In this 3rd article, I build on the previous two articles and give an example of how to use the two Pattern Languages to develop your pattern sequence.

The most important question to stakeholders is often “When can it be done?” There is a lot that goes into answering that seemingly simple question. What is involved in the work?

There is one product, one Product Owner, one Product Backlog — a simple rule. How is that supposed to scale, you might ask, isn’t that approach turning...

The agile movement really has changed the way we lead our people. Giving them more freedom and autonomy to do their job often improves the quality, productivity and happiness of the people.

This is a series on how to create more engaging and interactive Scrum Events with Liberating Structures and recover from Zombie Scrum.

The Scrum Guide provides no reference or guidance on how to get started with Scrum. That's because Scrum is a lightweight, minimal framework to encourage self-organization. I have heard it stated that Scrum is intentionally incomplete. There are no special Sprints in Scrum, such as Sprint Zeros, eit...

Welcome to the Agile Movers & Shakers interview series. Today’s guest is Ben Linders.

For me, 2019 was all about purpose. This means aligning all my effort in things that matter: professionally, social causes, community, and connecting with family and friends. This year started out with me doing talks on innovation and resilience. This is one of my passions as innovation has been ...

It’s that time again. The end of the year, where many of us take a step back to reflect on the year that will almost be over soon and create another new year resolution. Like many of you, I do the same. On my last year life retrospectives, I wrote about servant leadership.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainers Louis-Philippe Carignan and Daniel Vacanti who is also the co-creator of the Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) class, Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams and Kanban Method discuss the origins of the PSK class and provide some insights into what will...

Announcing our upcoming book with Scrum.org and Addison-Wesley.

Hey awesome people. I hope you are having a great time with your friends and families in this holiday season.

In 2017, I was talking to the head of the Agile Coach Group of a large bank. She asked me to come over to work with her and help to roll out their standard way of working across all branches in Europe.

While Diana Larsen continues her coaching, mentoring, and consulting practice in a limited way, she has shifted more toward involvement as a co-founder of the Agile Fluency Project, a startup...

The Professional Scrum Master (PSM) workshop has a module that talks about the Definition of "Done" (DoD) and Technical Debt.

If there is one trend that has surpassed Agile in our profession over the last five years, I would say DevOps would be a good culprit. As we’ve seen an explosion of tools to implement CI/CD in our Scrum teams, we’ve also seen some of our Agile practices being challenged by this new reality.

The other day I had a conversation with a colleague. He was looking for an opener for a talk - something catchy to illustrate to his audience (mostly finance and banking) that there could well be a need to change their current ways of working.

On November 22nd, 2019, I gave the closing keynote at Scrum Deutschland, a talk called 'The Four Things You Do To Prevent Value Delivery'. In this keynote, I discussed the trends I found during my research at multiple organizations.

Last week, about 30 members of the Hands-on Agile community in Berlin came together to identify opportunities for personal and professional growth for the coming year, using Liberating Structures’ Ecocycle Planning in the process, to further your Scrum Master career 2020.

Can anyone be a Product Owner (PO)? What’s the best position in the company to fill that role? With Scrum you have one and only one Product Owner for a given product...

Hello awesome people. Today I want to share with you my personal guidelines that I have been using to recruit/hire Scrum Masters from the job market.

What baffles me each time I look at the numbers with regards to Scrum certifications, is the low amount of PSD Certified Software Developers in relation to the certified Product Owners and Scrum Masters out there.

Scrum Master anti-patterns: The reasons why Scrum Masters violate the spirit of the Scrum Guide are multi-faceted. They run from ill-suited personal traits and the pursuit of individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.

Sir Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and Nikola Tesla; this woman and these gentlemen are considered to be some of the greatest scientists of all time.

The Clerk is your personal waiter for all your user story serving. Gathering all the wishes, user stories and demands is what The Clerk does.

What event could better embody Scrum’s principle of empiricism than the Sprint Retrospective? I assume all peers agree that even the simplest retrospective—if only held regularly—is far more useful than having a fancy one once in a while, not to mention having none at all.

How to use "Visible Status" with the information radiator to help the call to action? How to use explicit indicators to make decisions?

The Project Manager is typically concerned with day-to-day progress of the Development Team.

The Customer Representative Product Owner is the go-to person for people in the organization who want to gain a understanding of what customers (and/or users) are looking for in the product or service which the Product Owner is responsible for.

Visionary Product Owners are people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Thomas Edison and Winston Churchill.

You’ve met them: slightly curved back, eyes glued to the screen, minimized font size and a 14 step template in Jira. Story, check. Acceptance criteria check. Examples, check. Logfiles, hmm still have to run that query.

This week we witnessed the launch event of the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Product Owner-Advanced class, and we could not be more excited about it. Finally, we are free to tell everyone about the best training we’ve ever created. Oh well, as freshly minted stewards we might be biased, but based on ...

With the launch of a brand-new Product Owner-Advanced class (including certification) coming up, we want to introduce you to some new and unpublished content: The Stances of the Product Owner. In this article, we’ll share an overview of both the preferred and the misunderstood Stances of the Product...

Hey everyone. How has your week been going? We are entering summer here in Perth. And in today's vlog, I'd like to share with you how to evaluate the Scrum Master's performance.

Scrum.org offers different courses to provide you the best learning experience based on your focus of Scrum. The variety of courses makes choosing the best course difficult sometimes. This blog post provides guidelines to help you choose between the Applying Professional Scrum (APS) course and the P...

Somewhere between the CEO and 1st line management level, "you do Scrum, just get it done, how much money you need, and what kind of people you need."  "It's just another framework." Salespeople were saying, "you're doing Scrum magic and making it faster." Sometimes people don't want to change.

As Scrum Trainer I get to meet a lot of teams and hear of many different ways to do Scrum. Most are valid ways, yet some seem more aligned with the values of Scrum or the purpose of the specific Scrum Element.

Welcome to the Agile Movers & Shakers interview series. Today’s guest is Viktor Cessan. Viktor has dedicated his career to helping companies consciously design organizations that keep motivation, engagement, and performance levels high.

In football, the team that wins is the one that gets the ball in the other team’s goal most times. Not the one that runs the most.

This is a common question in my Professional Scrum classes.  It often comes up early when we are still learning the basics of the Scrum Framework.  And it comes up because people are already splitting their time between multiple Scrum Teams or are being told by their organizations that they will be.

While working with plenty of Scrum Teams and teaching Professional Scrum Product Owner classes, I observed a similar anti-pattern regarding Product Owners, which resembles anti-patterns of Scrum Masters who are not empowered.

Scrum uses a concept called a “Sprint” to eliminate the risk of complex product development and deliver value sooner to stakeholders. These Sprints are no longer than 30 days in length.

The role of Scrum Master is often completely new for many organizations, and often misunderstood. So what are the responsibilities of the Scrum Master? And what is a Scrum Master supposed to do the whole day?

In my experience, the Daily Scrum is the Scrum event with the highest anti-pattern density among all events. Learn more about the Daily Scrum anti-patterns that threaten to derail your transition.

As promised, here is part two of the three-part blog series, inspired by the writings of John C. Maxwell, “The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth: Live Them and Reach Your Potential.”

Hi Duncan, I took your Scrum Training class a couple of months back. You mentioned if we had any questions, we could email you and I have an interesting situation I found myself in regarding QA’s in our Scrum teams.

I often wonder about the Trustpilot reviews straight after a workshop. Did I entertain? Did I perform? Were attendees satisfied? Are attendees inspired? It matters. I just think it matters more if the workshop made a difference to the work lives of attendees. I can't take credit. The client does the...

When working with a flow-based Kanban system there are a few statements that I would suggest most teams should bear in mind.

During this Liberating Structures strategy for Scrum meetup we addressed dealing with uncertainty — a particularly useful skill in highly competitive markets. Learn more about how to train and grow the resilience of your team when dealing with the unexpected.

As part of the Scrum.org webinar “Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer - Martin Hinshelwood - Answering Your Most Pressing Scrum Questions” I was asked a number of questions.