“Hi, I’m a coach and I am here to help” My spine stiffens and I can feel my hair on back of my neck. “Thanks, K” I respond tepidly K: “I have been promoted, I am now your coach. I will do what it takes to help your team” Me: “we need all the help we can get” ‘When...
Kanban at its essence is a signaling device that instructs the moving or creating in a "pull" based system. Kanban when applied within a system enables synchronization between the rhythm of demand (customer) and rhythm of production (producer). The pace or beat, of...
CPR - Categorize, Prioritize, Resolve: Impediments This is simple mnemonic that aids me to be methodical in my approach towards uncovering and resolving issues that impede progress. Categorize: How do you view your world? Lack of any impedence means your team is in a...
The proliferation of job titles in an organization encourages the diffusion of responsibility and dilution of vision. Panchal's Directive provides a guide to the number of different titles in an organization: Take the square root of the number of people in the...
Consider one of your peers or subordinates or juniors some one at the same level as yours or below. Lets name him Jerry. Next time Jerry or some one like him/her requests for a non-trivial action from you, reflect on how your thinking, processes this ask. It is my...
Oh Master of Scrum, You make our team hum You take obstacles away So we can work all day With you we are greater than our Sum! - By Bilyana, Joel, Nicole & Kiran This poem was created by class participants, thanks for making this a great class.
Context explains a lot of our behavior. This is a most intriguing case, that I feel I can now retell. For much time has passed by and my metaphorical obfuscation will protect the innocent. In the warm summer months of August, I was engaged to a client most ambitious...
Once upon a time in a land of many elephants. Shankar believed that there are white elephants too. Shankar travelled far and he travelled long. He met a pink elephant, a flying elephant, a yellow elephant. Until he came across a white elephant and then he exclaimed: I...
For large distributed retrospectives, where participants in the retrospective are in different cities, I have created a variation of popular group discussion technique called as “Park Bench”. Some Background: I was coaching within a large organization with different...
Walk the dog is simple way teams learn story splitting. I prefer a marketing twist to its name which came to me while coaching a team that was struggling to behave cross functionally and were paralyzed at delivering working software at the end of their sprint. It is a...