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VSLive Austin 2017: Top 10 Ways to Go from Good to Great Scrum Master
As promised, here are the slides from the Top 10 Ways to Go from Good to Great Scrum Master talk at VSLive Austin 2017. Here’s the abstract: The Scrum Master role in an organization can be difficult. You live between a rock and a hard place. You’re influential but you probably don’t have any real power.…
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Top 3 Scrum People Skills Myths
As part of the on-going Scrum Myths series at Scrum.org, here are three myths related to people skills. When I say people skills, I mean topics like emotional intelligence, emotional IQ, and person-to-person interactions. Myth #1: Scrum must be “huggy / feely” Word on the street is that Scrum has to be “huggy / feely”. …
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Slides from Node Boston “Coaching Skills for Scrum Masters” Talk
Thanks again to Node Boston for having me come speak last night. As promised, here are my slides for that talk. Also, since we had so many questions about geo-distributed teams and time zones, here’s a link to a blog post I wrote on Scrum + time zones. Coaching Skills for Scrum Masters & The…
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Scrum: Don’t Lick the Cookie
I was reminded by a friend’s tweet this week about a piece of advice I give in my Scrum talks — “Don’t Lick the Cookie”. This is my way of saying, when you’re doing Scrum Sprint Planning, don’t assign tasks. If you exit your Sprint Planning meeting with a bunch of PBIs and Tasks and those…
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.NET Rocks Episode: “The Scourge of Multitasking”
Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell invited me on their podcast a few weeks ago to talk about “The Scourge of Multitasking” and that episode just dropped this morning. The conversation covered a lot of ground. We started off with how multitasking can crush your team’s productivity, talked about burnout, talked about focus, what “Done” actually…
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Scrum Master Tip: Hang Back
I taught a Professional Scrum Foundations for Teams (PSF) class this week. A core part of the PSF is a series of compressed Scrum Sprints where the students work together to build simple websites. One of the scrum masters this week’s class had fantastic technical skills and was the team’s technical lead in “real life”. …
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VSLive Austin 2016: Real World Scrum with TFS2015 Slides
I spoke at VSLive Austin 2016 last week. As promised, here are my slides and code for my Scrum + TFS2015 talk. Real World Scrum with Team Foundation Server 2015 & Visual Studio Team Services You’ve got Team Foundation Server 2015 and you’re looking to do Scrum. Ok. Great. Now what does that mean? What…
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5 Reasons to Care About Scrum Now That Waterfall’s Dead
How do you lead change in your software organization? How do you get your teams to care about doing a good job? How do you get them motivated to try new things and/or improve? It’s been 14 years since the Agile Manifesto and Scrum’s not so young anymore. The idea that Agile and Scrum are…
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CC BOS 2015: “Good to Great Scrum Master”
As promised, here are the slides from the Top 10 Ways to Go from Good to Great Scrum Master talk that I did last weekend at Code Camp Boston 2015. Here’s the abstract: The Scrum Master role in an organization can be difficult. You live between a rock and a hard place. You’re influential but you…
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CC BOS 2015: “Coaching Skills for Scrum Masters & The Self-Organizing Team”
As promised, here are the slides from the Coaching Skills for Scrum Masters & The Self-Organizing Team talk that I did last weekend at Code Camp Boston 2015. Here’s the abstract: Scrum works best with — arguably, requires — a self-organizing team. If you want a high-performing and self-organizing team, it helps if your Scrum…