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Webcast
This webinar is a beginning to understanding the latest buzzword DevOps in the context of scrum.
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Blog Post
Update: after receiving some valuable feedback, I've added the third lesson learned.
The previous week I used the Spotify Squad Health Check model to assess a team's situation and condition. One of the cards the game contained caused quite a lot of discussing during the retrospective and also ga...
5 from 1 rating
Blog Post
Have you ever seen a Sprint Backlog that can be reused across Sprints? I have!
A reusable Sprint Backlog contains obvious tasks, like for example ’write code’, ‘make test scripts’ , ‘execute test cases’, 'investigate' and so on. These tasks are too trivial to be useful and undermine one of the fu...
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Blog Post
The concept of user stories is a well-known tool for describing requirements. In a simple format, it captures the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ of a requirement. User stories have their roots in Extreme Programming (XP) and are an often-used tactic within Scrum. In 2001, Ron Jeffries proposed the Three C’...
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Blog Post
GREAT DALLAS ICE STORM OF 2013
I think it was the winter of 2013. I was at the Scrum.org headquarters in Boston, attending training on Evidence Based Management. On the last day of the training, as we were wrapping up, I got an automated call from American Airlines - my flight ...
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Blog Post
This blog is the sequel to my earlier blog - Enterprise Agile Transformation Part 1 - The Story of BB Watt's Lawn Service. In Part 1, I told you the story of my friend Walt and how he got fired as the President of his HOA.
WALT'S PENANCE
After being fired, Walt was in the doldrums. I fo...
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Blog Post
The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better.
4.7 from 3 ratings
Blog Post
WALT'S CHALLENGE
One of my friends - Walt, is the HOA President for a community of about 500 homes. Although it is a safe and beautiful community, they are undergoing a transition - many of the residents are empty-nesters who want to sell their homes, down-size and move to their retirement ho...
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Blog Post
The Scrum Guide begins the description of the role of the Product Owner as follows:
The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the Development Team.
How does a Product Owner do this? Which instruments does Scrum offer to achieve this? How can a P...
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Blog Post
There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love...
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.
Similarly, an organization must focus the business around tomorrow’s customer, not today’s customer. The organization must continually learn from its customers to guide the...
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Blog Post
A pair of recent findings from the Standish Group confirm the astonishing success and cost savings of Agile approaches over waterfall.
In the "Chaos Report 2015", Standish found that large Agile projects are 6X more successful than waterfall projects. While Standish doesn't get specific on what ...
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Blog Post
The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better.
3.5 from 4 ratings
Blog Post
This is the final post in a three part series. Please like, share,and/or comment. Please click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2.
Suppose you have a persistent group in your organization who has been completing its job the same way for a significant period of time. They refuse to change despite...
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Webcast
Learning, responsibility and power - the three psychological models very useful in a Scrum Master's daily work.
3.6 from 145 ratings
Blog Post
This is the second post in a three part series. Please like, share and commentand I’ll be sure to update you when the next post in the series comes out.
When implementing an agile transformation, do you start from the top or bottom of the organization? My experience has shown it is best to take a...
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Blog Post
The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better.
4.5 from 3 ratings
Blog Post
Through my years of trial and error, I have learned there is no one size fits all solution to transitioning organizations to agile...context is king!
Every model is based on different organizational contexts. Each model’s context has its own starting and ending point. There’s no guarantee that y...
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Blog Post
The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better.
5 from 2 ratings
Blog Post
VersionOne does an annual "State of Agile Development" survey and publishes the results for the cost of your email address. Thanks VersionOne! I recently read through the 9th annual survey results for 2015, and there's lots of good, useful data there. For now I want to highlight the top five reas...
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Blog Post
The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better.
In a series of blog posts...
3.6 from 4 ratings
Whitepaper
Professional Scrum Trainer Gunther Verheyen looks at how numerous organizations worldwide have adopted Scrum to become more agile. Many of them have engaged in endeavors to scale their product development done through Scrum. None of these efforts are easy, and each effort faces specific challenges.
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Blog Post
Scrum is a framework for complex systems development.
Scaled Scrum is any instance of Scrum involving more than one team creating and sustaining a product or system.
Scaled Professional Scrum is any instance of scaled Scrum that thrives on Scrum’s formal rules and roles, complemented...
4.5 from 1 rating
Blog Post
If you have seen the TV documentary series Hoarders which depicted the real-life struggles of people who suffer from compulsive hoarding. Some victims suffered so severely that they were often drowning within their own filth. The disorder is immediately obvious to family and friends.
Similarly, o...
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Blog Post
The Scrum Guide requires that the Product Owner ensure that "key stakeholders" attend the Scrum Sprint Review, but who are these "key stakeholders"?
According to the Scrum Glossary, a stakeholder is "a person external to the Scrum Team with a specific interest in and knowledge of a product that...
4.3 from 3 ratings
Blog Post
The Scrum Master is an amazing and at the same time very challenging role. He needs to have different skills, and depending on the situation put on a teaching, training, facilitating or a coaching hat. Furthermore, each of those skills is very difficult to master. People may spend their entire p...
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Blog Post
Is there a way to help organizations move from a Change Transformations mindset to a Continuous Change mind set?
Traditionally, organizations implement large scale change events within their organization by spontaneously have an epiphany and transform every few years.
The frequency of these tr...
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Blog Post
The Standish Group's "Chaos Report 2015" was recently published. Standish gathers data from projects done across a variety of industries. They present the data in buckets of "successful, challenged, or failed" projects. I'd like to highlight my two key learnings after reading the 2015 Chao...
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Blog Post
In Jeff Haden's recent post entitled "The One Attitude Every Successful Person Has", I was struck at how aligned this attitude is with the Agile Mindset. What do you think? An Agile Mindset... essential for healthy Scrum...is not reserved for specific people - rather, this is the attitude that anyon...
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Video
The proliferation of scaling frameworks shows there are real challenges in scaling agility, and the solutions don’t seem to involve inventing yet more frameworks or formal processes. So then, why is it so hard to find success in agility at scale?
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Blog Post
Father's Day offered an annual moment for me to reflect on the journey of a humble and influential man whose life was tragically cut short in 2002 - my Dad. Although it has been a number of years since his passing, he continues to shape my mindset in meaningful and profound ways.
I hope all of ou...
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Blog Post
Recently discussing design and programming with an external programmer, he explained me his approach of defensive programming.
But before going in detail of his explanations, Wikipedia help us to define the defensive programming:
Defensive programming is a form of defensive design intended to en...
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Blog Post
The Scrum Master role can easily be misunderstood as it is harder to grasp by reading the theory; hence people often compare the Scrum Master role to Project Manager or Technical Leader. Scrum Master's primary job is to place himself in service consciously, with self-awareness, and for the benefit o...
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Blog Post
I was recently contacted by a senior executive of a mid-sized company that is evolving their product development to Scrum. He explained a situation he had been in and wanted my opinion. He accepted me to share his story here (with some abstractions, and calling him Jim) in an open-ended way, invitin...
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Blog Post
Companies have two avenues for growth: acquisition, or organic growth. Regardless of how they are growing their increasing size increases the difficulty of the company successfully responding to change. Retaining as much as possible of advantage of that small company’s ability to rapidly piv...
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Blog Post
Scaled Professional Scrum is based on unit of development called a Nexus. The Nexus consists of up to 10 Scrum teams, the number depending on how well the code and design are structured, the domains understood, and the people organized. The Nexus consists of practices, roles, events, and artifacts t...
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Blog Post
Scrum brings agility to and creates Agile organizations through the implementation of empirical process control, the process of frequent inspection and adaptation. The empiricism of Scrum serves discovering and taking advantage of opportunities and options, at all levels; people, technology, market....
4.3 from 2 ratings
Blog Post
I’ve been witness to the start of hundreds of teams and projects. There’s a point at which, during the launch of a new team even before the first Sprint, I can tell with fair certainty whether the team will be successful or not. I’ve been thinking about what the root causes of this are, and here’s m...
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Webcast
n this session, we examine some common and not- so-common metrics before introducing how we can use them as a guide for continuously measuring business goals, aligning them with software development efforts, and then deciding what to do next.
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Blog Post
One of the challenge working as a Professional Scrum Trainer is reading what is in people's mind when they are silent. In a classroom setup, silence can mean many things and it depends on the local culture. In some culture, silence can be a form of respect to the person who is talking. Silence c...
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Blog Post
History
In 2012 in one of my Professional Scrum Master classes I met a true gentleman. Much older than the average IT specialist in Poland, jeans and button-up shirt, amazing manners, spotless language and a perfectly kept medium-length black beard with shining strings of white. The kind of a per...
4.5 from 1 rating
Blog Post
Making a purchase can feel great when you’ve developed a rapport with the salesperson. Regardless of the product; from a tasty treat at the farmer’s market to a major purchase like a new car; a sale is much more likely when the vendor not only cares deeply about their product but also takes time to ...
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Blog Post
Do you want to pass a small test? It is very simple - please reproduce in the exact sequence literally four values of Agile Manifesto.
Well, how did it go? If you succeeded, then you get my congratulations.
3 years ago I failed the test, though I knew the Scrum Guide almost literally and was...
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Blog Post
An analogy I can think of is... I want my dart to hit the dart board, and not necessarily the bull's eye.... as it calls for a lot of details which apparently is missing during estimation. However, if my dart doesn’t hit anywhere on the dart board... it's almost like shooting in the dark; a very dis...
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Blog Post
In his book Good to Great, author Jim Collins asks the reader:
Do you have a "to do" list?
Do you also have a "stop doing" list?
He goes on by saying:
Those who built the good-to-great companies, however, made as much use of "stop doing" lists as "to do" lists. They displayed a re...
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Blog Post
In today's rapidly changing world of disruptive innovation organizations need to be nimble enough to support this. We are asking our workforce to do this by becoming 'agile'. We want the agility to quickly pivot and seize new opportunities. We want to deliver to market sooner. We want ou...
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Blog Post
“To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.” - Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell’s Soup
To create Organizational Agility you need to find the harmony between People, Process, and Tools. Agile speaks of putting people first, however from my experience, people are the poor step ch...
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Blog Post
A program team of over 40 people decided to move to Agile from their traditional development practices. The program was old and had been in existence for over 6 years. In these 6 years they had released multiple versions of their software product to their customers. In the rush to satisfy the custom...
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Blog Post
Do you hold the job title of Scrum Master in your organization? In most big companies today, this role is still misrepresented as a Project Manager, which is hindering the pursuit of organizational Agility and hurting the professionals who are genuinely attempting to make this challenging job change...
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Blog Post
To imbibe Agility in an organization which is a state of high responsiveness, speed, and adaptiveness organizations should promote a new organizational culture of openness, transparency, respect for people, constant learning, improving, and constant adaptation. Even with so much of awareness, cultur...
3.6 from 236 ratings
Blog Post
When reading the role of the Scrum Master in the Scrum guide, one of the core competencies is to facilitate meetings. While in a meeting, a Scrum Master might want to visualize what the team is thinking or expressing. Or he might want to enhance the collaboration through an activity. Colored Post-It...
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