As soon as I settled down in Colombia in 2016, I started to work for a commercial business that sells materials for architectural projects. Furthermore there is a foam factory for the production of customized mattresses and furniture. As soon as I understood the big picture I recognized the huge potential. In this blog post I want to tell you about some interesting checkpoints of this project! Read how and why we initiated a Lean Change Process to get this Company ready for the next decade!
image source: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/135319163780041465/
In a fast-moving business world even big organizations feel the pressure to innovate and quickly produce valuable solutions. If they take too long in bringing a product to the customer they can be overtaken by a faster moving competitor. One powerful way for companies to compete is to establish a team-based learning culture – teams that are able to learn and act effectively. This blog post should provide you some powerful details on why it is important to learn together and 10 tips on how you can support this process of working in your agile team. Continue Reading →
Me talking about agile values in a south american foam factory
After I moved to South America in 2016 I wanted to know how agile approaches could work in a foam factory. I started from the scratch by chatting with many people in the organization and recognized that they react very different when I speak about agile values. The meaning of the term was unclear for them and the teams weren’t sure how it would affect their daily work. This gave me the motivation to point out the importance of agile values and why they bring so much positive impact to a team, even when it’s in the context of production. Continue Reading →
Hey everybody. I want to write my blog posts as authentic as possible. Therefore every single article is based on real-life experiences from my daily work as a Coach. This time I want to tell you something about bad team setups. In my time as a Coach I often faced the situation to join a team whose members were mixed up randomly by the company. The resulted constellation can be super frustrating because team members weren’t selected according to their skills and context. In this blog post I will explain you the hard consequences of building teams without a plan. Read about the 3 main characters that are absolutely mandatory for a highly innovative and creative team. No Theory! No Fluff! Just Real Life Facts! Continue Reading →
Hands up if you’ve ever failed as a moderator in an Agile Retrospective! My guess is that you have!
Even if you do work your ass off on preparing a great Retrospective, the team remains bored, extremely unmotivated and there is only a low-level engagement what makes it impossible for you to make the Retrospective valuable.
BUT, What’s really going on here?
First … Don’t worry, that happens to almost all Coaches who moderate an Agile Retrospective! I experienced this as well.
So what if I told you that you can add a squad of tools to your toolbox that will eliminate a ton of time spent on terrible Retrospectives? In this Blog Post I want to share with you some Hard-Won Lessons about moderating a valuable Retrospective that will hit the mark! Continue Reading →
One of the most important challenges on agile transformations is influencing the current culture. Culture is more than making ceremonies, creating new roles and putting Kanban Boards full with Post-It’s. Although it’s absolutely true that visible artifacts show cultural expression, values and principles, however I believe that talking and showing values on a more active way is a much healthier way to initiate a change.
The following guest blog post by my friend Johnny will show you how a small group of Scrum Masters came up with an awesome idea to radiate values and principles on an artful way. The following tutorial will show how they implemented the Tree of Teams in a one of the biggest banks in South America. Read how you can do it too!
In the last 10 years I’ve experienced many Scrum Masters. This role can be crucial for the success of an upcoming agile Team. If companies take bad hiring decisions the cost runs high because the damage can be tremendous for the team and organization. I identified 8 bad characteristics and indicators that shows your team that you should ban your Scrum Monster from hell.
The LEGO® – Retrospective is a quite nice method I tried out with a team in my current company. The reason why this exercise is so exciting is the fact that team members are joining a totally new creative space where they can try out to express their thoughts on an abstract layer. In this post I’d like to share some experiences about this improvised retrospective. Continue Reading →
In Scrum Teams I used to work always with physical cork boards or whiteboards to visualize the status of a running sprint. Nowadays many companies have distributed teams. Therefore it is quite common to use project management toos like JIRA, Trac or Trello. The first time I was confronted with a distributed team I noticed some interesting details with these tools. In this blog post I want to explain why digital and physical boards do not contradict each other and why it still makes sense to use physical boards.
As a Scrum Master I took care of a new Team where I wanted to have a better visualization of our daily work. As I am not a big fan of digital tools for processes I decided to set up a physical board although it was a distributed team.
So before I started to create the board I made some notes about the information I wanted to make transparent and visualized:
