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 […]
Images that Inspired a Successful Change
Images have the power to inspire. And as human beings, we connect to images and stories around those much faster than we connect to words. When I began Agile transformation with one of the business units for my client organization, I thought of using these images. These were quite inspirational for me and I believed […]
A story to help with sustaining focus
One of the challenges typically faced by the teams adopting scrum is not being able to focus on their work without interrupts. I was reminded of this by the recent blog from my colleague JV, where he mentions “Too many / too much time with Agile meetings”. Interrupts add to that feeling/sense of the lack […]
CHOW #258 – Team Working Norms
Sukriti had joined as a new Scrum Master for a team that worked for internal technology group of a Financial Services Organization. She had come from a products-based organization that was known in the industry as people friendly and at the same time was known for the quality of their products. Many media houses had […]
CHOW#244 – Fixing the problem
Bob is a manager in an IT product company. His team is responsible for the support and maintenance of a product. His team has started on the agile transformation journey six weeks back and is slowly getting used to the new practices. One of their customers asked for some customizations; the first set of which […]
War and Warriors: Part 1- Rapid Teaming
I volunteered as a Corona Warrior during the lockdown period from 23rd March until 17th May and continue to volunteer towards covid-19 efforts. The blog came into being through several questions posed by friends, well-wishers and colleagues. This is only the start of my experiences, observations and take-aways. There is so much that I decided […]
Rise, fall and rise again
Our choir in school was a group of about 55 girls at any time, organized so singers of similar voices were grouped together to create blended harmonious music. The music conductor was our music teacher who also played the piano, our guiding instrument. We regularly performed at school programs and several competitions. Practice sessions were […]
CHOW #138 – Indispensable, but poor team player!
Coolsoft, a product company, was in the process of transitioning to Scrum. Bobby was a team member in the critical Work Flow feature team. He was technically brilliant – team was heavily dependent on him for many things – in a sense he was indispensable to the management as well. However, he was anything but […]
CHOW #126 – Mystery of Disappearing ‘Issues’
SuperSeven was a great team and had been performing consistently last year. But during last couple of quarters they seemed to have some new challenges and Ajay, the Scrum Master, approached me for help. I went through some retrospective notes and saw their velocity chart etc. What I observed was that some points were repeated […]
Importance of Trust in Agile Teams
Scrum mentions five values – Commitment, Transparency, Courage, Openness and Respect. Scrum teams need to inculcate these values to be Agile. Practicing the ceremonies makes teams ‘Do Agile’ while these values would help them to ‘Be Agile’. Every one of these values is most important and in a way they are all inter-related. Without commitment, […]
