It’s Official – Women Are Killing it in Agile!

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The ScrumMaster trends report 2019 showed that women in the ScrumMaster role are taking home a higher salary than their male counterparts. Those with training and certification were doing even better than those without.

Here at ThinkLouder, we’ve seen that women are eager and excited to get the ScrumMaster certification under their belts. In fact, we’ve had more female participants than men this year! We’re delighted to be supporting gender equality in high tech careers, and we want to wish all our female ScrumMasters a happy International Women’s Day!

Here’s one of our ScrumMaster students, Brandi Raso, sharing her experience. If you want to join Brandi, and add ScrumMaster certification to your list of achievements for 2020, get in touch!

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Agile QuickTip: Yellow and Red Cards!

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Here’s how introducing yellow and red meeting cards can help you focus your teams meetings, and stop them getting taken off track.

We’ve all been there when a meeting loses focus. Sometimes participants get too far in the weeds, sometimes they start talking about things that aren’t relevant, or maybe start talking about redundant things that have been covered and put to rest.

One technique that can really help your team members to focus comes from soccer.

Introduce the yellow and red meeting cards. Here’s how it works. Provide each participant with a yellow and a red card. This can be a post-it note, or just index cards.

Now, whenever a meeting starts to get off track, anyone with a yellow card can hold it up, providing a signal to the person speaking that maybe they need to refocus or move onto a different topic. If two or more participants raise a yellow card, this means that someone can hold up the red card. When the red card is held up, this gives the speaker or the speakers 60 seconds to wrap up that discussion before moving on.

Using this very visual and clear tactic, you can keep meetings focused, on topic, and quite frankly, way more engaging for everyone involved.

I hope you enjoyed that Agile QuickTip, and I hope you found it valuable. I’d love to get your feedback on this tip, or any others from the series, so feel free to send me a message! Don’t forget to check out thinklouder.com to see how our training and coaching offerings can help both you and your teams.