Our Staffing Approach
Our Staffing Approach
It’s all about people.
Your development team directly impacts the success of a product, and your team is only as good as its members.
The process of hiring the right professionals into an organization is one of the hardest and most time-consuming management tasks, but for an Agile organization, getting it right is absolutely critical.
Spend time with any Agile team and you’ll discover a litany of skillsets unusual to most IT organizations, such as servant leadership, coaching, facilitation, and negotiation. It can be tough to know what skills to look for beyond typical programming and testing competency, but Artisan Agility can take some of that work off your plate!
We select candidates based on their fundamental personality traits, prioritizing character attributes that make them more responsive to training and more receptive to coaching. We work to understand your specific needs, and then provide certified, qualified ScrumMasters who can bring out the best in your team.
How We Staff
We work to understand your needs, ensuring our ability to provide ScrumMasters who can bring out the best in your teams – but it doesn’t end there. Our secret is continuous learning to support continuous improvement.
Continuous Training
We ensure your Artisan-provided ScrumMaster is always learning by providing ongoing training to them at NO ADDITIONAL COST to you. On a regular basis, but sensitive to your production schedule, we will continue to improve your ScrumMaster’s skills through training. We also hold bi-weekly discussions for our ScrumMasters to learn from each other across multiple organizations and industries.
Valuable Coaching
Our staffing guarantee also includes immediate access to highly experienced coaches. If your Artisan-provided ScrumMaster is experiencing a problem with a team or just wants to find a way to help improve a team’s effectiveness in a specific situation, they can call upon an experienced coach for assistance. Our coaches assess, observe, and support with the goal of sustainability and self-reliance.
Ongoing Assessment
We also have a continuous feedback loop to assess progress. On a regular basis (typically once per quarter), you’ll be visited by an experienced Artisan Agility coach who will assess the performance of your Artisan-provided ScrumMaster, for the purpose of providing feedback and suggestions on solutions to make your teams more effective and your organization more Agile.
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Testimonials
Here’s what some of our clients had to say about us:
“I took a Scrum Master course and was completely impressed. Agile and Scrum are concepts that do not exist in a vacuum. Without real business contexts, and especially real software development experience, Agile doesn’t mean much. It was Jim’s ability to teach the material with his finger always on best practices that made the class a home run.”
“I recently took the Certified ScrumMaster class. Not only did our instructor thoroughly understand the course material and knows how to teach it well but he also has many real-world examples to further enhance one’s learning. I really enjoyed the class and learned a lot!”
“CSM training with Artisan was the best training that I have ever taken. The class was lively and interactive. They covered Agile fundamentals and material relevant to the CSM exam. They were not hesitant to take questions and had lots of examples from real world experience. I passed the CSM exam with an almost perfect score without help from any other sources.”
“I had the pleasure of attending a 2-day seminar on Agile and it was fantastic. If you are looking to improve your understanding of Agile from someone who has done it (not just someone who read it) for years, Artisan is the one. I have attended many other seminars but none as plain and simple. Most coaches add an unnatural aura to Agile as if it were some mystic and ancient magic. Artisan presents these concepts in a dispassionate yet highly precise manner.”
Recent Blog Posts
Why a Forecast is SO MUCH BETTER Than a Commitment
The Scrum Guide says that a Scrum team makes a forecast during Sprint Planning, but managers want a commitment. What’s the difference and why is a forecast much better than a commitment?
A Bigger Product Backlog Isn’t a Better One
Product Backlogs should be relatively short. The longer they get, the harder they are to use effectively. In this blog post, I talk about why a large Product Backlog is bad news and what you can do to fix it.
A “Reality Framework” for Metrics
Thanks to 20th century management theory, the world is filled with metrics and measures that are questionable. Many are useless. For example, a commonly used but effectively useless metric for knowledge creation workers (like those in IT, marketing, and other creative careers): utilization. Utilization is a metric that was meant to measure the percentage
Evaluating the Performance of a Scrum Master
Measuring the performance of an employee is never easy to do. It’s made much more difficult when we have a hard time understanding exactly what a person is supposed to be doing. In this blog post, we’ll clear up all of your questions about Scrum Masters, their accountabilities, and how