As leaders, we are connected 24/7. Being connected with our mobile devices has meant we’re always available all the time. We have the pressure to move faster. Do more with less time. To our benefit and also to our detriment, we end up doing it.

What exactly is “agile” or even an agile leader? This is one of the biggest problems our industry faces. Ask a room full of people to answer and you may get as many answers. Common ones include “it’s a mindset” or “it’s a software methodology” etc…

A few days ago, I was observing a Sprint Retrospective. The Scrum Team decided to work on the Definition of Done (DoD), identified as the most important topic to adapt for the next Sprint. The discussions were open and animated, when an unexpected discussion emerged during the session.

An Agile mindset is crucial in management roles for organizations that are moving towards Agility. I observed this while working in various organizations and currently am a witness of it while assisting my customers.

There has been so much written about Velocity and its impact on teams yet it is one metric that eludes everyone and keeps cropping up whenever there is discussion around productivity.

Hearing a senior executive announce "We're committed to becoming agile!" is not the bombshell moment it used to be. It no longer indicates a personal revelation or board-room epiphany.

As a Global Vice President at a major financial institution, I spend two days a week teaching Product Ownership, Agile Leadership, Scrum, and Kanban to 25 employees per week. As a Professional Scrum Trainer, I’ve taught over 1500 people through the years. This experience has made me a better leader.

An executive is a person who owns the strategy or sets the direction of travel or sets justifications for spending. This exec could be the Product Owner for a chunk of the organization.

The 2019 Scrum Master Trends Report by Scrum.org and the State of Agile 2018 shows numbers that provide insight in the maturity of agile adoptions.

The Scrum Team consists of accountabilities devides over three roles. The only three roles needed in Scrum. But all needed! And all equally important to be successful. If we would practice Scrum within our companies the way described in this way we can all be successful in delivering incremental value to our customers each Sprint.

The purpose of Scrum is to create a potentially releasable Done Product Increment, in order to realize business value. Many teams struggle in improving their Definition of Done. The technique described here allows for greater transparency on what the Definition of Done is, and what the next steps are.

Questions about agile certifications (especially those from Scrum.org) are an integral part of my routine. People always come to me saying that they are going to act as a Scrum Master / Product Owner / Developer on an agile project and they want to know what to study and what's the best first certification.

Struggling to integrate UX Designers into Scrum? Use these actions to make Scrum teams more user-centric and UX Designers full-time members of the Scrum Team!

We all know that developing ourselves intellectually requires sustained dedicated effort toward continual learning. We take classes, read books, read from experts online, we find mentors, we collaborate, and many of us learn by teaching others.

The Scrum Guide is markedly ambitious in the standard of professionalism it demands of a team. Development Team members must be self-organizing and cross-functional, to the point that they will repeatedly and sustainably create a valuable product increment...

Compare the use of Scrum's Definition of Done to the professional procedures in other fields such as surgery and aviation.

In the last decade, we have realized that we cannot plan all up front in a linear process to develop software. We are solving complex problems, which require us to use an empirical process, lean UX practices, and a supporting technology platform that allows us to build, measure, learn and apply the learning in a repeatable fashion.

I am learning awesome things that can relate to our world of “Agile” and “Product Ownership.”

This blog post is about what I learned working with my team as a Scrum Master and improved between one year using Professional Scrum with Kanban.

In this article, I will discuss the dangerous dynamic that can arise when a Product Owner, Scrum Master, or the management of an organization focuses a Development Team on velocity.

Scrum limita el riesgo, proporciona transparencia y ayuda a la adaptación a través de los Sprints y la entrega alto valor. Scrum funciona bien con equipos auto organizados que tienen todas las competencias para entregar el incremento de producto.

Scrum is easy to understand, yet difficult to master. The Scrum Guide says so and it's true. If you have worked with Scrum in your organization you probably recognize it also. It's not difficult to start with Scrum.

Scrum is intended as a simple, yet sufficient framework for complex product delivery. Scrum is not a one-size-fits-all solution, a silver bullet or a complete methodology.

In my experience, the word YES is one of the biggest things holding the organization back from focusing on their desire towards innovation, disruption, agile, or more customer-centric.

The Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) class was launched a year ago - Feb 26 to be precise.

In this little blog I share some tips for multi-team Product Backlog refinement.

In this blog post, we describe how to use Conversation Cafe, as a Liberating Structure, within Scrum.

In 2016 the Scrum Values were added to the Scrum Guide. In this article I share a workshop I run several times, with excellent feedbacks, hoping that you'll see value in reusing it in your working environment.

I just celebrated my 48th birthday. This is quite a milestone because being born with Cerebral Palsy the odds were not in my favor to reach this age, let alone a professional career in leading change and leading leaders.

In January 2019 I was at Prowareness in Delft, Holland, and attended the 2 day Professional Product Owner course delivered by Ralph Jocham, co-author of The Professional Product Owner book. I thought I'd share my thoughts on the course with you.

No hay necesariamente una relación directa entre la complejidad de un PBI definido en términos de puntos de historia y el tiempo de desarrollo. Es decir, un PBI o historia de usuario que tiene mayor complejidad en puntos de historia puede terminarse en menos tiempo que un Item que tenga menos puntos de historia.

As people become more empowered and capable of taking ownership of their process and executing on their decisions, the next area to focus is raising the bar. This is about a drive for continuous improvement. In this article, we look at 4 ways to raise the bar.

Agility is a continuously evolving state that is unique to a specific organization, given the organization’s people, its constructs and its history. A traditional (industrial) approach to becoming more Agile (adaptive) commonly creates no more than an illusion of agility.

The 2019 Scrum Master Trends Report is an update to the 2017 Scrum Master Salary Report that Age of the Product conducted in 2017. By partnering, we have secured a larger sample and broadened the reach of the research, growing from over 500 to more than 2,100 respondents and adding more geographies and a broader set of demographics.

Recently as I was delivering a keynote about leaders sharing their failures one person from the audience asked me mine. I shared some from my blog I wrote a couple years ago...

Hello, great people of the world. Welcome back to the Scrum Master blog series with yours truly. As we enter the new year, we are seeing Scrum becoming the most commonly used framework to manage complex product delivery in the industry.

In my career, I have had the great privilege to witness different companies undergo many different phases of agile transformations. I’ve met many amazing Scrum Masters along the way that have evolved to take on major responsibilities in their organizations.

How are you interacting with your employees today? Are you taking the time to make an authentic connection?

A discussion is raging among Project Managers about the Iron Triangle because the authors of Scrum say “Scrum breaks the Iron Triangle”.

Why would Product Owners prevent value delivery, you ask? They shouldn’t, and don’t want to, but yet I see them do it every day. And usually, it’s without them even knowing they’re doing it. Here’s four observations of how Product Owners prevent value delivery, and suggestions to improve.

Scrum stands on the three legs of transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Of these, transparency can arguably be said to come first. Unless a situation is made clear it cannot be inspected, and any consequent adaptation arising therefrom is likely to prove futile.

One common misconception of agile is that it simply allows you to get everything done faster. This is simply not true. Agile allows us to plan a much smaller scope of work, delivering iteratively and incrementally to deliver the least amount scope needed to solve the problem/capture the opportunity.

This is the third post in a series on tools for Scrum Masters and their teams.

The Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) course has now been out for more than 6 months at Scrum.org. As one of the first few trainers who wanted to teach this course when it came out, I find it is a great way to combine the Scrum framework with Kanban as a strategy to deliver value to your customer.

Scrum is simple to understand. The Scrum Guide is just 19 pages. Over the years, I've met many Scrum practitioners who have never read the Scrum Guide or they have read it once and once only. I believe there's something special about the Scrum Guide and because of this, it's important that we consider reading the Scrum Guide as an empirical process itself.

When practicing the guitar, there have been times when I got very demotivated and frustrated until I found out I was focusing on my mistakes instead of enjoying all the good licks I was producing on my guitar as well. I learned that focusing on the good things I play makes practicing the guitar much more enjoyable.

In working in today’s knowledge work economy, it surprises me that many leaders still use traditional ways of leading their people. Leaders still put most of the focus on the work to be done instead of focusing on the people to create an environment where great work can be done.

A couple of months ago I blogged about some of the tools and toys that live in the trunk of my car. I take these along everywhere I teach and coach. Since posting, people have suggested additional items that just must be in my toolbox.

In the past years I’ve been the king of procrastination... there's a way to reduce anxiety by thinking differently, this article explains my way of doing it.

Now that we’ve covered the essentials of self-organization and intrinsic motivation, let’s dive into how you make decisions that enable and empower others.