This week, Digital Maelstrom’s CMO Kristopher Stice-Hall continues to be the featured guest on The Scrum Master Toolbox podcast- a daily podcast for Scrum Masters and Agile coaches. Throughout the week, Kristopher will be sharing his personal experiences and words of wisdom as a Scrum Master of over ten years.
The third podcast of this series was released on Wednesday, April 24th and can be heard at Scrum Master Toolbox with Kristopher Stice-Hall: Episode 3.
The fourth episode of this series hones in on Agile retrospective format. Kristopher shares how his team’s retrospective meetings are organized: the first half is dedicated to noticing what could be improved upon for the future, and the second of the meeting is analyzing what went well and the reasons why. By including this Kudos check-in in the last half of the meeting, the team is left hopeful and actively considering how they can continue to improve upon their current successful methods of working.
In addition to finishing retrospective meetings on a positive note, Kristopher suggests never targeting an individual who is not performing as well as the other team members. Instead, he suggests approaching the problem as one that should be solved by the team as a whole. Because the goal of Scrum methodology is to complete epics and stories as a team, calling out individuals is typically unproductive and veers away from Scrum principles.
Scrum Master Kristopher defines workplace success as work that is completed in a predictable fashion and leaves each of the team members are satisfied with the results. He explains that in using the word “predictable”, he is referring to work that is completed in a patternized way which then allows the team to understand the velocity and time frame of future projects. When team members are working for long stretches at odd hours of the day (or night), predictability hasn’t been met. Unpredictability may be symptoms of a larger problem within the company.
Kristopher Stice-Hall has been a Scrum Master for over ten years and has been working in software development for the past 17 years. His IT Advisory company, Digital Maelstrom, offers a wide variety of services in Development, IT Operations, IT Strategy, and IT Security.
