Manuel Mueller

ScrumMaster - ThatMatters We all can profit from a free framework we apply to our organization. On Scrum.org you get free certifications to different level of Scrum. So we are engaged to give something back to the community. You will find Usergroups, Agile meetups around your location. They welcome you a lot. Everyone has something to say and contribute to the community. Do not crumble in your office, get out of it, tell your story and you will get help or suggestions that can help you overcome with your situation. The internet is a really good source of knowledge. But nothing is better than the exchange with each other. Picture Description We fight for the same thing, so let's learn from each other. Tell your story, experiment with new things and report about it . A network inside and outside the company helps you to get feedback and other views. Learn new knowledge and no- knowledge and stay on the pulse of the agile movement . Certainly agile enth...

ScrumMaster - ThatMatters To work in an organization which is not from a Startup character, ScrumMaster had the engagement to develop and change the organization. This is really hard work and you will not get much of credit to do so. Then large organization are stable and not likely to change. There are fear and uncertainty around. We as ScrumMaster are in the duty to pick this feelings and get them the necessary security. If we are able to develope an environment of trust, we can reach a lot. Sometimes you have to be like a pirate in the organization. Do something that no one did before, inspect and adapt learnings. If you are fast in inspect and learning, you can show how effective change will be. Success is a good consultant in this situation. The following habbits will help you to start with change. This list is far from complete so if you have any suggestions to add something, please contact me. Picture Description Tell people in the organization about the a...

ScrumMaster - ThatMatters The ScrumMasters Job is to develop the Team so they can deliver maximal value. This is coupled to good quality and people oriented leadership. We do not squize out the juice out of one orange, we wanna grow up an orange tree, where we can get much of juice from it and which is sustainable. To do so, we have to consider a lot of habits and methods. Some of them are described in the following table. If you have any other ideas, please help me to get this more complete. Picture Description As ScrumMaster you live in many different leadership roles  ( 8 Stances of a ScrumMaster ).  The most important thing is to claim to help others become better. This can be done as a coach, mentor, teacher, etc. It is important to recognize in which status ( ShuHaRi ) the team and the individual members are . Active and well-managed retrospectives are a very effective means of improving the team (and also the organization). The impediments mus...

ScrumMaster - ThatMatters Most important for a ScrumMaster is to look after himself. For you it will be essential to live what you belief in and hold the flag upright. You have to be agile, not acting agile. Working on your facilitator, teacher, mentor, leader role and striving for excellence. It is hard work, because of the diversity, but in my opinion the most complete role you can have. How you can do that? Read books, follow the world agile leaders, conferences, local community and most important experiment with your idea, inspect and adapt. For this, change your flight height to see more in the hole context, what is going on in your team and with yourself. If you read further, your will find the most important things in my opinion, that matters to you. There are more points to look after, belief me. Picture Description Be Authentic means, not lying to yourself. I feel this as a very central aspect in the work of leader roles. Spec...

Since the agile movement, the role of ScrumMaster has changed in my opinion. At the beginning there where more or less single teams who practice with scrum. The ScrumMaster had to care to the process and protect the team from outside interuption. More and more organizations practices Scrum with multiple teams. In a scaled Scrum environment the role of a ScrumMaster has expanded to organization transformation.  He has to optimize the environment for the teams to perform. To reach this, ScrumMaster have to deal with management. In my experience there are many ScrumMaster they do not want to deal with management and hold hard on team focus. The effect is a very local optimization, which can end up in different culture, different implementation of Scrum or even back to ordinary team constallation. To prevent this, the ScrumMaster of an organization have to be learned, teached, coached to deal with here role for external focus. Often they are not aware of this, that they have this re...

Hi ScrumMaster Looking for a Retrospective who can held outside the office? Do you enjoy eating together in team? Then probably I have something for you here. The Restaurant Retrospective Introduction Speeddating let the team members sitting in front of each other 90 sec talking about a any topic (you can easly make it 2min) after time is up, let them rotate rotate as long as you feel energy or your timebox is up Improvement Retro This technique is near the creative technique 6-5-3, this you can find here . For this method I created a simple paper with three columns (You, Team, Outside Team), as you can see in the picture. Create your own paper to make it more yours. First round, every Teammember writes an improvement or an idea in each of the column. Give them around 5min to come up with truly improvements. Afterwards pass the paper every 2-5min in the direction of your choice. Ajust the time to your needs or maybe depend on your team size. Let the Teammembers writ...

Hi Scrumers How do you estimate in your team? Could your team make the step to relative Estimation? If not, maybe this post can help you establish relative Estimation in your team. As ScrumMaster you know all the Theory of relative Estimation from your ScrumMaster Course or Certification. If not, I recommend the following book for you. Or following Links: Agile Estimation, Mike Cohn Effective Estimation, Robert C. Martin, Uncle Bob There are much more blogs about it. For relative Estimation where recommend StoryPoints as an abstract size of a Story. I find this very useful and it helped me to find the way out of time based estimations. But for a lot of people it is hard to make this switch. Mike Cohns recommondation is here to use DogPoints. You take the different dog races from its size. I do not know anything about Dogs and so I had to find something else as further abstractation. I live and work in Switzerland and here we are surounded with mountains and hills. So I find it...