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Some may confuse the word “Foundation” in the name of the Professional Scrum Foundation course to mean simple or basic. But in truth this means it is a course for everybody to build a solid base of knowledge, understanding and practical application of Professional Scrum. Everyone in your Scrum team and the managers/leaders who interacting with your team should be able to answer What is complexity? How does Scrum framework help us develop and sustainable deliver complex products? What is empiricism? How do the Scrum Roles, Events, Artifacts enable and ensure this empirical process works? What is self-organisation? How does the Scrum framework help an organisation and its reams become self-organising? For comparison, the Scrum.org PSF course is the equivalent to the Scrum Alliance CSM. Who should attend? Are you curious about what Scrum can bring to your products and organisation? Are you supporting Scrum Teams in a leadership role, stakeholder, or other capacity and want to understand how Scrum works and how to collaborate together? Are you interested in a career change and have no experience in Scrum? Are you doing Scrum in name only and nothing has changed? No mindset, culture, or increased agility change? Are you NOT delivering a “Done” Releasable Increment at least once per sprint, therefore enabling transparency, trust, and greater business agility? Are you NOT gaining better customer outcomes and business benefits? Is Scrum NOT helping you manage risk and complexity? The Professional Scrum Foundations course is the perfect introduction, reboot or refresher to Scrum. This course is for organisations, teams or anyone wanting to experience the Scrum way of working. PSF provides the base knowledge needed for anyone interested in taking role-focused training's. How? Over the 2 days, students experience Professional Scrum with the practical application of Scrum. Students work together as a team in a series of Sprints to build a product, thereby facing real-life problems. The rules, roles, and principles of Scrum are leveraged during the exercises. From its emphasis on the practical application of Scrum, the course exposes common missteps and misunderstandings so students grow a higher awareness of the associated symptoms. The course provides prescriptive guidance to avoid going off track and keep Scrum healthy. What previous students have said? We ran a small experiment with students who attended a PSM course and had little or no knowledge or experience of Scrum beforehand. We offer them to attend a PSF the following week, if they could gives us feedback on - "Which would you recommend to someone, PSF or PSM, who has the current experience & knowledge you had before taking either course?" "I enjoyed both courses honestly but if I had the opportunity to choose which to take first I would take the PSF first. My reason is that the PSF is broad and covers all areas of scrum, and obviously has a lot of fun exercises. It's fun to work as a Scrum Team in Sprints to deliver a product & the exercises to learn Scrum. The PSF is also more laid back on the second day which relaxes everyone. The PSM on the other hand is more specific and detailed compared to the PSF. It would greatly benefit someone who has some knowledge on what scrum is. My recommendation is the PSF first." Fortunate Ngwang - Changing career "As with the PSM course, the PSF was fantastic! I will be suggesting that people take this one before they decide to take on either PSM or PSPO. Despite being a virtual class, the level of interaction was amazing and your teaching style speaks volumes in terms of the number of people, including myself, who crack the not-so-easy assessments with flying colours. Thank you! " Abhijeet Basu - Project Manager What you get for taking the course Facilitation and coaching from highly experienced Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainers Debunk myths, dispel misconceptions, and gain a true understanding of Scrum Gives students the knowledge and direction to start using Scrum and cutting practices immediately after the class Create a transformation plan for the adoption of Scrum within your organization/team in the class with the support of the trainers’ transformation experience 2 attempts at the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master I certification and a 40% discount from Professional Scrum Master II certification If your ready to take the next step you can find BAgile’s Professional Scrum Foundation course schedule at www.bagile.co.uk/psf

The focus of this article is on one of the most important things giving lifeblood to the Product Backlog and promoting its characteristic of long-living artifact, the Innovation. The innovation allows us to shift from a Project perspective, by which a project is limited in duration, to a Product perspective, with a product evolving over time. We’ll then discover the importance of quality as an enabling factor for the innovation and how innovation can be measured throughout the sprints, by also indicating some of the practices that could be used to let it flourish. When is the right time to think about innovation for a Scrum Team? That's a question I got several times during the trainings I had the pleasure to deliver. Well...the short answer is every occasion can be the right one! As a Product Owner, having innovation within your product can lead to a rapid validation of your hypothesis and, consequently, the possibility to give more value to this, knocking down unrealized value. But is it always possible to do innovation within a Sprint? It depends on you and on how much quality your product has... Why Quality is related to Innovation? One of Scrum Team's objectives is to focus on delivering high quality product increments. More quality your product has, less time is spent on maintenance stuff, so more time is saved to give vent to your creativity on innovation. There are two metrics from Evidence-based management (EBM) Ability-To-Innovate Area, that are related to each other and help us to understand how much is spent on innovation and on code maintainance throughout the sprints: innovation rate: the percentage of budget spent on innovation technical debt: the technical debt we're accumulating (and that we need to reduce through activities like bug-fixing, or refactoring) By the end of each sprint, we can check how many Done items of the Sprint Backlog were related to innovation (to obtain that, if asked, I usually suggest the Scrum Team to 'mark' them with a label, to easily gather the information from some tools like Jira), so that we can create an Innovation Trend diagram. This diagram gives us an overview of the percentage of budget spent on innovation (you can obtain that from story points’percentage of Done innovation items within the sprint) and, at the same time, you could conclude even if it's the case to refill the product backlog with new fresh ideas, unless product’s unrealized value is very low. The remaining budget is then spent in maintenance and expansion of already delivered features (these trends could also be indicated within the above diagram to let it be more exhaustive for an overview of the whole budget spent in a sprint). Which are some of the practices helping us doing Innovation? Of course there are several practices, also according to specific approaches you’re going to use. For instance, there are some frameworks focusing on dedicated periods of time for doing innovation - have you ever heard about Design or Innovation Sprints? Without entering deeply in one or another approach, I'd prefer to focus on some practices that can be used whenever the Scrum Team deems appropriate, as a self-organized team, without impacting on the structure of a Sprint (by Scrum Guide, all the Sprints have the same characteristics) and that gave me a great support for my experiences: end-users observation, while they're interacting with the product customer or end-users satisfaction surveys development team's ideas (don't underestimate this point!) stakeholders' feedback during the sprint reviews, or other occasions of interaction with the Scrum Team So what.. As a Product Owner, let's be open to insights and suggestions and try to maximize the occasions for inspection and adaptation of our product. The more frequent these occasions, the more we are able to validate our assumptions and product’s realization becomes an increasingly exciting game!

TL; DR: Lipstick Agile — Happiness in the Trenches? Have you noticed how many people in the agile field are unhappy with their work situation? A situation where an organization already struggles doing agile, not to mention ‘becoming agile?’ This is what I call lipstick Agile. Scrum Masters and agile coaches are close to either burnout or indifference. Product Owners who “own” the product by name only, and developers questioning why “Agile” is imposed upon them and often turns out to be just another form of micromanagement. 📅 Join the 25th Hands-on Agile meetup on August 20, 2020, to explore the virtual Ecocycle Planning. Do you want to get this article in your inbox? Then sign up for the Food for Agile Thought newsletter and join 26k other subscribers. Lipstick Agile in Statements and Observations Here is a personal list of quotes, issues, observation, and challenges that have made me think about being a member of an organization — shall I stay or shall I go, so to speak: Quotes from Stakeholder and Clients “How many teams can you handle at the same time — three or four?” (This quote is from a prospective client who was looking for a Scrum Master for several newly-formed Scrum teams without any experience.) “The availability of meeting rooms is a difficult topic here.” (There was no space at all available. And improvising by using the walls in hallways, for example, was strictly prohibited.) “We don’t need physical boards; we use Jira.” (“When you put problem in a computer, box hide answer. Problem must be visible!” Hideshi Yokoi, former President of the Toyota Production System Support Center in Erlanger, Kentucky, USA.) “Test automation does not work for us. We always test manually.” (A manager from a corporate QA silo w/o an engineering background on test-automation. He had a large number of subordinates in East-Asia for manual testing.) “We deploy once a week so that the governance team has a chance to sign-off our work.” (The Scrum team in question created an excellent build pipeline and could deploy at will.) “As a Scrum Master, you will also report the performance metrics of the team to the project manager after each sprint.” (A “Scrum Master task” stressed by a prospective client.) “We can invest more in learning once we have delivered [the application] and proven our usefulness.” (Knowledge sharing as a reward. That’s the equivalent to insisting on that any R&D project must pay for itself.) “I think pair programming is a waste of resources. Remember, it is twice the work in half the time.” (Thank you, Mr. Sutherland, for not pointing at the fine-print so every business guy gets the message wrong. Spoiler alert: It is about maximizing the amount of work not done.) “Why would you include the developers in the user interviews? They are supposed to write code. The business analysts can do the talking.” (Classic taylorist thinking from the industrial age applied to knowledge work. It is not about the quantity of code developed; it is about creating the right code. In that respect, nothing is more valuable than developers directly talking to customers.) “We need to meet numbers and deadlines. That’s more important than living up to some fancy initiatives of the C-level like ‘becoming agile.’” (Charlie Munger: “Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.”) “We know what we need to build, talking to users is a distraction.” (If the waterfall approach is working for you, why venture out into the realms of agile product development?) Observations in the Past Stakeholders do not participate in ceremonies, for example, Sprint Reviews. Never. Stickies on a physical board seem to have been aligned with a bubble level by the previous Scrum Master. (A prospective client, looking for a new dedicated, full-time Scrum Master for a Scrum Team comprising five people.) The walls in the office are strictly off-limits, enforced by the facility management. (The CEO was massively proud of the (unsuited) office design by a well-known architect, showing around visitors regularly. Consequently, the Scrum had no boards.) The Scrum Master had to process office-supplies order requests of the Scrum team. (No comment.) Lipstick Agile — The Conclusion Shall I stay, or shall I go? That’s the question in situations like the ones sketched above. Suppose you decide to stay, roll-up your proverbial sleeves and get going. If you choose to leave, do so quickly before you fall victim to the singing of the corporate sirens. What I cannot recommend is shrugging your shoulders because you have to make ends meet. What has made you reconsider your job situation in the past? ✋ Do Not Miss Out and Learn more About Lipstick Agile: Join the 7,900-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Community I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack Community and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world. HoA BANNER If you like to join all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free. Related Articles 13 Signs of a Toxic Team Culture 22 Scrum Master Anti-Patterns from Job Ads Speaking Truth to Power 2.0 — Taking A Stand as an Agile Practitioner 📖 Download the ‘Agile Transition – A Hands-on Guide from the Trenches’ for Free 📖 Download the Remote Agile Guide for Free.

Does your team struggle to get items to Done? Do they experience a high amount of spill-over into the next cycle because they are waiting on another team or another person? Do items sit in a blocked state and age out while waiting on other teams or people to complete work?