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Blog Post

Reveal Scrum Success With Appreciative Interviews

December 1, 2017
Appreciative Interviews (AI) is a Liberating Structure that helps identify enablers for success in less than one hour. By starting from what goes well - instead of what doesn’t. In this post we'll share examples of how we've applied this structures within our Scrum training and coaching engagements.
Blog Post

10 Tips for Product Owners on the Product Vision

November 29, 2017
The Product vision describes the purpose of a Product, the intention with which the Product is being created and what it aims to achieve for customers and users. The Product vision describes a future state of the Product and what problems it tries to resolve or what ambitions it tries to fulfill.
Blog Post

What’s Driving Your Need For Agility?

November 28, 2017
I have created a little exercise that I like to use to help focus the on things we can change, or at least situations to seek out or avoid, to help focus change efforts. The essence of it is summarized in a picture. I call this the agile affinity model, and the dimensions the key drivers of empiricism.
Blog Post

Myth 6: The Product Owner is a Proxy for Stakeholders

November 28, 2017
In this post, we'll bust the myth that the Product Owner is a proxy for stakeholders. The bottom-line is that Scrum Teams become significantly less Agile when only the Product Owner communicates with stakeholders. Instead of framing the Product Owner as a proxy, we instead prefer to explain the Product Owner as the person responsible for including stakeholders in the conversation.
Blog Post

What is Servant Leadership

November 26, 2017
Here I am sitting in my hotel room while looking at my half-empty wine glass and the stars outside while preparing for my last Professional Scrum Master (PSM) class for the year 2017 and pondering about all of the classes I have facilitated over this year. PSM has been a transformational course for me because it has changed me by seeing how it has changed the life of many of my students. 
Blog Post

How I Use Scrum To Run My Business

November 21, 2017
At a recent course, one of my students asked me to share what Scrum “looked like” for me at TheScrumMaster.co.uk. This post is my response to that question. This describes my current process which has evolved via inspection and adaptation over 5 years.
Blog Post

Getting Real About Your Values – The Values Retrospective

November 20, 2017
Values and principles can often seem lofty and intangible so many agile practitioners prefer to focus on tools and practices. That's understandable but unfortunate. Because values and principles have the potential to provide us with clarity and guidance that transcends what practices and frameworks can achieve.  Ideally - part of your empiric inspection and adaptation process should explore whether you are living according to your values/principles. To achieve that you can try a value-based retrospective.
Blog Post

Scrum is often a waste of money

November 15, 2017
The Intent of Scrum Scrum allows development organisations to invest a little time at regular intervals to allow teams with autonomy over their work to identify and enact frequent, small improvements to the process and the plan.
Blog Post

Scrum and Technical Excellence

November 14, 2017
One of the most common critiques about Scrum that I've heard from smart software engineers are "Scrum does not care about technical practices, Scrum is for wimps". I've also heard managers down the hallway say that "Scrum is for wreckless developers because its main concern is only about fast delivery".
Blog Post

Scrum is simple, just use it as is!!

November 12, 2017
Scrum is a mindset, an approach to turning complex, chaotic problems into something that can be used. eff Sutherland and I based it on these pillars: Small, self-organizing, self-managing teams; Lean principles; and, Empiricism, using frequent inspection and adaptation to guide the work of the teams to the most successful outcome possible.
Blog Post

Open Space and Scrum

November 11, 2017
Open Space is one of the methods that allows organizations to make inspirational meetings and events. I was lucky enough to use Open Space in various contexts, with Scrum Teams. The concept has always worked.
Blog Post

Workshop - The Scrum Master as a Manager

November 9, 2017
Today I facilitated the workshop "The Scrum Master as a Manager" at the conference "Agile Spain 2017" in Sevilla. In this blog post I'll share the outline of the workshop "The Scrum Master as a Manager". This gives you the opportunity to facilitate the workshop within your own organisation as well.
Blog Post

Scrum Guide Update November 2017

November 7, 2017
Today (November 7th 2017) Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland released an update to the Scrum Guide.The Scrum Guide is the definitive definition of Scrum, authored by Ken and Jeff, the creators of Scrum.
Blog Post

Professional Organisational Change at the Ghana Police Service

October 31, 2017
The Ghana Police Service is in trouble. Over the last few last few decades, each new Police organisation and government has tried in various ways to carry out some change but most changes have been ad-hoc, temporary, not robust enough or strategic. The old problems return to haunt new administrations and many police officers and the Public has lost hope.
Blog Post

Should Our Team Use Scrum?

October 30, 2017
As a travelling Scrum and DevOps consultant I’m constantly asked “should our team use Scrum”? Now you might think that being a Professional Scrum Trainer – and serious Scrum fanboy – I would always answer “Yes!”. Well, you would be wrong.
Blog Post

The Scrum Master as the Change Leader

October 28, 2017
In this blog post I'll share my view on the Scrum Master as the Change Leader. I'll briefly describe the common misunderstandings and the preferred stances of the Scrum Master. The services a Scrum Master provides for the Development Team, Product Owner and organisation, and the 3 levels that can be considered as a growth path for the Scrum Master. Want to know why the Scrum Master should be a Change Leader? Check out this article.
Blog Post

Why PSD is such a great Training

October 19, 2017
The PSD training teaches the whole Scrum Team on how to do real Scrum. They work in Sprints, create Done software and use the appropriate tools and practices for it. It is a unique experience on how really good Scrum feels like.
Blog Post

Agile-ish is “Kind of…..not”

October 13, 2017
When an organization decides to embark on an Agile Transformation, the first question should be, “Why?”   What does leadership hope to achieve?  Will the chosen path lead to improved ability to deliver high-quality business value? &
Blog Post

It's time to learn the missing metric

October 10, 2017
Over the past years I have been looking for a metric that could indicate the agility of an organization. After a study of the more common metrics used for products and management reports, I couldn’t really find a metric that indicates the level of agility.
Blog Post

Follow the $$$ - Inclusion and Accessibility

September 28, 2017
Although people with disabilities do have special needs, their purchase power isn’t special: it’s the same as everyone else’s. No longer can we think of accessibility as a compliance play. It’s simply good business. Let me frame this point with my story.