Doing little things makes big things happen
I love the game of basketball. I had the opportunity to play it for a long time and competitively. It taught me a lot about practice amongst other things, some of which I use today as an agile coach. What are little things? It starts with paying attention to details at practice. Its about what […]
SlumpBusting: Overcoming Performance Slumps
Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar, widely regarded as the greatest batsman who ever played the game, scored 9000 runs in 105 test matches he played between 1998-2002 hitting 31 tons at an average run-rate of 57. During the Australian tour of 2003, his scores read 8, 7, 55, 1, 0, 1, 37, 0, 44 totaling 153 runs […]
CHOW #136 – Resistance to Improvement
Ram, a Test Lead, had been working for eTravel for the last three years. eTravel has a cloud-based product for frequent business travellers. When his organization decided to adopt agile practices two years ago, he chose to take on the Scrum Master role. The feature team, that he was part of as SM, had the […]
CHOW #127 – Brand Image of Scrum Masters
Rajiv has been working as a scrum master and coaching the teams after getting trained. Management and teams think that Scrum Master is like a secretary who just books the meeting rooms, facilitates daily meetings and helps with some tasks when team asks for it. Rajiv spoke to couple of other scrum masters in the […]
Agile: 3 tips for effective coaching
I started my agile journey as an agile team member couple of years back, where I was assigned to a pilot team which was part of large agile transformation initiative. Once the initiative was kicked off, all the pilot project team members were trained on agile (what is agile methodology, process and how to do […]
Sprint Planning in distributed teams… Patterns… SAFe
The title may have intrigued you, here is how it evolved. A few teams that I coach wanted to know about Scaling Agile and particularly Scaled Agile Framework and I was thinking on how best to introduce that in a contextual manner. The patterns I had seen emerge during my coaching interactions with the teams […]
Enabling self-organization of Agile teams
As an agile coach, I knew how self-organization manifests itself in various ceremonies. There is a brilliant blog by JV – one of my colleagues at PM Power – that elucidates the behavior of self-organizing teams in various ceremonies. I would observe the behavior of the team in many of these ceremonies and guide the […]
Being Mindful or being concerned- Part II
In Part I of this blog – I had looked at a possible way of construing the tango of being mindful and being concerned about risk. So, it seems like that the cocktail of being mindful and also being concerned about risk, appears explosive. So, is there a possibly different approach to being mindful and still […]
Being Mindful or being concerned about Risk
When we notice the literature and trends in management, there’s a huge shift towards mindful leadership. When you reach out to the millennial workforce, they more than the earlier generation, are looking for the leadership to be mindful. So what impact could it have on some areas like risk management? Is it going to be […]
Motivating teams
A frequent question or topic of discussion with Scrum Masters, in course of coaching, is on motivation. How does one motivate the team members? A difficult question, which does not have “a” right answer/ approach. As a leader, one needs to deliver what is expected of him or her, this delivery is done by the […]
