.
Agile Leadership
Keeping it Agile
- Driving agile is about
- Keeping activities and practices relevant
- Maintaining momentum
- Keeping the participants involved and committed
- … which takes leadership. The Scrum Master has a strong influence on this aspect. The role is defined in the Scrum Framework to ensure coaching and assistance in implementing Scrum efficiently and successfully.
- The Scrum Master should lead as opposed to manage, to ensure that the team is protected and that the team members thrive. This, in turn, will drive opportunities for improving efficiency, productivity and personal growth in the team.
Servant Leader
Genuine desire to serve
- The Scrum Master should exercise Servant Leadership. Servant leadership is about … leading! Coaching and assisting the team to develop healthy values, establish secure personal spaces, ensure that openness and honesty is exercised and that ‘praise is given where it’s due’
- Servant leadership is a misused buzzword and might be difficult to get your head around. In essence it’s about caring and a genuine desire to serve.
- Practical activities that support this practice would be
- Pick up feedback from the team on a regular basis to stay on top, requiring minimal work from the team
- Collect team and organizational intelligence using the tools and resources available
- Look for common trends in the feedback and understand what ignites the trends
Relentless Improvement
Human motivation factors
- Another buzzword: Relentless improvement is often misused, but still captures the essence of what Scrum and agile is all about.
- Improving practices, working conditions, developer experience, reducing tedious repetitive work, team autonomy are what’s driving the human motivation factors that ultimately results in persistently improved productivity.
Collecting Intelligence
Handling Feedback
- If you want ‘relentless’ – you need to have practices for: consistently capturing feedback and insights, driving reflection, dialog, discussions, and implementing changes.
- Define changes based on facts rather than feelings. Look for feelings, understand what’s behind and see how it affects deliveries.
Intelligence tools
Looking for trends and correlations
Several tools exist for supporting these improvement practices. One great example for inspiration is Codi.gy
- Driving feedback collection: The tool has a feature that can be used for supporting the retrospective activities. This includes a questionnaire tool that allows you to send out and capture feedback from the team members, either by using the well-established Spotify Team Health questionnaire or defining a dedicated questionnaire for your team.
- Driving feedback collection: The tool has a feature that can be used for supporting the retrospective activities. This includes a questionnaire tool that allows you to send out and capture feedback from the team members, either by using the well-established Spotify Team Health questionnaire or defining a dedicated questionnaire for your team.
- Identify Trends: With intelligence you can analyze feedback to understand what’s driving the trends. Codigy will give you loads of graphical input that identifies and explains trends and dependencies e.g. how team health correlates with changes to the SW structure. Ultimately, you’ll be able to drive retrospectives based on facts, to focus on stuff that matters and to drive change
Agile Leadership
Tools Support
- This presentation gives you an introduction to how Codigy will support your leadership:
- Setting up consistent collection of feedback
- Getting insights on actual behavior
- Identify trends in feedback and behavioral patterns
- Identify correlation between changes in code, behavior, timing, etc.
Afspil video om Codigy Presentaton YouTube
Keep Developing Your Teams
If you need sparring or coaching to keep teams and organization motivated, or inspiration on how to identify obstacles and candidates for changes let’s talk.
We’ll be happy to have a session with you (free of charge) for us to understand setup and challenges. Realistic expectations of a session will be an understanding of the situation, specific obstacle candidates to check into, and an indication of realistic short- and long-term improvements.