Welcome Erin, Boost’s new Agile coach

We’re very pleased to welcome our newest Agile coach to Boost.

Erin was immediately attracted to the idea of servant leadership that underlies the role.

“I love the idea of being there for a team, identifying what they need, being that person that they can trust and come to,” she says.

With a background in therapy for couples and for individuals, Erin knows what makes relationships work and how to get there. She’d been looking for a role offering similar opportunities but in a collaborative setting, and Boost’s values chimed with her.

“Then after coming to Test Drive Boost I was even more keen, because I saw what those values looked like in person.”

Originally hailing from Mississippi, Erin moved to New York after university. Now she’s here in New Zealand, she’s looking forward to having a house with some space, some greenery and sufficient room to raise a brood of Silky chickens. Which should be quite a sight.

Silky bantam by Benjamint444 - CC BY-SA 3.0

Changing up Team Boost

In other news for Team Boost, Sean has moved from Agile coach to Relationship manager, Mette from Designer to Agile coach and Emma is back on the design team after returning from maternity leave.

Agile mastery reading recommendations

We’re currently using a couple of books by Geoff Watts to upskill our team and clients. We’re running through Scrum Mastery with our new Agile coach Erin and we’re giving our product owners copies of Product Mastery.

There are two reasons we find the books particularly useful.

Memorable frameworks

They detail the characteristics of effective Scrum Masters and Product Owners using simple mnemonics. These give you a memorable framework to guide your work:

A great Product Owner has to be DRIVEN:

Decisive with incomplete information
Ruthless about maximising value and minimising risk
Informed about your product’s domain
Versatile in your leadership style
Empowering of project stakeholders
Negotiable while you pursue your vision

A great Scrum Master needs to be RETRAINED:

Resourceful in removing impediments to productivity
Enabling, helping others be effective
Tactful, diplomacy personified
Respected, known for integrity both within the team and the wider organisation
Alternative, prepared to promote a counter-culture
Inspiring, generating enthusiasm and energy in others
Nurturing of both individuals and teams
Empathetic, sensitive to those around them
Disruptive, able to shift the status quo and help create a new way of working

Real-world examples

Both books demonstrate what these frameworks mean with real-world examples. They show what good practitioners would do in different situations, and contrast that with what great practitioners would do.

Check them out

If you want to learn more about the books, and see if a library near you has a copy, here are their WorldCat listings:

Scrum Mastery: From good to great servant leadership

Product Mastery: From good to great product ownership

Boost selected for new Agile panel

We’re very pleased to have been selected for the Ministry of Social Development’s new Agile expert panel.

We might have had an inside edge, because we’d already demonstrated our Agile expertise to MSD by delivering the SuperGold and Check what you might get projects.

We loved working on these projects because they offered such clear opportunities to create positive impacts for the people of Aotearoa. Check out these case studies to see how we used Agile to deliver these impacts.

SuperGold case study: Strong, independent seniors finding savings anywhere, anytime

Check what you might get case study: Helping Kiwis thrive by making it simple to get support