Ralph Miarka

I work as Scrum trainer, agile growth coach, team- and leadership coach, trained business coach and trainer for solution-focus in agile environments. I’m a frequent speaker at agile conferences, like OOP, Agile, XP and Scrum Gatherings and also an attendee of conferences on Positive Psychology, Solution-Focused Therapy, etc.

During each Scrum training, I gain valuable insights into an organisation and their way of work. I support the members of the company to understand Scrum from the heart, gut and mind. Recently I restructured my courses again to incorporate more team-building, more Scrum activities and a more positive approach to learning (instead of learning from failure I encourage learning from successes).

I also support organisations to adopt Scrum. Change needs to start where people are right now - so we conduct a retrospective at the beginning of a change process - focussing on past achievements and resources available right now. Then we set out a focus for the better future. How would a better way of working feels like to the people? What does „better“ mean anyway? Then we figure out how Scrum will help them to achieve this better state. Recently, for a non-software organisation, the team even developed a new Agile Manifesto for their context - a genuinely energising activity. I want to try this more often to see how it will affect other transition activities.

In August 2015 my partner and I published our first book on Agile Teams lösungsfokussiert coachen, and in 2019 the 3rd edition was published. (Amazon) (dpunkt.verlag). We wish the readers a lot of fun and plenty of helpful insights. Writing the book also helped to reflect on current practices in Scrum - and to give some of them a solution-focused twist.

Also in August 2015, we founded our own company called sinnvollFÜHREN to bundle our knowledge and experience for our customers and to promote the leadership topic, we are so passionate about.

To increase the outcome of a transition project and to reduce my time at organisations, my partner and I started to provide a leading-and-coaching agile teams training for Scrum Masters, Product Owners and company managers.

To improve my „natural“ coaching abilities, I started a 2 1/2 years Master’s degree course on systemic-constructive coaching which I completed in December 2012. The knowledge and skills I gained in the classes are most valuable when talking to people, leading a change project or even just thinking about the next action for myself.

Since January 2010 I am an independent Scrum coach, consultant and trainer. Before, I worked for Siemens AG Austria for five years where I promoted agility at Siemens IT Solutions and Services SDE. In December 2007 I became a CSPO and in 2006 CSM. I have lead several projects according to Scrum there. I learned that it is possible to form pockets of freedom even in large organisations and to be successful with Scrum there. I provided a large number of Scrum trainings within this structure. At the time I also wrote a short column for an article by Jutta Eckstein published in the Cutter IT Journal on how we used Scrum in a distributed environment.

I’m a trained Computer Scientist with a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Kent (UK), which I received in 2002.

For more information (in German), please visit our home page: 
https://sinnvoll-fuehren.com/