As the Product Owner, you are well aware that part of the success of your product depends on your decision. Every day, you must be facing...

With the Covid 19 pandemic, I really struggled big time to create the boundary between my work life and personal life. Day by day, that boundary was getting thin. There were lofty overlaps and I sucked at creating the balance.

During my interactions with my students/ colleagues who play the role of Scrum Master, they tell me that they see gaps in how things are implemented compared to the rules of the Scrum Guide.

As per Scrum Guide – The Sprint Goal is an objective that will be met within the sprint by implementing the Product Backlog, and it guides the Development Team on why it is building the Increment.

20 ideas for using the new Scrum Mythbusters card deck in your organization

Product Owner is Accountable for Maximizing Value of The Product. As per Scrum Guide, version November 2017: “The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from work of the Development Team” Product owner is mini CEO for Product and own the prod...

If you currently are in search of the answer to this question, enjoy this video.

The 2017 version of the Scrum Guide states, "The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from work of the Development Team." But what does value mean anyway?

Agility is a buzz word that can be interpreted to mean different things to different people. In this session, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma and his colleague Steve Tallent will explore several questions together,

The role of the Scrum Master is a complex one. You are serving, coaching, facilitating and teaching the team all while helping to remove impediments and changing the organization.  In today's landscape it has become even more complex having to deal with people working remotely, added distractions an...

The days are getting shorter and colder. Summer is over and winter is coming. Some people are already thinking about the holidays and the preparations for it. Soon children will have their Christmas wish list ready. The wish lists my children created were always a combination of text and pictures; e...

Every Executive understands that the ability for an organisation to adapt to change is critical. Radical change has forced many organisations to unexpectedly make fundamental shifts to their business models over a very short time period. Those who can’t pivot, fail. Whether change comes from stakeho...

TL; DR: 20 Questions to Ask the Product Owner to Get up to Speed as a New Scrum Master From Scrum Master to Product Owner, this set of questions addresses the future collaboration between the two individuals and the rest of the Scrum Team. The questions have been modeled after some basic principl...

I was hired by a bank to help them to get started with agile and Scrum...

Brief about me before you read this post so you can understand my perspective better. I am a software developer and Scrum Teacher...

What should the Development Team do when the Product Owner asks them to do work that was not planned during Sprint Planning?

One of the most common questions that I get in my classes is: What should the Development Team do when they've finished all of the planned Sprint Backlog before the end of the Sprint?

TL; DR: 11 Proven Stakeholder Communication Tactics - Stakeholder communication: It is simply not enough for an agile product development organization to create great code and ship the resulting product like a clockwork...

The Daily Scrum is the heartbeat of Scrum. It's a key inspect and adapt opportunity for the Development Team, encouraging them check their progress towards the Sprint Goal and adjust their plan accordingly.

Distributed teams are not new, but our global pandemic has made them the norm. Atlassian University and Scrum.org team up in this webinar to explore the myth that agile and Scrum Teams need to be colocated and walk through real-world examples of how products get delivered from distributed teams.

McKinsey and Scrum.org presented a webinar on joint research about measuring business value. There were a number of questions unanswered. This blog answers those questions.

Plenty of teams still use hourly estimates for complex work. In my experience this always hurts. I thought plenty was written on this, but maybe some summarizing of what I have learned over the years might help.

How to tell if Scrum fits your work and what to do when it doesn’t

In business, the quest for predictability is universal. We all want to grab hold of the reality we face everyday and, somehow, bend it to our will.

Scrum has proven time and again to be the most popular framework for software development. Given that software is eating the world, a seasoned Scrum Master is nowadays in high demand.

So you have a couple of Scrum Teams working in adjacent areas, and you're starting to face some challenges in delivering value in a coordinated integrative way. What we haven't talked about much until now in the Scrum.org world is how Flow/Kanban can help organizations use Scrum at Scale more effect...

What is up awesome people? In this vlog, I am doing something different to all of my other vlogs. The topic technical debt does not get talked about often in the agile space even though some of the agile manifesto signatories like Ward Cunningham and Martin Fowler have concerns about it. 

People in Belarus fight the dictatorial regime that purposefully removes all protest leaders. Under these circumstances, though, self-organization strives. Having a common bigger goal, people invent various kinds of protests and demonstrate unprecedented creativity and courage.

Learn more about agile management anti-patterns the aspiring servant leader should avoid during the organization’s transition: From applying the Stage-Gate® approach...

This experiment is about creating transparency around dependencies and the effect they have on your team’s ability to ship fast.

Twenty questions for you — the new Scrum Master — that fit into a 60 minutes time-box.

What's up, awesome people? I hope you are having a good weekend. Recently, many people asked me how to write a perfectly detailed user story...

In this series of ‘In-depth’-posts, we take time to consider the bigger picture. This series is not about easy answers or practical tips, but to develop a more complete understanding of what may be going on.

One of the key stances of the Scrum Master is being a Coach. Often coaching is perceived as the art of asking powerful questions. How many times while taking a coaching stance do you ever feel like you’re chasing the coachee? Have you ever felt that the coaching sessions are going around in circles,...

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.

Suitable agile metrics reflect either a team’s progress in becoming agile or your organization’s progress in becoming a learning organization.

In late 2018, Vodafone New Zealand set out to improve its customer experience by adopting a ‘digital first’ mindset. Investing in agile would underpin this approach by introducing ways of working that reduce complexity, improve collaboration and bring the customer to the forefront of each decision.

This blog is inspired by two books I read recently "The Power of Full Engagement" & "A-Team of Leaders".

Scrum has proven time and again to be the most popular framework for software development. Given that software is eating the world, a seasoned Scrum Master is nowadays in high demand.

In this post, we explore eight common biases, underlying research and how they distort our thinking. We also offer what you can do to reduce them.

What looked like a good idea back in the 1990ies—outsourcing software development as a non-essential business area—has meanwhile massively backfired for a lot of legacy organizations.

Facing a large number of risks while delivering products seems to be normal. And, it is. It is common and natural. What we need to do, is manage the risk.

What I usually hear is “Scrum is great, but it doesn’t work in my organization, because...” and then follows a list of excuses why change is impossible or hard.

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,

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?

We often try to make massive change once we realize something isn't right and this doesn't normally go so well. When it comes to making progress everyone wants to LEAP; take BIGGER steps.

Since the Industrial Revolution, increasing competition has driven businesses towards strategies that preserve and increase their market share.

When I first became a Scrum Master, I heard the phrase assume positive intent over and over again. And it really resonated with me.

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times : Bruce Lee

TL;DR: Creating an Agile Community of Practice Creating an agile community of practice helps winning hearts and minds within the organization as it provides authenticity to the agile transition — signaling that the effort is not merely another management fad. Read more to learn how to get your...