I saw a great movie a long time ago. It was called “The Princess Bride.” It had so many great quotes and absurd scenes that I could write an entire blog article about it. There was one thing though, that I am reminded of now when I am talking to people about coaching teams (agile teams or even just teams of good people). In the movie, people are warned not to go into “The Fire Swamp.” It has 3 great perils in it that you do not want to face – Flame spurts, Lightning sand and R.O.U.S (Rodents of Unusual … Continue reading Coaching in the Fire Swamp

Now that Agile has gone mainstream, I often find that people are concerned about the performance of the members of an agile team. In particular people seem interested in how we measure the Product Owner and Team Facilitator (Scrum Master, Agile Coach, Celebrity Post-it note Artiste etc). When working through this, I came up with some “useful” metrics, but this still seemed to leave a gap … which led me to wondering if it is the metrics we need, or an understanding of what we mean by “self-organizing teams, served by scrum servants and product guides.” In fact one interesting … Continue reading Product Owner and Scrum Master Metrics