What's up awesome people. I hope you are all having a great week. In today's vlog I am sharing the differences between project management and product management. There are still growing misconceptions in the market that Scrum is an agile project management methodology. In this vlog I also bust the m...

The Spotify "model" pops up as either advocated practice (especially by large consulting companies) or some sort of a hoax and hated practice. I wrote this text few years back, but it appears to be valid more than ever. Join me in discovering 10 lessons from my "spotify" encounters.

Like most tools, if you want to run successful training in Microsoft Teams you need to do some homework and some configuration before your class.

With the new normal, I have been delivering all of my Professional Scrum classes and consulting online. I have tried many tools from Zoom and Webex to Miro and Word. The combination that I have found gives the most security, flexibility, and features are Microsoft Teams with Mural. Both Virtu...

TL; DR: The Agile Movers & Shakers Interview w/ Ryan Ripley Today’s guest is Ryan Ripley. Ryan is a Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) with Scrum.org. He hosts the Agile for Humans podcast and most recently co-wrote Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions for Common Scrum Problems with Todd Mill...

For many years, many of us have had strong opinions about the importance of having teams that are co-located.

With the change in business model in the current crisis, many training organizations have had to do the unthinkable and move to Live Virtual training options. Existing wisdom was that training online, just as running teams virtually would be a disaster and reduce the student's experience. ...

Something very close to my heart is helping folks understand the origin of the practices that are commonly used in management today. I feel that only with an understanding of history can we figure out how to change the future. I often talk about this in my classes and help folks see why things are t...

"Scrum and Organizational Design in practice" is my contribution to Gunther Verheyen book "97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know" published by O'Reilly Media and resumes my latest experience as Scrum Practitioner on how to make a company's transformation implicit rather than explicit. ...

How to make sure that the definition of Done is used properly at a sprint planning session? Continue reading ...

A few years ago, I became a Product Owner. But not in the traditional ways most do.

The contradiction and tension between the empirical process of Scrum and the often-used efficiency mindset.

Lots of discussion about Taylorism. It's not as evil as people seem to think. When the work was simpler a process to optimize efficiency and find best practices make sense. However as the work got more complex and our management styles didn't keep up then dysfunction started. The transition from ...

The Scrum Master tactics series are a series of articles in which I write about and explore contemporary techniques that will aid you in your journey as a Scrum Master. The tactics explained stem from my personal experience as a Scrum Master which I accumulated over the years in working with many di...

I've learned and experienced that most symptoms can be traced back to not adhering to the Scrum Roles. Let's have a closer look at the Scrum Master role.

Scrum is all about self-organizing. But what does that mean? And more specifically, how can Liberating Structures support that? In this post, we reflect on Liberating Structures from the perspective of self-organization.

The concept I describe below is tested, proven, and modeled after my virtual Professional Scrum training classes.

The fact is, Scrum and DevOps works well together.

Many scrum teams use a metric called velocity as their primary metric. Velocity is commonly defined as the number of story points you finish over time, usually measured by sprints. Measured from sprint to sprint, it becomes a sort of gauge of success. If it stays the same or goes up, that’s great. I...

As the name “Test First” suggests, you write a test first before the actual code and keep them running all the time. Well, maybe not the second part explicitly. Yet what if I said to you that it actually means more than that?

Shu-Ha-Ri has been a frequent topic within Agile communities for years to capture the essence, the progress of the journey we embark on as we grow and learn better ways of working.

TL; DR: The Agile Movers & Shakers Interview w/ Christiaan Verwijs & Barry Overeem Today we welcome Christiaan Verwijs & Barry Overeem. Christiaan and Barry are both Professional Scrum Trainers (PST) with Scrum.org, dedicated early adopters of Liberating Structures, and co-authors of ...

A physical build monitor - like a light that turns red when a build fails - is a great way to get fast feedback. Its also a fun & educational activity for Development Teams, as it gives them a product of their own they can apply their craft to. And it encourages a Developer Culture.

Today, on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, I look back on how far we have come as a society in making things accessible for people with disabilities. Yet, how far behind we are in inclusive user and customer experience. Just because I ‘can’ use your product or service, it does not mean I ‘want’ t...

The best Scrum Teams are diverse. Diverse teams are more fun to work on and deliver better products. A diverse team will provide diversity of thought because they  bring different experiences to the discussions and decisions. Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD).

How much have you scored this year? My parents asked this question twice a year throughout my schooling. I was well prepared to ask the same questions to my son, but school cheated me. Have you had a similar past? If yes, then you will understand why I call it a generation gap issue.

“Our problem is that we can’t plan Sprints accurately with velocity,” he said. “Some Sprints, our velocity is really high, in others, we barely achieve anything.”

One of the most asked question that people ask me in my Professional Scrum classes is "Who should be in the development team" in Scrum?

The organizations must truly practice patience while applying Scrum. Scrum does not solve the problems, but it reveals all the problems that deter you from achieving your goals by making it radically transparent. Patiently work on the problems one at a time and very soon you will achieve the Busines...

Executives: there are many reasons for agility. You already know this. {"preview_thumbnail":"/drupal/s3fs-public/styles/video_embed_wysiwyg_preview/public/video_thumbnails/kgwhtaA15Jc.jpg?itok=n4N4dX6r","video_url":"https://youtu.be/kgwhtaA15Jc","settings":{"responsive":1,"width":"854","height":"...

Many folks on LinkedIn these days, seems to have a renewed interest in firing the Scrum Master. I have been asked quiet a few times personally as to what will the scrum master do now that we are heading to a ‘New Normal’.

Scrum is a straightforward framework to develop complex software products in a complex environment but hard to practice.

It is a time of unprecedented challenge. Firms are experiencing extraordinary disruption.  Productivity is impacted. Delivery has stalled. Leaders worry about survival, remaining profitable and/or competitive in a distributed environment.

Scrum Master's role is unique, and comparing with any traditional roles will limit our thinking and exploring a beautiful journey of servant leadership.

During this virtual event, Louis-Philippe explained the Kanban metrics for Agile or DevOps teams. Although the Kanban delivery strategy is highly recommended in DevOps mode, unfortunately, its metrics are hardly used in our profession. Louis-Philippe therefore wishes to share its value with particip...

What is agile – I asked everyone what it means to them. Got responses like “being flexible,” “respond faster,” “move quickly,” and “adapt to change,”

During a 20/20 vision on my writings, I discovered clusters of knowledge that are essential to Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches: Genuine coaching techniques, knowledge of psychological principles and above all, understanding and developing “Self” awareness.

The Scrum values help build the foundation of Trust. Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation, the three pillars to embrace empiricism flourish on the foundation of Trust.

Inspiration for fulfilling the stances of a Scrum Master, remotely.

This eighth article now looks into supporting a distributed Development Team organizing a remote Daily Scrum.

*Covid is a fictional character based on my imagination that represents the strain of CoronaVirus that is causing the disease Covid-19. This is just a very simple and sincere attempt to put my knowledge and understanding about Covid-19 to test in this article and I tried making the connection with S...

The COVID19 pandemic gives us plenty of opportunities to think about uncertainty, complexity, and how to deal with those using Empiricism.

A number of weeks ago I was chatting to Jeff Gothelf the co-author of Lean-UX and co-creator of our Professional Scrum with User Experience class. He described a project that he is working on which sparked my interest and is something I believe to be relevant to our Scrum community. I wanted to shar...

Although most people see the value of Sprint Goals, how to create them is a huge source of confusion and frustration. Is the Spring Goal there before the Sprint Backlog? How do you create a Sprint Goal out of the unrelated set of items at the top of your Product Backlog? And should everything on the...

Working overtime in stressful situations is not a viable long-term remedy and should not be seen as a professional solution, but as a warning signal to be heard courageously.

Are scrum and personal effectiveness compatible? In recent weeks I have experienced using Scrum for my personal organization.

As an active agile Scrum Consultant and Professional Scrum Trainer, I am constantly helping a large number of agile teams. Unsurprisingly all the teams I am supporting are experimenting with different ways to make remote working, work!

As promised, here is the part two of the two part series "how to lead live virtual class like a pro" where I'd be emphasising on the execution part- facilitating the class effectively.

We all are going through a tough time – both socially and professionally. People have been asked to maintain distance to break the COVID-19 outbreak chain. Most of us have isolated ourselves for the past few weeks.

The Scrum Master encourages the Scrum Team to improve, within the Scrum process framework, its development process and practices to make it more effective and enjoyable for the next Sprint.