Resources

"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.

The Scrum Master role is a new one and is often misunderstood by teams and organizations implementing Scrum. When I work with organizations, often I see Scrum Masters role is not taken very seriously,

This is the audio version of the Nexus Guide.

This is the German audio version of the Nexus Guide.

Net Health first adopted Scrum in 2014 to aid in the completion of two large software development projects and remove the burden of an exhaustive initial requirements phase, thanks to the iterative nature of Scrum.

I have recently been helping a new Scrum team get started with the framework and helping them to set themselves up with the best chance of being successful with Scrum.

These slides accompany the webinar What is Nexus? An Introduction to the Framework for Scaling Scrum

In this webinar, Patricia Kong, Scrum.org Product Owner of Enterprise Solutions and co-creator of Nexus provides an overview to the Nexus Framework, its principles and the thinking behind it. She will discuss how Nexus, like Scrum, promotes bottom-up intelligence to discover and emerge what works best for the teams and organization. She uses case studies as examples showing how Nexus can be used, and visits the recent updates to the Nexus Guide.

In this post, we address the myth that the Sprint Review is primarily an opportunity to ‘demo’ the increment to stakeholders. Although a demo certainly can be part of a Sprint Review, it fails to capture what the Sprint Review is actually about...

Steve Porter joined Agile for Humans host Ryan Ripley to discuss a wide variety of deep Scrum topics and approaches.

“Agile” has become a buzzword in the software development industry as well as the wider business landscape. And for good reason – several organizations have cited Agile principles as the influence behind results such as better financial performance, project success, customer satisfaction and employee engagement.

Professional Scrum Trainer David Dame didn't speak until the age of 12. Born with Cerebral Palsy he has used his every day challenges to help companies and individuals become more adaptive, more understanding and more engaged with one another. A fabulously insightful interview with a truly inspirational agile and design thinking coach.

Being a professional with a disability is like working two careers:  The one I get compensation for - leading organizations to adapt continuous change. The other career - managing an organization of personal support workers to allow me to have a full life. 

A friend sent me an e-mail, asking me to summarize Nexus and the Scaled Professional Scrum class. Here's the gist of what I sent in return.

Recently I worked with a new customer in Denver to help them move towards a greater degree of Scrum in their software development. The idea that Scrum is for everyone in your organisation is kind of new, but it reflects the modern understanding of the way people work, and the rejection of Taylorism and command and control.

A facilitation technique to make the purpose of your work as a Scrum Team clear.

Expanding a successful department-level agile initiative across an enterprise requires an agile project approach of its own. Agile delivery has hit a tipping point, with the majority of IT organizations finding some level of agile success. For these organizations, the next logical step is to scale this success into an "enterprise adoption", taking the value they are getting from a single team and replicating it.

There is nothing in the Scrum Guide that says that you can't have workflow across the Sprint boundary. I'm going to suggest that not only can you, but you should as long as you don't endanger the Sprint Goal.

Improve your Scrum events with the Liberating Structure “1-2-4-All”. Unfold open conversations and sift ideas and solutions in rapid fashion. Your Scrum events (and other meetings, events, workshops) will never be the same!

Wenn man Scrum auf einen einzigen Begriff reduzieren müsste, welcher wäre das?

In this episode Jochen Krebs speaks with Patricia Kong and Kurt Bittner of Scrum.org, about the changes made to the Nexus Guide release in January 2018 and their thoughts on Scaling Scrum.

Stop the traditional introduction rounds and start using Impromptu Networking. A facilitating technique to rapidly share challenges and expectations and build new connections.

Back in the early days of Scrum, the Scrum Master role was exciting. The days of the pigs & chickens, the days when being a Scrum Master was considered dangerous. In those times there was the saying a dead Scrum Master is a useless Scrum Master  And even today I still use that when selecting a Scrum Master to work with.  If you never got fired as a Scrum Master then you probably did not show enough courage to achieve breakthrough improvements.

The Sprint is one of the five Scrum events.  In my Professional Scrum Courses, this is the event that people often forget about because it is a container event, not necessarily something you distinctly schedule on the calendar.

Specify only the absolute “must dos” and “must not dos” for achieving a purpose. Ideal for creating a Definition of Done, a Minimal Viable Product or a Team Manifest.

InfoQ interviewed Dave West about the adoption of agile and applying Scrum Studio, what the industry can do to increase the understanding of agile approaches and what the industry should stop doing, and what the future will bring for agile.

It’s been a year since I joined the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainers Community. 2018 marks my fifth year in teaching Scrum. Allow me to reflect on this journey.

This document provides an overview of the changes made to the Nexus Guide over time.

In this SD Times article, they look at how Scrum.org is announcing new updates to the Nexus Guide, the body of knowledge for using its Nexus framework to scale Scrum. The new updates focusing on adding clarification as well as asserting the importance of transparency at scale.

In this DevOps.com article, they look at the announcement of the new release of the Nexus Guide, and Scaling Scrum with Nexus book.

According to Forrester Research, 90% of Agile teams use Scrum.[1] One reason for this popularity is that Scrum is a simple framework that promotes transparenc

In August 2015, Ken Schwaber and Scrum.org introduced the Nexus framework to the public via the Nexus Guide, the definitive guide to scaling Scrum. Today, on January 17, 2018, we release the first update to the Nexus Guide.

“I designed a defined framework for using many Scrum Teams on a single product or problem. The result is Nexus, an exoskeleton that rests on top of many Scrum Teams. Nexus provides information and management information for guiding their working together.” - Ken Schwaber

This Guide Describes Nexus, the Framework for Scaling Scrum

An online version of The Definitive Guide to Nexus

Scrum.org, the mission-based organization dedicated to improving the profession of software delivery through training, certification assessments and community, today announced that it has made updates to the Nexus Guide, the body of knowledge for using its Nexus framework to scale Scrum. The Nexus Guide was initially released in August 2015.

Itero Group to expand its Agile Innovation Practice to the West Coast with Professional Scrum Trainer Donis Marshall as they named himVice President of the Agile Innovation practice. Mr. Marshall will be responsible for expanding the West Coast operations of the organization.

During some Scrum training classes, I have been asked, can teams practice Continuous Delivery (CD) , using the Scrum Framework? The answer is a resounding yes!   Let's explore why some believe that Scrum only allows you to release at the most, every Sprint against what the Scrum Guide says.   

Diversity boosts innovation in companies in times, when the rate of outside change is high. Diversity of people across culture, gender, religion, physical ability, ethnicity and other individual differences have to offer value for the group. Diversity in teams can generate greater idea flow and help making faster and better decisions.