Too many managers don’t know how to manage remote people. Worse, those managers, or their organizations, don’t trust people to do a good job. The organization installs spyware to see if people are working. That’s classic Theory X behavior. However, people are smarter than the spyware. Many of these spied-upon people have installed mouse (and […]
On the ANE panel last night, an agile coach asked, “What’s my path forward as an agile coach? What do I do next?” That’s a great question and one each coach might ask, to make sure they continue to add value to the client. (Internal or external, all coaches have clients.) I said that if
Vasco and I had a wonderful discussion about the Modern Management Made Easy books on his Scrum Master podcast. Listen to BONUS: Modern Management trilogy by Johanna Rothman. We discussed why Scrum Masters and coaches might want to read these books. And how to use the information in the books. (Hint: to support and serve
I started this series writing about the need for coaches in Coaches, Managers, Collaboration and Agile, Part 1. I continued in Coaches, Managers, Collaboration and Agile, Part 2, talking about the changed role of managers in agile. In this part, let me address the role of senior managers in agile and how coaches might help. For years,
In Coaches, Managers, Collaboration and Agile, Part 1, I wrote about circumstances under which a team might want a coach. It wasn’t an exhaustive list. It had several questions defining when coaches might help the team to become agile, not be cargo cult agile. One of the reasons we might need coaches for a team is because
There was a fascinating Twitter conversation last week when I was busy writing other things. (I also find Twitter to be a difficult-for-me arena to have a conversation. I need more than 140 characters.) The conversation started when Neil Killick tweeted this: orgs need coaches not because “agile is unintuitive”, but because effective sw delivery
People want to know the “secret sauce” for hiring Scrum Masters and agile coaches. I wish it was easy to provide a standard set of questions. Because your agile team is unique, your questions should be different. However, there are some common qualities, preferences, and non-technical skills among Scrum Masters. First, do a job analysis
Prepare to Become More Influential When you want to make a change, you need other people to work with you. Maybe you want your organization to transition to agile. Maybe it’s time to experiment with measuring your work in progress. Maybe you want to move from manual testing to a combination of automated testing plus