# Thursday, February 7, 2019

Happy New Year everyone and apologies for not blogging in such a long time. I don’t know about you, but I have no idea where 2018 went!  It seemed to speed past so quickly..

I have been busy with a relatively new client and was due to be there a couple of days the other week when ‘The Boss’ called up proclaiming  ‘man flu’, and wanted me to support him on his Certified ScrumMaster Class. Now, I don’t really buy into ‘man flu’ but he was a pitiful sight to behold, and so went along to do some of the heavy lifting. It’s been a good few months since I last trained Scrum, but it all came flooding back to me Smile  It was while there that I got the inspiration for this blog. I met a man who was literally starting as a ScrumMaster 9am the day after the course, and he wanted to know what needed to be done in his first few days and weeks.   So I reeled off a few things for him to consider and then wrote him a nice poster with all the details on to take away. 

Things to think about

I have not heard from him since the class, but I am hoping everything has worked out for him!

I thought other people might be interested in this and so here I am blogging about it.  I have taken the liberty to expand on some of the points. I was going to make a mind map, but all the ones I tried would not let you export an image for free Sad smile 


Stage 1 (First few days and weeks)


    • Meet the team and get to know them and what they want to achieve. Agree regular 121's to keep the conversations flowing.
    • If the team is already up and running, spend some time observing.
    • Organise a team building event. Encourage team members to get involved in the organisation.
    • Has the Team used Scrum or Kanban before? Do they need to have some sort of training?
    • Meet the Product Owner. Get to know them, their history and what they want to achieve. Discuss both of your roles and what you expect from each other. Discuss what to do if you do not agree with each other.
    • Discuss the product with the Product Owner. Understand the Vision, roadmap, commitments, issues and risks.
    • Review the Product Backlog. If it does not exist, we need to help facilitate creating one. Do we need to complete user story mapping?
    • Set up regular sessions with the PO to keep collaborating. Encourage them to sit with the team.
    • Does the team sit together? If not organise this. Ensure that the team has either a TV or visual board.
    • Create an initial board to start putting work on. This can be refactored as you get the team up and running.
    • How does the team store information? If some form of wiki, SharePoint or other doesn't exist. Think about creating one (after discussion with the team)
    • Facilitate getting a team Definition of Done.
    • Set up Sprint or Cadence structure in diaries. Plan for more refinement sessions if the team has to create the backlog from scratch.
    • Set up a holiday chart and make visible in the team space.


Stage 2 (Coming weeks and months)


    • Understand 'other' teams, people or third parties we might have dependencies with. Meet these people and agree ways of working.
    • Create a stakeholder map and plot all of the key people on. Plan how you can meet all of these people.
    • Understand Staff Liquidity. Implement knowledge share as needed.
    • If using Scrum, think about creating calibration stories for referring to in estimation sessions.
    • Set up team metrics (CFD, Burnup, Burndown, Lead time Distribution, Defect ratio, Waste, Work in progress, Net flow, Live status, Bugs, time to deploy, % automation, % fails of automation, build times, ticket age, throughput rates.
    • Consider if we need to create 'End of sprint one page' report for stakeholders.
    • Refactor the Board. Think about how to visualise: Blockers, Avatars, waiting, dependencies, issues and risks, different types of work, expedites, defects, WIP limits, capacity allocations, abandoned work, external teams collaborating with you (to name a few)
    • What engineering practices do we need to consider and implement? Understand what is done now and work with the team to define where we want to be.
    • Understand what the release process is, and the frequency of this. If people are involved outside of the team. Become their friend!
    • Understand current state of play for : Tooling, environments, levels of automation, CI/CD strategy, testing strategy, Source control, coding standards, online tool such as VSTS or JIRA.
    • Work with the Product Owner to create a Release Plan and any metrics they need to help manage flow of stories, value and delivery.

I am sure there are things missing and so feel free to leave comments for other people to get the benefit of your knowledge as well. I can then add them in for an AWESOME list!

I will try and not leave it as long next time.

To quote Jerry Springer ‘Look after yourself, and each other’

Helen

xxx



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Thursday, February 7, 2019 1:07:48 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)  #    Comments [0]


# Tuesday, August 7, 2018

Whether you use Scrum or Kanban as a delivery method, as a ScrumMaster you must be able to help the team or organisation understand and use the methods or frameworks.

This involves an element of teaching, coaching and mentoring. I have already looked at one way I have been establishing a coaching stance at my clients in my ‘Coaching Dojo’ blog earlier this week. Now I want to share with you something that Carlo Beschi and I put together for a conference and now subsequently using to help people become better trainers within the same organisation.

I regularly train non certified Scrum Classes and I am also an accredited Kanban trainer for the LKU. In fact, I am also a Train the Trainer for the LKU (ooooooo I hear you say! Smile )

This means I spend lots of time thinking about how to convey messages in a simple and fun way, that everyone gets and can practically take back to their work places and start using.

I am one of the first people to turn off with my three second attention span if you just talk at me. Equally if you want me making random shapes with my body, then you are going to lose me too. For me it’s about getting the right balance of the two and really thinking about who your target audience is and what you want to get across.

I have seen many great trainers over my years and love the Sharon Bowman’s ‘Training from the back of the room’. So when Carlo and I put together this offering it was a blend of all of our years experiences and what we have learnt from our own training and research.

Our strategy was to include as many good and bad practices as we could Smile. If the students could recognise them in us, maybe they could recognise them in themselves. To help facilitate this we created Bingo cards and of all the techniques we were planning on using in the session. As soon as they had a row, we encouraged them to shout ‘Bingo’. Not only was it educational, but it meant they kept focused throughout the session and had a little fun along the way. We rewarded winners with chocolate.

The first half of the deck is sharing different thoughts and practices for running great training sessions. You won’t get this sense from the deck, but throughout the class we were using all the different techniques we were talking about so they could see them and experience them in person. 

The second half is about handing over the reins to the attendees and getting them to put into practice everything that they had learnt over the course of the session.

We gave them a time box to go away and plan a mini training session and we had 2 decks of cards for the topics, normal ones like story points and user stories and then wild cards which are harder topics such as probabilistic forecasting.

You will see in the slides that there is a lot more content around them than just words on a page. Apologies, but without writing a whole book this is hard to convey.

Carlo and I first run this at the Agile Tour and we got some really great feedback from the attendees. Now I have adapted it further and we are going to use it to facilitate a half day session at my client to train people in preparation for a software craftsmanship course, they are planning on running internally. We hope that they also take many practices into the sessions that they are about to write and plan.

Our slides are in the public domain and you can find them on my slide share here: https://www.slideshare.net/helenmeek/effective-teaching-v20

Maybe have a think about how your communities train each other and whether there is any value from any of the practices that we call out. Don’t forget that the practical element of any training is extremely important, and so that’s why we have included it with the provision of valuable feedback to the students.

I know so many great trainers from my peer group who I admire. I took the opportunity to contact a few of them and ask them for some of their top tips. Keep an eye out for these in the deck and thank you to everyone who contributed them.

I wanted to share these slides with you because I feel it’s important to help grow and harness the expertise in our industry. Together we have so much knowledge and by creating a sharing culture we can truly become awesome and transform the world of work.

Thanks again to everyone who was involved in this and special thanks to Carlo Beschi my co creator.

You never know, we might run it again at conference near you Smile


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Tags: Agile | Agile Coach | Coaching | Training

Tuesday, August 7, 2018 4:07:19 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)  #    Comments [0]