Of late, I've been noticing an interpretation of the Scrum Master role - the Scrum Master as An FFFCDO for Developers - a Fierce, Ferocious, Fearsome Chief Defense Officer!

I have recently started down the path of certification with Co-Active Coaching as I wanted to improve my coaching skills; to know more about what great coaching looks like, to immerse myself in a community that will help me improve my abilities and to have credibility in my own mind about my own skills.

Quand on parle de Scrum et d’Agilité, nous sommes habitués à penser à l’Amérique et à l’Europe, et non à l’Afrique. Je dois avouer que je suis totalement ignorant du niveau de Scrum et de l’Agile en Afrique. Inutile de dire que j’étais excité d’être invité en Côte d’Ivoire pour une formation PSM-1 et PSPO-1 dans la ville d’Abidjan.

In diesem Blog untersuchen wir, woher diese Grundhaltung kommt, zeigen, wie wir damit umgehen können, leisten Überzeugungsarbeit und bieten Experimente an, d. h. wir

When I first started practicing Scrum, I thought that delivering a done, usable increment each Sprint was the least important part of the framework (spoiler alert: delivering a done, usable increment at least once per Sprint is critically important for reducing risk, enabling faster delivery of business value, reducing the accumulation of technical debt, and facilitating empiricism.)  At the time, I was the Scrum Master for a team that was building an online application, and the Product Owner did not intend to release the new application to production until it was complete.  What did it matter how we sliced up the work when a certain amount of work had to get done either way? How wrong I was.

Heeeey. What's good this week awesome people? I hope you are well and keeping safe. During the recent lockdown in Brisbane I created a video about how Professional Scrum team plan their Sprints with Kanban.

With remote work increasing we look at how Scrum can enhance and accelerate you remote working practices

Llevamos un año increíble, bueno algo más, unos 18 meses. La «vieja normalidad» de marzo del 2020.

When using the Scrum framework, the Retrospective is the final event in a Sprint. In this article, we will discuss ideas to use when planning your next Sprint Retrospective.

Algunos anti patrones de un Scrum Master que pueden no ayudar a ser un líder servicial.

When talking about applying Scrum and Agile, we are hardwired to think about America and Europe, not about Africa. I must confess I am totally ignorant about the status of Scrum and Agile in Africa. Needless to say, I was excited to be invited to Ivory Coast for a PSM-1 and PSPO-1 training in the city of Abidjan.

How effectively a Nexus works depends on its ability to eliminate dependencies. Eliminating dependencies simplifies integration. Scrum Masters who efficiently perform cross-team refinements save time. Saving time saves money. 

In March 2021, I was conversing with a CTO of a Product based company. He asked me a question that if it was worth employing a Scrum Master. We discussed the topic by exchanging opinions, and I explained my viewpoint.

There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone.

I interviewed a Scrum Master candidate last week. This blog is inspired by him.

Desde hace 16 meses he recibido incontables preguntas relacionadas con el trabajo remoto en equipos.

One of my favorite sayings is “Inspection without adaptation is waste”. For continuous improvement it is important not only to identify things that did not go so well but to also change something in the way you are working. If you change nothing, the inspection did not have an impact at all and is a waste of time and energy.

Does the role of the Scrum Master go away with time? For addressing the doubt, first, understand the role of a Scrum Master clearly. 

Every company has customer focus in its vision or mission statement, but is it really? As an employee of a development team, how do I know if this is the case?

 

When we introduce Scrum to an organization, many people are skeptical of the monetary benefits and ROI of the Scrum Master position. The question I am often asked is - "How do you justify the salary of the Scrum Master?"

Can a Scrum Team simply decide to abandon Scrum? After all, the Scrum team is self-managing, according to the Scrum manual, also known as the Scrum Guide. So, let’s explore this question at the very heart of team autonomy.

A Scrum team consists of three clear accountabilities: one Scrum Master, one Product Owner, and Developers.  Often, when working with a Scrum team struggling with excessive conflict or a lack of trust, I find the culprit is a lack of clarity around each of these accountabilities.  Even with the best intentions, the Product Owner can become too focused on the upcoming Sprint and not focused enough on the bigger picture.  The Scrum Master can become overly protective of the team, and the Developers - wishing only to please - can take on too much work, jeopardizing the Sprint Goal.     

In this blog post, I share 10 success factors that emerged from a community meetup. These factors helped Scrum practitioners prevent or fix Zombie Scrum in their team and organization.

In the past few months I have heard several of my clients said that Scrum does not work and ask me to fix it.

TL; DR: Linking Strategy to Everyday Work w/ John Cutler — ACB21 In this highly engaging speaker session from the Agile Camp Berlin 2021, John Cutler delves into the advantages of linking strategy to everyday work: Motivation, inspiration, se

On today’s episode of YOUR DAILY SCRUM:  Is the Scrum Master Role an Entry Level Job?

I am often asked how to create better goals. This comes up at the team level, and it also comes up for the wider organization. When we are dealing with complexity, there is no one right way, no perfect template, and no best practice. And I find it helpful to look at the goals people are using today, explore the benefits those goals are giving them, and identify if there are unintended consequences of how they are using goals. In this post, I will share some common patterns I have noticed that lead to using goals poorly.

He sido un defensor del marco de gestión basada en evidencias (Evidence Based Management, EBM) de Scrum.org durante algunos años.

We ran several train-the-trainer events to prepare the launch and our trainer community for the PAL-EBM class. I enjoyed participating in one of those and am glad to share my experience with you.

When I’m describing the Key Value Areas (KVAs) of Evidence-Based Management, I find Time to Market is often misunderstood to mean “just go faster.” We need to scrub off the scent of “we know what we need to do, we just need to do it faster.” In complexity, goals and execution have a lot of unknowns, and things emerge as we do the work. So, we will be unsuccessful if we choose to follow a plan, even if we do it faster.

The role of an agile leader is to create and foster an environment where empiricism thrives to support the delivery of value. Evidence Based Management supports this, by providing a framework to link goals and objective measures to provide insights in to how effectively the organisation is working.

Today, Scrum.org launches the new Professional Agile Leadership - Evidence Based Management ™  (EBM) training course.

Discover how EBM solves many challenges for Product Owners.

EBM provides organizations with an opportunity to use empiricism to improve customer outcomes by delivering greater value. It helps to improve collaboration by elevating conversations from opinion-based discussions to evidence-based discussions and decisions. EBM may feel awkward at first, but it will be rewarding. The seeds of learning and changing are there.

We have now launched a new Scrum.org course – Professional Agile Leadership – Evidence-Based Management (EBM), and it is an exceptional occasion to share my experience with implementing the framework.

Previously, I have described some challenges with the Evidence-Based Management implementation. There are plenty of challenges regarding the process of applying Evidence-Based Management, there are also great results.

One personality trait we look for in managers is confidence. And rightfully so: It is needed to be able to make decisions and stand by them in adverse circumstances.

In industries ranging from financial services to consulting and defense, we can find countless examples of how organizations employed incentive plans that produced behavior not aligned to the organization's desired strategic goals.

Sprint Planning is an important event that has a significant impact on the team’s effectiveness and productivity during the Sprint.

La Gestión basada en evidencia de Scrum.org es un marco de trabajo que provee un enfoque empírico para mejorar continuamente el valor entregado a los clientes, las capacidades organizacionales para entregar ese valor y los resultados de negocio en un entorno de alta incertidumbre.

More than 10 years of helping organizations travel on the path to Agility have taught me some hard lessons about what differentiates the organizations that practice self-defeating pseudo agility from those who practice authentic, evidence based agility.

A contratação de profissionais da área de Tecnologia da Informação está cada vez mais difícil. De acordo com dados da Associação Brasileira das Empresas de Tecnologia da Informação e Comunicação (Brasscom), até o ano de 2024, o Brasil precisará de 420 mil profissionais de Tecnologia da Informação (TI). A Brasscom alerta ainda que o país forma, aproximadamente, 46 mil profissionais por ano.

TL; DR: Ignoring Self-Management — Undermining Scrum from the Start There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone.

How should leaders ensure that they and their teams execute against what they know? Check out this blog post for some key ideas

There is one frequent question that I encounter in my workshops. There is a piece of information that is missing in the Scrum Guide. Interestingly, It is regarding the managers. Where is the role of Manager in Scrum?

Ha salido el ’15th Annual State of Agile’. Cómo sabes es un reporte sobre la agilidad en el mundo.  Te dejamos el link de nuestro análisis del 2020 para que puedas comparar.

There are loads of blog posts, articles and podcasts about agile - what it should be, what it should do, how it should look? The problem is that a lot of what’s out there is hypothetical and not based on field experience.