Global Scrum Gathering San diego 2017 #SGCAL

Global Scrum Gathering San Diego 2017 took place this last week, and we were proud to be there sponsoring the event!
The #SGCAL feature a lot of daily talks, most of them scheduled, but there’s also an open space where there was nothing scheduled and people just wrote whatever topic it’d be cool to share and hop in to take the stage.

As with every other event we’ve assisted, we’d like to share a bit of what we see and learn with you guys, who weren’t here.

#SGCAL Quotes

Stuart was in the building taking care of illustrating some of the talks that we’ll share, but there was this wall that he used to draw some quotes and thoughts that the assistants submitted.
Here are some of the quotes he chose and who submitted them:

• Surf the tides of change… Align value streams first.
• Why Scale? To make life easier for developers! Fixing your backlog is key for Scrum @ Scale @RADTACLtd
• Scrum transformations are driven by exponential technologies. Keep it Simple, 5–6 ingredients for successful teams. Jeff Sutherland
• Scrum is not driving a clown car
• The scrum master steps back in an ideal team.
• Finding the cost efficiency of the scrum team
• #Left Brain poisoning… being consumed with seeking metrics that matter.
• Find the biggest problem and fix it.
• Drawing helps retain learning
• The power of play …Longer life … Better results
• Be passionate, empower a team and change lives… High 5!
• Scrum in Edu… Our students are taking over the world. Brian Rivera
• Remove organizational friction with conversations. OpenSpace encourages trust & Collaboration. Ronica Roth
• Djing Whilst car building @MariaMatarelli

Luke Hohmann Enterprise Retrospectives.

Visual representation of Luke’s talk.

Luke had a very interesting talk about enterprise level retrospectives. We had caught up with him last week to talk a bit about his presentation and got a chance to pick his brain a bit. You can read our pre-event interview right here.

In his talk, Luke started by “Retrospecting Retrospectives”. Reflecting on what are they and what can be improved on an enterprise level.

First of all, he made a good point: Retrospectives are not for complaining (Bitching, moaning, whining). They are to look for solutions. So, having that in mind, What is the problem with retrospectives? Well, he share a couple of warning signs or red flags that your method or style is not working:

-People stops coming

-People stop participating

Whenever this happens, it’s appears as if there’s nothing wrong coming up with the team, but the reality is that people are not involved or vested on the process.

Another issue that comes up is the employees Aspirational and prescriptive BIAS, where the participants are held back by their own expectations, and how they think they are expected to behave at work. So, there’s 3 types of issues that can come up in an Enterprise Retrospective: People > Tech > Process. Either one of team is sometimes hard to notice sometimes, as different teams will tell you their own version of the issue.

In order to have a productive enterprise retrospective, you need to consolidate individual team data patterns to find a common issue. It’s also worth noting some tips he mentioned by the end of the talk.

• Hard process improvements are not easy nor quick. It’s not like your team will identify an issue and fix it right away. Not in 1 sprint.
• Enterprise retros are infrequent, team based retrospective should be done by the end of every sprint. Depending on the size of your team, try doing an enterprise retrospective every quarter.
• Don’t kid teams that they can fix things out of their control.

At the end of the talk, he shared the slides he used:
https://www.slideshare.net/innovgames/ldtr-whyandhowtorunone

Are you interested in improving your team retrospectives? Try our Retros tool. Or visit SoftwareDevTools.com We have a series of tools and add-on’s built specially for #Remote and #Agile teams.

Heidi Helfand Dynamic Reteaming.

Visual representation of Heidi’s talk.

Dynamic Reteaming is the act of moving team members around teams in different ways. What you want to have in your organization is a group of stable teams. A stable team is often confused with keeping it the same, and that is a big mistake.

An stable team doesn’t necessarily needs to be the same, just as keeping the same team for some time does not make it an stable team at all. We are talking about keeping your team stable for predictability. The challenge here is how short can you make your feedback loop.

Heidi’s take on Dynamic reteaming also has a good point on transparency. She’s an advocate for making changing teams a fully transparent practice. She shared how does dynamic reteaming looks like from the transparency perspective. From less transparent to less transparent:

• People don’t know who puts them on the team.
• Managers put people on teams without their input.
• Managers tap into people’s interests/needs.
• Managers arrange self-selection events.
• Team members trade places, later tell managers.

So, in a fully transparent organization, there are some ways that individuals can get on board with other teams:

• Self-selection.
• Choice of team.
• Retrospectives.

Heidi’s tip for creating great teams is a simple one: PUT PEOPLE FIRST.

If you are leading a great organization, you’d think everyone is on their “dream team” but there’s more than one reason people look to switch teams:
To grow, to Learn, Sustainability, to be Liberated, for Code.

So, at the end of the day reteaming is inevitable. You might as well get good at it. Creating intelligent teams require working agreements, you need to talk about the white elephant in the room, be able to discuss any topic. That will give you great business teams.

Bob Hartman
How to talk to executives.

Bob gave us geeks a few tips on how to talk to senior executives or C-Level personas. It came down to 3 tips and a list of do’s and Don’t’s that were summarized greatly by Pete Behrens.

1 Understand their world: Get in their shoes, find out what are they looking for, what’s causing them trouble.

2 Goal > Next Meeting: When talking to an executive don’t expect to close a deal right away. On your first talk your Goal should be scheduling their following meeting with them.

3 Reflect their pain: You need to externalize the fact that you understand what they are looking for.

Do:

• Share success stories
• Show Value
• Be consistent
• Be confident
• Be realistic
• Discuss options
• Identify next steps

Don’t:

• Judge them
• Tech speak
• Sell
• Assume their world

Fadi Stephan Fostering self organizing teams

“The 7 levels of authority”

Fadi gave an interesting talk about self-organizing teams. Though not the same talk, here are some slides from a previous talk he gave.

His talk was very informative and he went in deep in many aspects of a self organizing team. You can see most of the talk on the slides, but we thought we’d share the 7 levels of Authority as described by him.

The 7 levels of authority:

1. Tell: Make a decision as the manager
2. Sell: Convince people about the decision.
3. Consult: Get info from team before decision
4. Agree: Make decision together with team
5. Advise: Influence decision made by the team
6. Inquire: Ask feedback after decision by team
7. Delegate: No influence, let the team work it out.

A team where everyone acknowledges and uses these levels of authority is a team that is on it’s way to being comfortable working together and that will soon have no need for a manager, as they will be a self-organizing team.

Paul Goddard. Improvising with agile.

Paul shared some point on what concepts of improvisation can be valuable for an agile team and how can we use them. These are concepts to work with in any team meeting.

1 Safety: Be comfortable being uncomfortable. If your team has the same goal as you do then you will find that your team sometimes expects you to make mistakes. You need to make you and your team members feel like a family when talking.

Put in practice: Focus, Presence, Reacting, OK to fail, Fail fast, Safety

2 Spontaneity: Don’t hold back. Don’t worry about sharing any new thoughts that come to you during a conversation.
Practice: Don’t filter, don’t be obvious, Accept idea, add to idea, blocks > offers

3 Storytelling: You want to make sure everyone is on the same page, you can reinforce ideas or concepts, by adding some storytelling for context.

Practice: Add to ideas, Connect ideas, reset > Explode creativity

4 Status:

Practice: Low status accept offers, high status refuse offers, switch status!
5 Sensitivity: You need to be aware that you are dealing with people and that what you are doing is always improvable.

Practice: Selfless, listen, recollect, aware,in the moment, open to change.

There you have it! A small summary of some of the talks we had the chance to assist to at this year’s #SGCAL. Hopefully you’ll get something out of it.
If you are interested on #Agile practices for your team, make sure to checkout www.SoftwareDevTools.com We have an array of helpful tools for remote & Agile teams.

Happy planning!