Last time I talked about the Ghana Police Service (GPS) I was talking about Professional Organisational Change and the approach the Inspector General of Police (IGP) is taking; using Scrum to incrementally make changes to the organisation. While Nana Abban and the IGP have been focusing on the big p...

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Wilbert Seele discusses the importance of separating what you are building from why you are building it. He talks about how people make buying decisions and that at the end of the day, you need to build products to solve problems. ...

Do you have time for an experiment? Then please ask me a coaching question! Welcome to the first of a two part blogpost full of curiosity filled questions on coaching! Coaching, as management practice, interests me greatly in my work life. In order to better understand my own thinking...

In this blog post I'll share my view on the Scrum Master as the Change Leader. I'll briefly describe the common misunderstandings and the preferred stances of the Scrum Master. The services a Scrum Master provides for the Development Team, Product Owner and organisation, and the 3 levels that can be...

We describe the myth that the Scrum Master should always be present during the Daily Scrum. We'll offer the perspective from the Scrum Guide, describe examples of problems in how Scrum is applied and share tips & tricks on how to make the Daily Scrum more effective.

The PSD training teaches the whole Scrum Team on how to do real Scrum. They work in Sprints, create Done software and use the appropriate tools and practices for it. It is a unique experience on how really good Scrum feels like.

Courage however is more than just learning what it means and telling your teams to be courageous.

An estimate is our best guess for what can be achieved and by when. There are some situations when estimates are very important: Coordinate dependencies. It can be very useful to know when the team can proceed working on new design if the key expert is temporarily out of office. Align prior...

When multiple Scrum Teams are working on one product, shared DoD becomes necessary. DoD helps to ensure that each increment is transparent by the end of every Sprint and creates a shared understanding of what “Done” means.

Although people with disabilities do have special needs, their purchase power isn’t special: it’s the same as everyone else’s. No longer can we think of accessibility as a compliance play. It’s simply good business. Let me frame this point with my story.

Our real-time, globalized world thrives increasingly on information and technology. The balance of businesses and society has rapidly shifted from industrial (often physical) labor to digital (often virtual) activities. The world seems to be changing faster and less predictable than ever before. We ...

In this talk from Scrum Day Germany, Dave West CEO and Product Owner of Scrum.org describes how Scrum is being used at scale and how organizations are managing the friction between the needs of Agile and the traditional needs of the organization. 41:47 Minutes

As the saying goes, it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. The same could be said about DevOps and its implementation in an organization. Yes, the result is magic since it aims to deliver daily business value, but the journey is even more interesting. This journey is full of organiz...

"It's weird when you get roles that coincide with your life" - Lily James Introduction Impressive-sounding job titles are a recurring joke in large organizations. They often bear little relationship to the devil's brew of chaos and drudgery which is a daily reality for most. Cynics may hol...

I want to address those of you who don't really want the feedback. I mean, as important as feedback is, and as many times as you've heard that the central point of a Sprint Review is feedback…you're tired of it. It's pesky. And it just gets in the way of you doing what you know is right anyway.

This blog post will be about the question "Should a Scrum Master be technical?". I'll describe my personal journey, share some opinions of other experiences and give you some examples of Technical Scrum Masters I've worked with.

“The secret of success is to be ready when your opportunity comes” - Benjamin Disraeli A glance back at “Done” A few weeks ago we looked at the Definition of Done, which describes the conditions which must be satisfied before a team’s deliverables can be considered fit for release. Th...

I hear it all the time. Whether it is a consulting engagement or in a Professional Scrum Course, the desire to modify Scrum comes up frequently. 4 Questions to Ask 1. Where does the transparency hurt? Transparency usually brings pain, especially when you are early in your Scrum adoption....

People don't always think of Scrum Teams handling customer needs. But, for a Scrum Team to have success understanding the customer is key.

This blog post will focus on how to get started and succeed with Zombie-Scrum. What do you really need to have in place? What are the tips & tricks to give your Zombie-Scrum implementation a kick-start? How to make it sustainable? This article will offer you some nice recommendations.

In this blog post I'll share my view on the question "What is a Scrum Master actually doing during the day?" I will use different sources and perspectives to answer this question and clarify the title and describe a day in the life of a Scrum Master.

Scrum is often called the art of the possible. This means we do the best we can with what we know and what we have. This means we repeatedly take imperfect action in an intentional way. I believe this also means Scrum is about creating our own luck. It might seem a little strange to hear...

This blog post will be about the question: can you rotate the Scrum Master role? With rotating the Scrum Master role I mean frequently changing the person fulfilling this role.

The Sprint Goal is an important part of Scrum. It's like a burning torch that unites the Development Team and helps it move forward during the Sprint. However, the Sprint Goal is not discussed very often, and in this article, I would like to talk about the deep importance of this component. ...

The truth is, worrying about velocity is a trap: it says “we don’t care where we end up, so long as we get there fast.” That’s just wrong. Teams who measure their velocity but don’t or can’t measure customer outcomes may, quite simply, be driving in the wrong direction.

In this blog post I'll share my view on the question: Can you be a part-time Scrum Master?

True story - happened in one of my recent Professional Scrum Master workshops. I think had just mentioned that there is no "Sprint Commitment" in Scrum, only a "Sprint Forecast".

Like many old, boring people, my favorite radio channel in the car is National Public Radio. Since I live in Dallas, TX, my local channel is KERA. Of all the shows in KERA, my favorite is a show called Think With Krys Boyd. Almost each show I listen to leaves an imprint on my mind and modifies the w...

The role of the Scrum Product Owner is probably the most misunderstood of the three Scrum Roles. As I look back at the different incarnations and interpretations I have seen of Product Ownership, I thought it was time to articulate the different stances I thought an Effective and Professional Scrum ...

Several of us in the Kanban and Scrum community got together recently to build a bridge between Scrum and Kanban. We are writing a series of blog posts looking at this bridge from different perspectives. In this post, we present a primer on the Scrum Framework from a Kanban perspective.

Having been part of this recent activity, allow me to share with you my personal account of my first Global Face-to-Face meeting with the Trainers Community.

Although I’m generally considered to be a strong leader with the people I am privileged to serve, I am still susceptible to making mistakes. We all get caught up in the moment every now and again, and sometimes forget that it’s all about empowering, engaging, and empowering our people. Even great le...

Are you ready to escape the average and become awesome? Do you want to overcome your fears and follow your dreams? We all want to escape the average and the humdrum. The essential step in achieving any great goal is to "START." Inspired by author Jon Acuff's book, Start, I've come up with this ...

To get an insight into people's perception and understanding of something, just look at the social networks. This message coming from a company looking for a lead DevOps makes me ask myself a big question about the perception and understanding of the market about DevOps. But is DevOps real...

One of the most important things to understand in modern business (and quite possibly life in general) is the concept of complexity. While we use the words complicated and complex almost interchangeable in everyday language, they mean very different things. Let’s explore my favourite model on comple...

Find the books written and co-authored by Ken Schwaber, our Professional Scrum Trainers and staff to help you learn more about Scrum and Agile.

Ah, the Daily Scrum, so often misused as an instrument of status (see https://youtu.be/i7_RPceEIYE for a discussion). Often the way the Daily Scrum is conducted lends itself to a report of status. The team answers 3 questions in a round robin fashion. It often sounds like this: What did you do...

Several of us in the Kanban and Scrum community got together recently to build a bridge between Scrum and Kanban. We are writing a series of blog posts looking at this bridge from different perspectives.

What makes a great team? Why do some teams achieve greatness, seeing their vision become reality, while others seem to go nowhere?

What is the difference between a traditional and an Agile Manager? Keep reading, if you want to learn how a manager evolves.

Have you ever sat on a bus or plane, and rather than offering the vacant seat next to you to others, you hope that no one takes it, so you might have more space.

Coaching conversations typically occur in a “zone of comfortable debate.”. However, to deal with issues at their core, it’s important to enter the ZOUD: the “Zone of Uncomfortable Debate.”

We find this a common thread amongst our customer teams, which can be attributed to a lack of backlog refinement.

"It's not our fault! The Product Owner is responsible for backlog management, the PBIs aren't well defined." "It's not my fault! The Development Team owns the Sprint Backlog, moreover, the PBIs went through refinement and they have the same level of detailing as the others." "I'm working on th...

Hi everyone! In this article, I'd like to share my list of top 30 books for Scrum Masters. I've read all of these books and used them in my practice. They actually work! :) The books cover all eight areas of the Scrum Master competency model developed by the Agile Coaching Institute: ...

The previous weeks I've taken some time to re-write the white paper "The 8 Stances of a Scrum Master". Given my sessions at Scrum Day London, Scrum Day Warsaw and Scrum Day Europe I wanted to offer the participants a paper with my latest insights and lessons learned. In this blog post I'll share the...

Recently I had the opportunity to give a guest lecture about "Agile Essentials" at a University of Applied Science. These students, the lecturer told me beforehand, would only be partly interested and engaged. Therefore I prepared for the worst... While I watched the class going through the firs...

Does this headline make you cringe or cheer? Scrum.org’s Steve Porter and ActionableAgile’s Daniel Vacanti weigh in on whether we should blend these two approaches.

"As remote teams become more and more common, Scrum Masters must find a way to effectively do Scrum while working with far flung team members." "We are not a software development company, what you are talking works only for software development. We operate in a very different business. That stuff...

Leadership is developed, not discovered (I have found inspiration in John C. Maxwell's various books).  John defines leadership as influence, and a good Scrum Master has to climb the different levels of influence to achieve a good to great mindset.