I Am a Certified Scrum Coach and I Am Not Nice

September 25, 2010

Congratulate me.  I recently learned that I have been accepted as a Certified Scrum Coach (CSC).  I have been wanting to be among the ranks of the other CSCs for a while and it took me a long time to do a complete job with the CSC application (and the time delay had a bit [...]

Read the full article →

Estimation and Release Planning with Fruit Salad

August 28, 2010

Some late breaking events caused several students in a recent Certified Scrum Product Owner class to reschedule, leaving only five students in the class. I (Lyssa) had arranged for a candidate Certified Scrum Trainer (CST), Brian Rabon, to co-teach with me in this class. He and I had some fancy footwork to do as many [...]

Read the full article →

Agile and Design Thinking:
How to Stop Work from Killing You

August 6, 2010

I am part of the Coaches’ Training Institute Co-Active Leadership program this year.  If you want to really delve into yourself to amp up the leadership qualities that help people know what you’re about so they can follow you, with the flip-side of pruning (most painfully) the parts of yourself that don’t help people follow [...]

Read the full article →

Millennials and Scrum, made for each another

May 23, 2010

This year, I encountered my first classroom-full of people who had never worked waterfall.  Now, I don’t talk a lot about waterfall versus Scrum when I teach the Certified ScrumMaster course, just enough to set the stage for why Scrum arose when it did.  I show some data about the appalling failure rates of projects [...]

Read the full article →

Addressing upper management challenges with Scrum

April 21, 2010

Common challenges often laid at the doorstep of upper management as an organization starts to see the benefits of Scrum are a noisy host of problems that usher in the need for a trio of mind-set changes: resource utilization vs. throughput, competition vs. collaboration and command-and-control vs. servant leadership. In my experience, most of the [...]

Read the full article →

Positive Psychology and Team Performance

March 20, 2010

Do the teams you coach seem to be stuck in a rut?  Do you wish they would stand up for themselves when company management hands down a decision that harms them?  Do they blindly accept situations that cause impediments to their work, assuming they can’t affect them anyway?  If your attempts to help have been [...]

Read the full article →

Scrum Gathering in Orlando

February 21, 2010

Tobias Mayer and the folks at the Scrum Alliance have organized what looks to be the best Scrum Gathering ever.  Truly, I’m not saying this because I get to be part of it with the Coaching the Coaches deep-dive session and a couple others (including project manager deprogramming).  Rather, I say this because the people [...]

Read the full article →

Navigating Conflict on Agile Teams: Why Resolving it Won't Work

January 24, 2010

My keynote address which I now call “Navigating Conflict/The AWE Factor” keynote is available on the StickyMinds website. Grab a snack, take a look and let me know what you think.  And, send it around if you think it can help people.

Read the full article →

Non-Profit ScrumMasters

December 20, 2009

I wrapped up a week of Scrum training and consulting in non-profit organizations with the cherry on top – a Certified ScrumMaster workshop for non-profits modeled after the brilliant  WelfareCSM concept created by Tobias Mayer. Contrasted with the Scrum courses I teach in corporate settings, this class was a slow boat into the essence of [...]

Read the full article →

Co-active coaching comes to the agile world

November 25, 2009

What a joy to see the Co-Active Coaching book alongside a bevy of agile books at the 2009 Agile Development Practices conference bookstore.  It sat there, nestled right next to the latest agile wisdom from Mike’s Cohn’s new book, Succeeding with Agile.  And…the Co-Active Coaching book sold out.  I didn’t wear a sign saying “Co-Active [...]

Read the full article →

Build your team's collaboration muscle

September 30, 2009

At Agile 2009, I delivered the results of a beautiful collaboration between myself and Lee Devin, co-author of the much loved Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work.  After our session had been accepted, Lee discovered that he could not attend the conference.  Instead of saying, “See ya” or “Good luck [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →