Tag Archive for: webinar

Webinar: The Sprint Review

Webinar | The Sprint Review

In this webinar, we discuss the Sprint Review which is the most challenging Scrum Event according to our community. The symptoms are subtle and the causes deep: teams often fail to invite real customers, or they don’t know how to solicit and manage feedback. Our hosts, Dennis Büscher and Martin von Weissenberg, have facilitated, hosted and coached hundreds of Sprint Reviews, and in this webinar they share their insights, tips, and tricks with you. They begin with the basics and go over what the Scrum Guide says about the Sprint Review. Then they go a step further and share some of the most common pitfalls they’ve seen, as well as discuss best practices for getting the most out of this event. The webinar ends with a Q&A with our live audience.

Watch Now | Sprint Review Webinar

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Meet your webinar hosts

Martin von Weissenberg is an experienced enterprise-level agile coach who believes that with the right leadership approach and change management tools, organisations can learn to change themselves in a structured and sustainable way. He has worked across the software industry for over 20 years, in startups as well as multinationals. Since joining agile42 in 2012, he has helped a large and diverse number of clients. These include organizations such as Siemens, ABB, Swedbank, Helsinki University, as well as countless shorter training and coaching engagements with companies in the banking, media, educational, telecom and marketing industries.

Martin is always interested in learning new things. So much so that he is currently completing his PhD on how to organize and lead for agility. This coupled with his empathetic and engaging nature, makes him well suited to drive transformations for both teams and larger organizations.

Dennis Büscher comes from a legal, agile project management, and human-centred design background. For more than three years, he has been coaching various companies and institutions in the fields of design thinking and legal design. Dennis worked at the HPI Academy as a project manager and coach for digital transformation and innovation training. Since 2021, Dennis has been a coach at agile42, supporting companies and organisations in the field of agility. He aims to drive innovation and empower teams through his user-centric approach and with the meaningful application of technology.

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Facilitating Scrum online courses

agile42 offers Scrum courses, as well as:

Webinar | The Daily Scrum

The Daily Scrum is found almost everywhere, even outside of Agile frameworks, but many organizations aren’t getting the most out of them. When run well, the Daily Scrum can be highly engaging, quick, proactive, and focused. Our coaches, Regina Martins and Lothar Fischmann, have facilitated, participated, and coached their way through thousands of these meetings, and share some of their insights with you. In this webinar, they start with the basics, cover what the Scrum Guide says about the Daily Scrum and share some tried and tested formats and methods that they have used. Finally, they answer your questions and share their greatest tips and tricks for getting the most out of this Event.

Watch Now | Daily Scrum Webinar

Stay in the loop about upcoming webinars by joining our mailing list 

Meet your webinar hosts

Regina Martins is an experienced business professional with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology, financial services and telecoms industries. As a facilitator and coach at agile42, she spends time getting teams from across the organisational hierarchies to communicate effectively. As a Radical Collaborator, she also helps people to collaborate better with each other and with other teams.

She also has been involved in the Africa Innovation Summit and the Agile Africa conference, as she is passionate about the Agile community in South Africa and continually strives to help keep it fresh. She also regularly speaks at conferences both locally and internationally.

Lothar Fischmann has a background in marketing and corporate communications. These experiences help him to turn agility into something more concrete and tangible. He is a team player who is passionate about creating supportive environments that foster creativity and learning. He also has a systematic approach that allows him to understand situations and develop scalable solutions that fit customers’ needs when helping teams and organisations go through agile transitions. Plus, Lothar always aims to add energy and humour when coaching or facilitating to keep teams engaged.

Browse the agile42Agile Certifications

Facilitating Scrum online courses

agile42 offers Scrum courses, as well as:

Webinar | Sprint Planning

Sprint Planning sets the tone for the entire Sprint. It is absolutely crucial to ensure that this is done properly, because any issues you run into at this stage will have a knock-on effect throughout the entire Sprint. Birge Kahraman and Paul Bultmann have helped many organizations and teams establish Scrum Events and run them with great success. During the webinar, they outline what an effective Sprint Planning Event should entail, and guide you through the practical steps involved in facilitating one. They also share what works well in Sprint Planning, as well as a few traps to avoid, before opening the floor to some listener questions.

Watch now | Sprint Planning Webinar

Stay in the loop about upcoming webinars by joining our mailing list 

Meet your webinar hosts

Birge Elif Kahraman started her career in 2009 and worked as a project manager, Scrum Master, and Agile Coach. Before joining agile42, she coached various teams and companies in Telecommunication, Finance, Ecommerce, and Service domains. Birge supports teams in analyzing their impediments and reflecting on the next steps, creating a trustful environment where they can communicate and collaborate. She has a data-driven and pragmatic approach, which helps her tailor her coaching unique to the company culture and the reality of the teams.

As an Agile coach, Paul Bultmann wants to make the world a better place to work. He believes collaboration should be easy, fun and structured to be successful. For the past 10 years he has worked as Leader, Agile Coach, Scrum Master, Trainer and Project Manger. His passions and skills include Organisational Change, Agile Transformation and Team building.

Browse the agile42Agile Certifications

Graphic: Sign up for our facilitating Scrum Course now

agile42 offers Scrum courses, as well as:

Webinar: Human Factors in Agile Transformations

Are we paying attention to the important human factors of coherence, psychological safety, and trust that connect us in the virtual and physical spaces where we gather? In July, agile42 coach Michèle Twomey, alongside our special guest Sonja Blignaut from More Beyond, explored this question and some of the hybrid models we are testing that enable essential human contact during agile transitions.

Michéle kicked off our two-part series on "Human Factors in Agile Transformations". In her video interview, Michéle gave us her take on Gerald M. Weinberg's statement: “all problems are people problems”. She also delved into what human factors one needs to consider in agile transformations as well as her sources of inspiration in her own journey of understanding human factors.

Let's automate what needs to be automated and let's start thinking about where that human magic can really become valuable.

- Michéle Twomey

Next up, Sonja shared her insights on human factors within the realm of "complexity". She addressed the notion that, if we force too much change on people, we compromise their sense of coherence. Ultimately she believes we need to think about limiting the change in progress, the same way we limit work in progress within agile transformations. Listen to Sonja's video interview HERE.

Michéle and Sonja joined forces in our webinar on the 28th of July. The session raised many pressing issues we are currently facing, particularly around the expectation of always being available, always being online, and the important element of trust within the workplace. The audience had the opportunity to engage with their own questions, some of which included:

  • Given a new team who can only work remotely, what would you suggest to build trust?
  • I miss the spontaneous corridor discussions that have in the past been the space where the most impact has been made. Have you seen anything that could substitute this space in the current situation when we're all remote?
  • What do you think helps some people handle digitisation better than others?
  • How is the link between the personality type of the leaders vs the human factor taken into consideration or not?

In the same way you put in place WIP limits, you need to put in change in progress limits. It's like a dam with sleuths - if you don't think carefully about how much water you let out, you flood the downstream.

- Sonja Blignaut

If you missed out on the live session, we have the recording for you here - please feel free to share around with your network. 

Join our free agile42 Community and gain access to thousands of agilists from all over the world to share experiences, challenges, and ideas. A safe and moderated community of like-minded people, who share a passion for all things agile - organizational culture, lean and agile methods, coaching & more!

Please do get in touch with us should you have any questions - we would love to hear from you.

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Webinar: Digital Transformation

June was all about "Digital Transformation". agile42 coach Martin von Weissenberg, alongside our special guest Dave Snowden, Founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Cognitive Edge, discussed the way agile and digitilisation are intertwined, and why it’s misleading to think of digitalisation as a one-time “transformation”

Martin got Part 1 underway with a video interview exploring what is a digital transformation and why it is necessary. Delving also into the organizational implications of a digital transformation.

Whilst agile is an enabler of digitalisation, we can also say digitalisation is an enabler of agility. 

- Martin von Weissenberg

In Part 2, the creator of the Cynefin framework and thought leader within complexity science and knowledge management, Dave Snowden, explained the role Agile plays in the context of a digital transformation & the organizational implications thereof. He also examined the social human impact of such changes.

On the 23rd of June we were treated to a thought-provoking webinar hosted by South African based agile42 coach, Peter Hundermark, along with Dave and Martin. The audience had the opportunity to ask their pressing questions in this Q&A-style panel discussion. Some of the questions covered included:

  • What is digital transformation?
  • Can agile enable digital transformation or the other way around? How do we see the connection/relationship between the two?
  • What is your opinion on digital transformation? Is it about technological risks? About literacy?
  • With many people now predominantly working from home, is this driving digital transformation or is there some sort of link?
  • How can we find the adjacent possible in a transformation based on attractions and systems tendency?

People confuse the adjacent possible with the adjacent, adjacent. They forget the possible. Adjacent possible is an evolutionary landscape. It's not what's next to us. It's also what's the next feasible state for the right energy input.

- Dave Snowden

If you missed out on the live session, we have the recording for you here - please feel free to share around with your network. 

Join our free agile42 Community and gain access to thousands of agilists from all over the world to share experiences, challenges and experiences. Expand your toolbox within this unique learning community of like-minded people, who share a passion for agility, organizational culture, methods like Scrum, and coaching.

Please do get in touch with us should you have any questions. We are here to help.
Stay tuned to our social media platforms for next month's theme!

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Webinar: What makes a great Product Owner?

The theme for the month of May was Product Ownership. We had two of our agile42 coaches covering this topic, Daniel Lynn and Lothar Fischamnn. Daniel kicked off Part 1 with a video interview where he looked at what makes a great Product Owner, including how to handle a team looking for a list of tasks to complete as well as navigating those needy stakeholders. 

In Part 2, Lothar looked at why having a Product Vision is so important for a Product Owner and what we can learn from “Shark Tank”.

This culminated in a webinar on the 26th May, where Daniel and Lothar shared their thoughts and experience in a Q&A style session. The audience certainly gave them some challenging questions! 

Some of these included:

  • Do you coach/teach Product Owners to ruthlessly prioritize to drive better product/service focus?
  • There was a debate whether the Product Owner role is still required in Scrum. Any thoughts?
  • What would you say are the most important "watch-outs "or pit-falls as a Product Owner?
  • Can you be a PO across 2 teams working on multiple products or is that another role completely?

As always the hour flew by with many more discussions still to be had. This is why we have decided to launch a Lean Coffee event after each webinar where you can continue the conversation with two of our agile42 coaches. This provides an opportunity to address those remaining burning questions as well as meet like-minded people. Join our free agile42 Community to gain access to our monthly Lean Coffees as well as an array of other benefits. We hope to see you there!

If you missed out on the live session, don’t panic! We have the recording for you here - please feel free to share around with your network. 

Please do get in touch with us should you have any questions. We would love to hear from you.
Stay tuned to our social media platforms for next month's theme!

LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter

agile42 Community Launch

We’re excited to announce the launch of our new agile42 Community! Our coaches Regina Martins and Rochelle Roos shared what this is about in a live webinar on the 29th April. 

We’ve trained and coached many people over the years that we’d like to continue supporting in their growth and development. One of them may have been you. Some of you have also been active in the PathToCSP Slack group and we’ve enjoyed interacting with you in that way. Many of you have also returned for more advanced training. But much more is needed to help you in your career as an agilist. 

In order to take learnings beyond the classroom, we’ve created 2 membership options.

Free membership

  • An exclusive safe forum with thousands of other agile professionals to discuss new developments and challenges
  • Monthly Lean Coffee
  • Discounted rate for exclusive webinars
  • Monthly newsletter with a “How-to” article to help you improve your effectiveness with your team

 

 

Premium membership

All the benefits of the Free Community Membership PLUS:

  • Access to self-learning content to help you be more confident, competent, and effective in your role
  • Access to exclusive webinars by the agile42 coaches on topics chosen by you, the community
  • 1 mentorship session monthly
  • Ready to use facilitation templates for the most common sessions faced by Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Agile Coaches

This is an inspiring new place where we want to continue supporting you in your growth and development as Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Agile Coaches. Each month we will have a theme around which we’ll create events and activities, and stimulate discussions. The idea is that you learn from the community as well as get support from our agile42 coaches and trainers. 

People who join communities, surrounded by other like-minded people, are more likely to get the results they want because they get the help they need when they need it. By learning more from other people in the community is a way to broaden your perspective. 

We want to make this a safe space for everyone to participate in and thrive. As such, we’ve created a Code of Conduct that everyone needs to agree to; and it will be a moderated space.

The theme for May is Product Ownership. So, join us, and let’s get the ball rolling on your growth and development. You can already sign up for the next webinar on this topic. 

If you missed out on the live session, don’t panic! We have the recording for you here to share around with your network, friends, and colleagues, so that everyone can benefit from the Communities. 

For any questions, you are always welcome to contact us!
Hope to see you again next month, for a new theme and new discussions! 

Leading Remotely: Webinar

Our theme for April was Leading Remotely, where we teamed up with our trusted partner, Geoff Watts from Inspect & Adapt, who kicked off the month with a video interview. Geoff is the UK’s leading ORGANIC agility® leadership coach. In his interview, he shares his observations on how organisations have been impacted by COVID-19 and particularly how leadership has been affected by the shift to remote work. He also gives advice about what to focus on to better lead remotely.

In the second part of our "Leading Remotely" theme, ORGANIC agility® leadership coach Andrea Tomasini shares his insights of the effect the COVID-19 pandemic has had on organisations, addressing why some companies have fared better. He also gives tips on how leaders can increase effectiveness when working remotely whilst finding ways to reduce stress levels amongst employees.

To sum all of this up, we hosted a webinar on the 22 of April, which recapped the month and the general discussions, both on social media and also in our Community. Both Andrea and Geoff shared their thinking live, and the amount of people that joined us was fantastic. 

Since the topic is very broad, we chose to have a poll in the beginning of the session, to see where we should start the conversation. The options were: 

  • Trust
  • Well-being when working/leading remotely
  • Practices

The majority of people wanted us to talk about “Well-being when working/leading remotely” and that became the natural starting point of the discussion. However the conversation did cover all three points, as they do go hand in hand. 

Leading remotely is a big topic, and our audience contributed with both good questions, as well as sharing their own valuable thinking and ideas on how they tackled this situation. The webinar was hosted more as a discussion this time around, and the engagement was great! 

If you missed out on the live session, don’t panic! We have the recording for you here to share around with your network. 

For any questions, you are always welcome to contact us!
Hope to see you again next month, for a new theme and new discussions! 

Growing as a Scrum Master and Beyond

Last Wednesday, the 11th of November, we ran our webinar "Growing as a Scrum Master and Beyond"! This topic clearly resonated with many, as we set a new record number of participants. We spotted familiar names who have been following us over the years, and many new names we hope to see again. It makes us happy to see our webinar network growing! 

We had the great honour of welcoming two guests on this webinar, Jelena Vucinic and Bob Stomp, who joined our CSP-SM training this fall. Together with agile42 trainers & coaches, Giuseppe De Simone and Niels Verdonk, we hope they provided you with the content you were after. 

As the coaches mentioned early on in the webinar, being a Scrum Master in a company is much more than just attending a 2-day training to get certified. Whilst your role is to primarily coach the team, it is also to teach, give advice, be a mentor and role model of the Agile and Scrum values and principles. This is not always an easy task. The knowledge and skills you need as a Scrum Master will grow through education, perhaps some additional coaching and most of all the experience and support of other Scrum Masters in your organization and network. 

As Jelena mentioned during the webinar, a typical day for a Scrum Master is not only to facilitate Scrum meetings, however a multitude of other undertakings. You observe the team, prepare for meetings, follow-up action points from meetings, handle impediments, have 1-on-1 meetings with the team members and stakeholders when needed and think about new ways in which you can help your team.

The webinar attendees were particularly interested in the ways you can grow as a Scrum Master, for which there are various paths. You can of course take the training provided on the Scrum Master growth path as visualised in the diagram below. Each training goes deeper into the content of the Scrum Master, and you will gain valuable new skills and learnings to add to your toolbox. The below diagram shows the steps to become a CSP-SM: 

 

We recommended reading The Hitchhikers Guide to Agile Coaching and checking out the post on 5 books we believe every Scrum Master should read.

Other training we offer is the Advanced Team Coaching Course which we recommend for those who already have CSM certification. There is also the ICAgile Team Facilitation Certification to support you as a Scrum Master. Furthermore you could consider coaching from one of our Agile coaches, for example, to grow you or your team of Scrum Masters.

Many of you listening asked us about the whole CSP path, how to grow skills and mindset as well as next steps after CSP-SM certification, and we feel that depends on what skills you wish to deepen. Below you can see examples of next steps, and our Mentoring programme can assist you on these paths. Mentoring is a long term commitment both from your side and the Mentors side, and this is a great opportunity to meet like-minded people, and to grow and learn together. 

If you would like to explore next steps on your individual growth path and/or like to enquire about our Mentoring programme after the CSP-SM, please get in touch with us and we would be happy to help.

Our upcoming trainings can be found here - take the next step on your journey with us!

The recording is available online. Feel free to watch it again and share with your network. It is also available on YouTube.

 

Below you will find the slides, with some further content. Please also feel free to share the slides around.

 

Connect with us on social media, to stay updated with blogs, webinars, training and other events which support your learning journey :) 

 

Have a great weekend, and don't forget to check out post and upcoming webinars!

Achieving Flow in Remote Meetings

Remote meetings can suffer from what we refer to as "traffic jam effects." Maybe someone's internet is dropping, and you keep having to repeat something, or maybe the general pace seems that much slower. These kinds of experiences impact our ability to collaborate remotely.

In our webinar, on the 6th of November, we looked at this problem from a few different angles. We began by looking at some high-level information on the trends of remote work, pre and post COVID. We briefly mentioned our 7 principles for remote facilitation and narrowed in on one, Enable Flow, which was the focus of this webinar. 

Many things can happen in a remote meeting which contribute to the feeling of “stuckness”. For example; technical challenges can interrupt flow as the group waits while information needs to be repeated. Similarly people speaking at the same time or feeling like they can't speak up can create a sense of getting “stuck”. 

If we look outside of meetings to better understand this experience, traffic jams provide a helpful analogy. Sometimes we can see the destination, but progress towards it is painfully slow, and when that happens, it can be super frustrating. It can cause us to feel like getting out of the car and just leaving it there in favour of walking to our destination. Maybe we get frustrated and angry; maybe our chest starts to tighten. It turns out that when we get stuck in remote meetings, our brain might be experiencing some of these same things. 

Our brains are wired to make the experience of closing feedback loops rewarding: it feels good to reach resolutions/achieve “aha” moments. However, if something inhibits us from this closure, the opposite becomes true, frustration, disengagement and fatigue often creep in. 

This is why it's so important to think about enabling flow in remote meetings. And what happens when we get stuck: we want to avoid conditions which lead to disengagement, fatigue, and frustration. We examined the 4 categories of stuckness, and gave some practical methods which can be used to achieve flow in remote meetings. 

Technical 

  1. Agree on a back channel before hand
  2. Co-create visual documentation
  3. Troubleshoot e.g (maybe switching off camera works) 

Ambiguity

  1. Make agenda and session rules visible
  2. Visible instructions
  3. Visually validate outcomes
  4. Root participants in the present

Comprehension

  1. Allow people quiet time to think
  2. Provide participation via writing
  3. Make meeting artifacts visual
  4. Pause and check understanding

Digital fatigue

  1. Make space for breaks
  2. Use energy queues
  3. Consider async

 

Here you can find the slides from the presentation.

The recording is available on YouTube. Please feel free to share around with your network:)

 

In our Remote Facilitation Practitioner training kicking off on the 17th November 2020, we will deep dive into more of the principles for remote design and offer real practices that you can put to use immediately. The training includes practical sessions and feedback to help you improve. We look forward to seeing you there!

 

*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*