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Blog Post

Speed Boats: Beware of Speeding!

October 23, 2019
Imagine a project with hundreds of people, a lead time in months, few releases a year. You could compare these as large cruise boats or tankers navigating for few weeks in the immensity and emptiness of the oceans and seas and then stopping to ports very far away from each other.
Blog Post

Ask a Consultant: QAs in Scrum

October 23, 2019
Hi Duncan, I took your Scrum Training class a couple of months back. You mentioned if we had any questions, we could email you and I have an interesting situation I found myself in regarding QA’s in our Scrum teams.
Blog Post

Best Practices and Scrum

October 15, 2019
In my Professional Scrum classes, I always get asked about best practices.  It may be about facilitating events, Product Backlog refinement, defining value, forming Scrum Teams, or creating good Sprint Goals.
Blog Post

Struggling with Capacity in Sprint Planning

October 11, 2019
Your Sprint is over. Your increment is “Done”, you have coded cleanly, your unit tests and integration tests are bright green, you are proud of your work. The Sprint Review is running smoothly. The Sprint Retrospective allows the team to find 1 or 2 areas of improvement without revolutionizing the world.
Blog Post

The Power of Real Teamwork

October 9, 2019
A few years ago, I was part of a team that was starting to work together under very difficult circumstances: We had to finish a showcase in the Industry 4.0 area within just six weeks.
Blog Post

How Do You Make a Good Forecast?

October 9, 2019
As part of the Scrum.org webinar “Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer - Martin Hinshelwood - Answering Your Most Pressing Scrum Questions” I was asked a number of questions. Since not only was I on the spot and live, I thought that I should answer each question that was asked again here, as well as those questions I did not get to.
Blog Post

Asperger's and Scrum

October 8, 2019
I'd like to share another story with you... Thank you Paul and Charlie for sharing your story. It moved me and left me with huge smile on my face. 
Blog Post

Sprint Retrospectives with Kanban

October 8, 2019
A few weeks ago we considered the Agile Manifesto from a lean perspective. We saw that it is possible to map the 12 agile principles to the 7 canonical “Lean Wastes” in terms of a mitigation approach.
Blog Post

Performance Measures and Flow

October 3, 2019
The legendary Steve Trapps has been talking to me for months about featuring in an interview. So here we are, I finally agreed and we spent 25 minutes talking about me; obviously mainly avoiding being narcissistic.
Blog Post

The Agile Workspace: The Undervalued Success Factor

September 30, 2019
If you want your organization to become agile, adding more whiteboards to the workspace will not suffice. You have to abandon the idea that the workspace is an assembly line for white-collar workers. You need to let go Taylorism. We are now in the age of the creative worker.
Blog Post

No Estimates and is it Advisable for a Scrum Team to Adopt it?

September 26, 2019
As part of the Scrum.org webinar “Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer - Martin Hinshelwood - Answering Your Most Pressing Scrum Questions” I was asked a number of questions. Since not only was I on the spot and live, I thought that I should answer each question that was asked again here, as well as those questions I did not get to.
Blog Post

Myth: Having A Sprint Goal Is Optional In Scrum

September 25, 2019
Sprint Goals are one of the more elusive parts of the Scrum Framework. Most teams know they are important, but few use them - for a variety of reasons. In this post, Barry Overeem and I bust the myth that Sprint Goals are optional in Scrum. And we make an effort to show what makes them so vital in the face of complex work. And more importantly, what you can do to start working with Sprint Goals from now on.
Blog Post

Scrum Master Engagement Patterns: The Development Team

September 23, 2019
Last year, I ran a (non-representative) survey on how Scrum Masters are allocating their time when working with a single Scrum Team. Much to the surprise of many readers, the direct Scrum Master engagement with a single Scrum Team of average size and a typical 2-week Sprint turned out to be about 12 hours per week.
Blog Post

How do you Incorporate a Design Sprint in Scrum?

September 18, 2019
As part of the Scrum.org webinar “Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer - Martin Hinshelwood - Answering Your Most Pressing Scrum Questions” I was asked a number of questions. Since not only was I on the spot and live, I thought that I should answer each question that was asked again here, as well as those questions I did not get to.
Blog Post

Not All Feedback is Created Equal!

September 17, 2019
Product Owners have a tough job. I was in a Sprint Review recently where the Scrum Team had some stakeholders talking about an idea they thought was excellent. So, like any studious Product Owner, they immediately typed up the idea and added it to their Product Backlog.
Blog Post

Hiring the Right SM or PO

September 10, 2019
A customer I was working with asked me to help out with the intake process for recruiting a new Scrum Master and a new Product Owner. I asked them what they had so far. They provided a clear job description describing what they wanted to see from the candidates.