developer is skilled in a technology and testers are manual testers. There are various requests from different internal groups in the company […]
