In this Ask a PST session moderated by Leslie Morse, you will get answers from Professional Scrum Trainers Stephanie Ockerman and Steve Trapps who frequently leverage the coaching stance when working with their clients. 

In this vlog, PST Joshua Partogi breaks down the 8 hats the Scrum Master wears as a true leader who serves. This topic is discussed in the Professional Scrum Master course with case studies.

When people ask me the best way for their team to transition to Scrum, I have to tell them that there isn’t an easy answer because every organization is unique.  Keeping that in mind, here are some general steps to consider if implementing Scrum is on your horizon.

In this vlog, PST Joshua Partogi explains the flow of an effective Sprint Retrospectives with Kanban metrics.

Learn how individual incentives and outdated organizational structures — fostering personal agendas and local optimization efforts — manifest themselves in Scrum stakeholder anti-patterns that easily impede any agile transformation to a product-led organization.

Building a product sometimes feels like an endless race, head down, pedal to the metal, let's build it! We all run after something and as a team incrementing our product to be the best possible set of functionalities our users ever wanted, at some point we get out of breath Sprinting. As Scrum Master and Coach I often have to remind people that our goal is not to run but build a pace we can be confortable with for a long period of time, a sustainable pace.

If you are familiar with Scrum.org, you may associate the organization with Professional Scrum and/or Professional Scrum Training Courses and Certifications. Behind those hands-on training courses are highly qualified Professional Scrum Trainers (PSTs), who go through a rigorous process to take their real world Scrum experience and create value for Scrum.org students. In several episodes of the Scrum.org Community Podcast, our host and Scrum.org CEO Dave West interviews Professional Scrum Trainers about their experiences that led to their becoming a PST and exploring what Professional Scrum means to them. In this episode, Dave interviews PST Sander Dur based in the Netherlands about his experiences. (16:52 Minutes)

An exploration of scientific insights. And four practical tips to encourage cohesion and coherence in your team.

In this energizing 40th Hands-on Agile ‘Best Test Ever’ session, David Burkus delved into the surprising science of high-performing teams.

There are five events in Scrum.  But just going through the motions and having each of the events on the calendar is not enough.  To get the most out of Scrum, your team needs to understand the purpose behind each of the five events.  

How effective are your Scrum Events if you can't even book a room? This is an issue that many teams in real life are struggling with. In this blog, I'll share an approach that one of my teams is currently experimenting with, and it seems to be working for them. This blog aims to utilize all the learnings that we had to do due to Covid-19 and use them in today's reality. Maybe it's useful, maybe it isn't.

In this short video, PST Joshua Partogi explains why Scrum Master cannot be compared to Agile Coach

In this vlog, PST Joshua Partogi visualises what the Scrum Master do all day using the 8 Scrum Master hats.

Scrum Scale Away (parody of Come Sail Away by Styx)

One of the first things that I usually hear after describing the Scrum framework and its five events to someone new to Scrum is, “that’s a lot of meetings!” I get it — at first glance, it seems like a lot. But it really isn't when I get the person to take a closer look. This article provides a description of each event and how you can reduce the need for other meetings by practicing them.

Middle managers in today's organizations still act as the glue that enables things to happen. They connect, enable and provide what teams and first-line managers need to get their work done. They have experience in the work coupled with knowledge of the systems and processes of the organization. They know the right people and can navigate politics, ensuring their teams make progress. This article by Dave West talks about their role in Agile Transformations.

How can the Scrum Master become that True Agile Leader, helping the organization to become more Agile?

One of the primary purposes of a retrospective is to create action items, but it’s not uncommon to come up with action items that aren’t actionable.  They’re aspirational.  This blog gives you some ways to ensure your retrospectives have actionable items.

In this episode of the Scrum.org Community Podcast, Professional Scrum Trainer Dave Dame joins Eric Naiburg and Lindsay Velecina to discuss accessibility and its importance when it come to training and work in general. They discuss the importance of diversity on Scrum Teams and how it helps teams thrive. Dave also shares some of his inspiring journey and advice for creating more accessibility. 

Erfahren Sie mehr über 21 gängige Sprint Retrospektive Anti-Patterns aus der Scrum Anti-Patterns-Serie — von PST Stefan Wolpers.

A critical, evidence-based reflection on a hunch that Scrum Masters may often be more concerned with the quality of the process than the value of its outcomes.

What do you think about certifications? It's kind of a controversial topic. A lot of people out there are either certification haters or they pump up certifications, and they have the alphabet soup at the end of their name on LinkedIn.W

TL; DR: Sprint Retrospective Anti-Patterns What event could better embody Scrum’s principle of empiricism than the Sprint Retrospective?

What’s the problem with working without purpose? Can you do it? Sure. You can do it, but I mean...

Fourth blog, in a blog series about the upcoming book: Creating Agile Organizations - A Systemic Approach, by Cesario Ramos & Ilia Pavlichenko.

In this blog series, we’ll share the gaps that many Scrum Masters face as they work to become better agile leaders and Scrum professionals. We’ll call out biases and misperceptions and also offer suggestions on how to overcome these challenges in order to influence change.

TL; DR: How to Pass the Product Owner Certification — Scrum.org’s PSPO I to III The 

In this blog post, Sander Dur explains technical debt vs undone work...

Why many Scrum teams struggle with continuous improvement, and how you can do better

Live & online training, when done well can be as effective, or even more effective than in-person training.

A self-managing team is a fundamental part of effectivity. How can this happen during your entire Sprint? Check it out!

Once the team has selected a point system, they need to decide which types of items to classify as a 1, 2, and so on. In this article, we will provide an exercise that can help your team create a point system organically no matter what’s in the Product Backlog.

Scrum is by far the most popular framework these days. In fact, the 15th Annual State of Agile shows that 66% of respondees use this particular framework.

Practical ideas on how to improve Scrum, personally.

TL; DR: Scrum Master Anti-Patterns No other role in Scrum can contribute to mediocre outcomes like the Product Owner—garbage in, garbage out.

Three simple retrospective formats based on the Liberating Structures "Conversation Cafe", "Troika Consulting", and "Discovery & Action Dialogue"

In this vlog, PST Joshua Partogi demystifies Product Backlog Refinement ... what it is, where, when, how long and how often it happens also how refined should each Product Backlog item be.

Das Sprint Planning ist ein zentrales Scrum-Ereignis, welches entscheidet, wie sich das Leben Ihrer Kunden mit dem nächsten Inkrement verbessern wird. Erfahren Sie mehr darüber, wie Sie Ihren Kunden durch die Vermeidung von 20 gängigen Sprint Planning Anti-Patterns helfen können.

TL; DR: Scrum Master Anti-Patterns The Sprint Planning is a core event that defines how your customers’ lives will improve with the following Product Increment.

In this podcast Professional Scrum Trainer Joshua Partogi shared how Scrum Masters can propel agility in the company by demonstrating behaviours that reflect the Scrum Values.

Die Gründe, warum Scrum Master den Geist des Scrum Guides verletzen, sind vielschichtig. Scrum Master Fehlverhalten reichen von unpassenden persönlichen Eigenschaften über die Verfolgung persönlicher Agenden bis hin zur Frustration mit dem Scrum Team selbst.

Welcome to Scrum Sutra – a blog series where I shall share a 3-min overview of each element of Scrum and how it connects with the other elements in the bead to form Scrum Sutra.

The reasons Scrum Masters violate the spirit of the Scrum Guide are multi-faceted. Typical Scrum Master anti-patterns run from ill-suited personal traits to complacency to pursuing individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.

In Scrum, part of the Product Owner accountability is to provide a forecast that sheds light on possible answers to the when will we get there question. In my last post, we discussed three ways to size Product Backlog items (PBIs). Today, we’ll discuss ways the Product Owner can use this information to create a meaningful forecast.

In this InfoQ article, Kurt Bittner and Pierre Pureur dive into what Software Architecture really is and how architecting is a skill agile teams embody and not a role.

A self-managing team is a fundamental part of effectivity. How can this happen during your Daily Scrum? Check it out!

When you aspire to a Scrum Master role, some form of certification on your resume is a must. Scrum.org offers the acclaimed PSM learning journey to support Scrum Masters to professionalise their skills. I am a Professional Scrum Trainer for scrum.org and I have trained hundreds of Scrum Masters over the past few years.  Newcomers start their career with a PSM-I class to gain an understanding of Professional Scrum and the essence of the role of the Scrum Master. I observe that many experienced Scrum Masters hesitate to join a PSM-II class. Possibly that's because it is unclear to many what the PSM-II training has to offer.

When will we get there?  It’s not just something you might hear from the back seat of a car on a long road trip.  It’s something that a Scrum Team’s stakeholders, customers, managers and many others want to know.  When will that thing you are working on be done?  How long do I have to wait for you to deliver what I want? Sound familiar? Today, we’re going to discuss three ways to estimate and in my next post, we’ll talk about forecasting.

Scrum is a tactical framework to build products, provided you identify what is worth making in advance. But even after a successful product discovery phase, you may struggle to create the right thing in the right way if your Product Backlog is not up to the job—garbage in, garbage out.

An investigation of three schools of thought on team development and high-performing teams