Resources

As an Agile Coach, you frequently encounter situations which demand quick thinking to get things moving in the right direction. Over time I have found few techniques which come in handy and always keep these in my playbook in case needs arise. This is the third part in the series of tools that I have found useful in my role as Agile Coach – Asking Powerful Questions.

What can you do as a Leader to help your Scrum Teams to become mature? Discover a 5-level maturity pattern that you can use as a reference.

An organization with a diversity of gender, race, sexuality, and disability make fuller products and services.

In my Scrum Master training courses, I get a lot of questions about the workload of a Scrum Master. One question I hear frequently is this: Is the Scrum Master role a full-time job?

I would like to discuss Scrum and XP because I often get a question "When should I use Scrum or XP?" from people in the community.

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Charles Bradley looks that the Scrum Value of Focus and ways to help improve and maintain it. He uses an excellent example about how the Sprint Goal helps individuals and the Scrum Team stay focused throughout the Sprint. 3:18 Minutes

This short video provides an overview of the Professional Scrum Foundations (PSF) course. Course stewards and Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainers (PSTs) Jill Graves and Rich Visotcky give you insight into the structure of the class and what you will learn. 1:59 Minutes

We regularly work with teams that see the Daily scrum as irrelevant, disruptive, and boring. They are often right. Here are three common anti-patterns and three potential solutions.

It’s been so exciting to hear so much positive feedback and interest in the new Scrum.org Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams and the accompa

Working as a Scrum Master I asked myself... "How do I know if my team are demonstrating the Scrum Values? What can I use to show their current state?"

In this series, I want to Introduce some helpful tips for Scrum Masters on “Systems Thinking” - a diagnostic Tool and a disciplined approach for examining problems more completely and accurately before acting.  Lights on! Camera !   

I’m lucky enough to work with different teams on a regular basis. In some cases, these teams have been doing scrum for years. These teams have become highly proficient when it comes to the events in Scrum.

This is second part in the series of tools that I have found useful in my role as Agile Coach – Timeboxing.

You’ve implemented Agile into your organization and hired professionals with Agile experience on their résumé to back it up. Yet, something is still not right. The gains that Agile promised don’t seem to be coming to fruition. Delivery times aren’t faster than they were before.

By Jochen (Joe) Krebs (jkrebs@incrementor.com) and Nils Oud (noud@incrementor.com) 

Work is complex, and to honour the empirical approach is harder. It requires trust, in order to be transparent. To enable the responsiveness that agile promises there needs to be discipline and rigour.

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Evelien Roos discusses why having a Scrum Master also hold other roles on the Scrum Team is not a good idea and how it can cause conflicts of interest resulting in negative team impact. (2:21 Minutes)

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Chris Lukassen talks about how he used Scrum when working with a group of children to build a bee house and how this experience can apply to any team looking to deliver a product using Scrum. (4:20 minutes)

This short video provides an overview of the Scaled Professional Scrum with Nexus (SPS). In this video, course stewards and Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainers (PSTs) Ravi Verma and Fredrik Wendt give you insight into the structure of the class and what you will learn over the 2 days. (

This short video provides an overview of the Professional Scrum Master (PSM) course created by Scrum co-creator and our founder Ken Schwaber. Course stewards and Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainers (PSTs) Stephanie Ockerman and Simon Reindl give you insight into the structure of the class and what you will learn over the 2 days. (1:39 minutes)

Kurt Bittner, VP of Enterprise Solutions presented "5 Things You Need to Know About Digital Transformation" at Agile 2018.

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Pawel Mysliwiec talks about why it is important for a Scrum Master to be patient.  He gives examples of his experience as a Scrum Master and trying to deal with issues too quickly and without thinking of the bigger picture. He looks at how this could have been handled differently and the impact it has on the Scrum Team and its stakeholders. (4:07 minutes)

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Andrzej Zińczuk discusses his experience working with a Scrum Team that was questioning their need to conduct Sprint Retrospectives each Sprint. He used a football analogy to help them understand the importance of a Sprint Retrospective and what it requires for teams to be professional. (4:37 minutes)

In this presentation from Scrum Day India, Professional Scrum Trainer Venkatesh Rajamani discusses how self-organization is not about eliminating leaders, but rethinking their role in a more balanced way. (51:32 minutes)

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Ralph Jocham discusses the evolution of mindset from a project to product point of view. He looks at some of the differences and benefits of thinking about a product rather than a project. (5:05 minutes)

Simon Sinek in his book „Start With Why“ talks about the importance of knowing why we are doing things before we think about what and how to do it.

In this webinar, we provide an overview of Nexus, describe how it is being used around the world to help organizations scale their Agile efforts with Scrum. Our presenters then demonstrate how these real-world scenarios using Nexus can be applied within the VersionOne Lifecycle solution. 

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Punit Doshi discusses the difference between having your entire schedule driven by plans that are created at the beginning of a project vs defining the plans on a Sprint by Sprint basis to help ensure that you are always focused on the delivery of value by learning and adapting as you go. (4:45 minutes)

As an Agile Coach, you frequently encounter situations which demand quick thinking to get things moving in the right direction. Over time I have found few techniques which come out handy and always keep these in my playbook in case need arise. This is first part in the series of tools that I have found useful in my role as Agile Coach

Try organizing a party in a “Yes, but…” atmosphere. The result is probably a zillion obstacles identified, but no party.

TRIZ is a facilitation technique to stop counterproductive activities and make space for innovation.

Professor Dr. Sabine Jaritz teaches a course within the Project Management major at the university called Project Controlling. This 14-week course looks at traditional vs. Agile project and portfolio management. Jaritz came to the realization that with Agile becoming more prominent, she needed to learn it, and teach it to her students.

InfoQ interviewed Patricia Kong, Product Owner at Scrum.org, about the changes to the Nexus Guide and the benefits that organizations have got from using Nexus.

By Jochen Krebs (jkrebs@incrementor.com) and Nils Oud (noud@incrementor.com)  The most timid girl in the class confided me (as did several other students):

In everything we do there should be some value - some importance in what we do. If not, then why do it?

Most organizations want to improve their agility to be more responsive to customer and market changes. They want to build on the success they have had with scrum at the team level and apply it across the whole organization. And while they might like to be more like Apple, Netflix or Airbnb, their challenge is that, unlike Silicon Valley startups and tech giants, they are not starting from a clean slate. Instead, they are trying to change from a traditional, process-centric, hierarchical organization into something else.

"The most important metrics are: did we execute the way in which we said we would, and did we deliver the value to the business that we had promised?" - Jamie S. Miller

Chris is a true example of an new type of leader. Not because he is a great speaker, nor because he has a big vision or has world changing ideas. Just because of one seemingly simple skill. A skill which is very hard to master. He recognizes the defining moments when he has to live the ambition. He knows when he has to lead his people by entering the 'battle' first. Let me tell you why.

In this episode of Agile.FM, host Jochen Krebs talks with Steve Porter who is a Professional Scrum Trainer on staff, working closely with the PST community at Scrum.org where he is also responsible for the curriculum.

Scrum.org has announced its new Scrum with Kanban course to teach individuals and teams how to use Scrum with Kanban practices, without changing Scrum. Scrum.org has collaborated with Daniel Vacanti to create the course.

Is it possible to use Scrum with Kanban? After a year of exploring the idea and working out the details, our answer is yes. Get ready to make your team stronger and more effective.

New Class Demonstrates How Scrum Can Be Complemented with Kanban Practices to Improve Effectiveness and Efficiency

Today we announced a new class Professional Scrum With Kanban. This class helps teams practicing Scrum to apply the practices of Kanban without breaking Scrum. It shows how visualization and flow are great partners in delivering Done software and how Scrum with Kanban helps teams become more professional.

With Scrum being by far the most influential and pervasive framework for delivering Agile projects, I thought it might be interesting to find out why Scrum has been so successful, any challenges it may face when scaling, and how it might evolve in the future. To investigate these topics further, who better to ask than the co-founder of Scrum itself.

In this class, students will learn how their Scrum Teams can introduce complementary practices from Kanban while continuing the way they are already working with Scrum, all without changing Scrum.

There is a common misconception that Agile and DevOps cannot work together, which does a disservice to everyone in the software development and delivery field. In fact, both approaches can significantly add to the Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection and adaption to better enable product teams to develop, deliver and sustain complex products.

Scaling is a popular strategy these days: scaling innovation, scaling agile, scaling whole organizations. But scaling can easily undermine agile principles like focus and minimal viable product, and the abilities to deliver, learn quickly, and pivot decisively when required.

Pushing harder isn't necessarily the pathway to achieving stellar results. From monitoring for burnout to leveraging the latest management techniques, here’s how to keep your IT team humming. In this article in CIO, Dave West provides his commentary on improving IT performance without jeopardizing morale.

Un Scrum Master que le dice al equipo de desarrollo y al Product Owner que según alguna experiencia cada miembro del equipo de desarrollo solo puede desarrollar...

The Scrum Master role is a new one and often mis-understood by teams and organizations who are Implementing Scrum. When I work with organizations often I see Scrum Masters role is not taken very seriously,