Resources

This blog is part of a series of peek previews from my upcoming book Coaching Agile Organisations

*Covid is a fictional character based on my imagination that represents the strain of CoronaVirus that is causing the disease Covid-19. This is just a very simple and sincere attempt to put my knowledge and understanding about Covid-19 to test in this article and I tried making the connection with Scrum. I hope you enjoy it.

Good Scrum Masters are passionate. Great Scrum Masters are dispassionate.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

In my 100th episode of Agile.FM,  I had the opportunity to speak with Jim Benson, the co-creator of Lean Coffee.

This blog post uses a metaphor to illustrate the potential impact of having more than one product owner per product.

The COVID19 pandemic gives us plenty of opportunities to think about uncertainty, complexity, and how to deal with those using Empiricism.

Emotions are part of the human experience. Emotions are essentially energy in motion (e-motion).  When our emotions are flowing freely, they can bring us energy and provide the fuel for us to transform and grow.

This case study takes a look at how Penta Technologies, a construction software company realized that they needed to make a change in order to help their customers be successful.  Moving from a siloed environment to one with greater agility.

In the seventh episode of Mik + One, the official Project to Product podcast, Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop is joined by guest is Dave West, CEO and Product Owner of Scrum.org.

A few weeks ago, I had a wonderful conversation with Diana Larsen on Agile FM, and it did not come as a surprise, that the topic of retrospectives came up. Diana is the co-author of the book Agile Retrospectives , which has been very influential in many agile careers, including mine. 

A number of weeks ago I was chatting to Jeff Gothelf the co-author of Lean-UX and co-creator of our Professional Scrum with User Experience class. He described a project that he is working on which sparked my interest and is something I believe to be relevant to our Scrum community. I wanted to share some of this discussion with you.

Have you always wondered about the difference between agile and Scrum? You’re not alone, these words are commonly interchanged for one another but they are not the same thing at all.

This seventh article now looks into organizing a remote Sprint Review with a distributed team: How to practice the review with virtual Liberating Structures, including and giving a voice to team members, stakeholders, and customers.

Although most people see the value of Sprint Goals, how to create them is a huge source of confusion and frustration. Is the Spring Goal there before the Sprint Backlog? How do you create a Sprint Goal out of the unrelated set of items at the top of your Product Backlog? And should everything on the Sprint Backlog be related to the Sprint Goal? In this post I work from examples of a real product, and the Sprint Goals we used there, to answer those questions.

Working overtime in stressful situations is not a viable long-term remedy and should not be seen as a professional solution, but as a warning signal to be heard courageously.

From my experience and observations, my concern is weak understanding that the Evidence-Based Management (EBM) framework is empirical. It requires transparency, frequent inspection, and adaptation.

En Scrum la planificación no es una etapa o un evento único, es una actividad continua durante todo el Sprint.  La Adaptación continua no es sinónimo de desorden o improvisación.

Scrum es un marco flexible que ofrece muchas ventajas para el desarrollo de productos complejos, pero puede ser fácilmente mal interpretado. Justamente esa libertad puede llevar a distorsiones en su uso.

In this whitepaper written by Professional Scrum Trainer Venkatesh Rajamani, he shares his journey as a Scrum Master based on interviews with other Scrum Masters and his own experience. Venkatesh couples that experience with practical examples throughout the paper to create a set of stages that one often goes through.

In this session, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma and Jack J. Phillips from the ROI Institute explore how most Agile training courses typically unfold – starting with the pre-sales process to class-delivery and post-class experience. We start by looking at the cast of characters we typically find in these journeys and potential hurdles that can get in the way of your learning and application of that learning after the course. We propose simple, actionable steps you can follow to get the most out of your training courses. Finally, they introduce the underlying principles, framework and practices created by the ROI Institute that provide the foundations for this approach and suggest resources you can use to learn more.

Are scrum and personal effectiveness compatible? In recent weeks I have experienced using Scrum for my personal organization.

As an active agile Scrum Consultant and Professional Scrum Trainer, I am constantly helping a large number of agile teams. Unsurprisingly all the teams I am supporting are experimenting with different ways to make remote working, work!

Like many Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Agile Managers, I am beginning to understand organizations are complex adaptive systems.

In this episode, I will try to show how understanding mental models can significantly improve the abilities of leaders like Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Managers. This is because Mental Models are at the core of knowledge and learning.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

This sixth article now dives into organizing a remote Sprint Planning with a distributed team: practices, virtual Liberating Structures, and lessons learned.

As promised, here is the part two of the two part series "how to lead live virtual class like a pro" where I'd be emphasising on the execution part- facilitating the class effectively.

We all are going through a tough time – both socially and professionally. People have been asked to maintain distance to break the COVID-19 outbreak chain. Most of us have isolated ourselves for the past few weeks.

Nobody really saw COVID-19 coming. Most people thought it would be similar to previous virus outbreaks and peter out without any meaningful impact on our daily lives. As the situation unfolded, we struggled to fully grasp the exponential nature of it.

Large numbers of Product Owners begin their work by creating requirements. In some situations, these scopes are dictated by others. Their work mainly consists of describing demands, thus apparently appearing as a scribe in their role.

Chacun d’entre nous à eu un déclic concernant Scrum, nous avons compris que c’était la route à emprunter, un comportement que nous souhaitions adopter, des valeurs alignées avec les nôtres.

The Scrum Master encourages the Scrum Team to improve, within the Scrum process framework, its development process and practices to make it more effective and enjoyable for the next Sprint.

When we learn new skills, we experience different emotions at different stages of the learning process.

No sé sobre el resto de ustedes, pero personalmente siempre promociono Professional Scrum cuando hablo, enseño, entreno, asesoro, etc.

In this blog post I explain why the Sprint Goal is key for an effective implementation of Scrum and how it is widely present in the Scrum framework by exploring its “lifecycle”. 

Scrum is intended as a simple, yet sufficient framework for complex product delivery.

Are you working remotely during the COVID-19 outbreak? Are you looking for some tips/tactics to lead virtual training for your teams? 

Having a Sprint Goal in some cases is not easy. Having a good Sprint Goal is even more difficult.

Jeff Gothelf is the author of LeanUX as well as Sense and Respond. He is a thought leader in the UX space and working on his next book Forever Employable. We talk a bit about the idea of being sought after by organizations. Not just being a thought leader or an independent consultant. We're excited to read more then the book drops later this year.

Many teams are finding that they need to adjust to a new reality amid the covid-19 pandemic. Strategic plans lie in tatters, urgent unplanned work fills the board, stakeholders are hammering teams with requests, and routine has gone out of the window. This is a time for a Scrum Master to be pragmatic, calm, and outcome focused: providing delivery leadership without allowing process to get in the way.

Facing the COVID-19 pandemic, we are all staying home for the safety of our people. This is a hard time for all of us. While classes are re-scheduled in the Fall, some of us Scrum trainers are refocusing our energy to help the household while others are investigating how to conduct interactive online training.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Wim Heemskerk answers questions about challenges your Scrum team is facing, and has some deep expertise in facilitation and leadership in agile, specifically.

This fourth article now addresses basic remote agile anti-patterns — the pitfalls any distributed team wants to avoid to become successful.

Even though applying agile processes in that context is often a good and valuable idea, business agility is a much bigger term than that. It means how well an organization is equipped to react to market changes, merging customer needs or other factors that impact the business as a whole. 

Ever wonder how to get your first Scrum Master job with little to no experience? It’s a question I often get in my Professional Scrum classes.

Good Scrum Masters are passionate. Great Scrum Masters are dispassionate.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.