Often, when I facilitate a Professional Scrum Training, I'm asked about how a Scrum Team can work without someone telling them what to do.

I recently read the book The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom. And I noticed strong correlations with what it takes to be an effective Scrum Master.

How many times a day are you walking into the conversation where people jump into discussing solutions that lead nowhere, lack a clear purpose for the people involved in the conversation, don’t make sense altogether without the additional “why” discussion? I know I am having those conversations day in and day out.

In this article, I want to clarify the need for agility in modern businesses and what agility in organisational design actually is.

Should the PO really balance the level of technical debt? I just had this conversation yesterday at Sweden's "big" agile conference, Agila Sverige.

The topic of my blog today is another one that is common on client’s sites. The use of the terms Showcase, Show & Tell or Sprint Review. In this situation, there is likely to be a broad mix of people fulfilling the Scrum Master roles.

A Sprint Goal is not often something people think about when using Scrum. Turns out it’s really important for teams to act as teams. Find out why in Robb Pieper's latest video blog from Responsive Advisors.

Hi awesome people. Courage is one of the Scrum values and as part of my New Year's resolution this year I would like to have more courage to point out elephant in the room at the risk people may dislike me for doing it.

In this 3rd article, I build on the previous two articles and give an example of how to use the two Pattern Languages to develop your pattern sequence.

An introduction of the 6 symptoms, with the symptom ‘No validation with stakeholders’ explained in detail.

The most important question to stakeholders is often “When can it be done?” There is a lot that goes into answering that seemingly simple question. What is involved in the work?

Collaboration is key to solve complex problems. I’ve always suffered from the evident lack of collaboration between people. It’s professionally frustrating when you’ve experienced effective teamwork.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my experiences via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

There is one product, one Product Owner, one Product Backlog — a simple rule. How is that supposed to scale, you might ask, isn’t that approach turning...

In a series of blog posts, I want to share how you can use Systems Thinking to resolve complex problems.

When Scrum Teams discuss too many problems during the Retrospective they may lose focus.

The agile movement really has changed the way we lead our people. Giving them more freedom and autonomy to do their job often improves the quality, productivity and happiness of the people.

Although I am going to use the term technical debt in this discussion. I am actively forming the opinion that this is the wrong term to be used both in how various assessments assess understanding and by practitioners in the agile community.

A while ago we started working on a movie to illustrate the essence of agile leadership. What is it about? Are leaders still needed in an agile environment?

This is a series on how to create more engaging and interactive Scrum Events with Liberating Structures and recover from Zombie Scrum.

The Scrum Guide provides no reference or guidance on how to get started with Scrum. That's because Scrum is a lightweight, minimal framework to encourage self-organization. I have heard it stated that Scrum is intentionally incomplete.

Welcome to the Agile Movers & Shakers interview series. Today’s guest is Ben Linders.

In my earlier article, I explained what Scrum Patterns are and why they could be useful for you in your transformation. In this blog, I discuss how to select and use the Scrum Patterns from the Pattern Languages.

How to start an Agile transformation? What are the initial steps? In this article I explain how transformations could be planned using Scrum Patterns and systems thinking.

Within the Scrum process, there are eleven basic elements that make up the framework. 3 roles, 3 artifacts, and 5 events. Practitioners need to learn to apply and understand the principles behind these in order to obtain the full benefits of the Scrum process.

Hey awesome people. I hope you are starting the new year with excitement. One of the most popular questions I got in my Professional Scrum Master (PSM) class from the past years is: "What are the differences between Project Manager and Scrum Master?"

You have a big heart and a lot of determination, and you want to create a better world. That may mean empowering and supporting your team.

For me, 2019 was all about purpose. This means aligning all my effort in things that matter: professionally, social causes, community, and connecting with family and friends.

Fighting organizational impediments as a Product Owner? Combine powers and utilize the Product Owner and Scrum Master symbiosis. And create more focus at the same time.

It’s that time again. The end of the year, where many of us take a step back to reflect on the year that will almost be over soon and create another new year resolution. Like many of you, I do the same. On my last year life retrospectives, I wrote about servant leadership.

In a series of blog posts, I want to share how you can use Systems Thinking to resolve complex problems such as software teams not delivering the right software fast enough.

This post is an excerpt from the book that we’re writing, the ‘Zombie Scrum Survival Guide’. It’s our way of delivering small increments and involving our stakeholders. So we’d love to hear your feedback, encouragements and wild ideas.

Technical debt is a plague on software development in companies big and small. But what is it? What problems does it cause? How can we remove it? Watch this video blog from Robert Pieper, CEO of Responsive Advisors to find out.

Announcing our upcoming book with Scrum.org and Addison-Wesley.

Hey awesome people. I hope you are having a great time with your friends and families in this holiday season.

In 2017, I was talking to the head of the Agile Coach Group of a large bank. She asked me to come over to work with her and help to roll out their standard way of working across all branches in Europe.

While Diana Larsen continues her coaching, mentoring, and consulting practice in a limited way, she has shifted more toward involvement as a co-founder of the Agile Fluency Project, a startup...

The Professional Scrum Master (PSM) workshop has a module that talks about the Definition of "Done" (DoD) and Technical Debt.

If there is one trend that has surpassed Agile in our profession over the last five years, I would say DevOps would be a good culprit. As we’ve seen an explosion of tools to implement CI/CD in our Scrum teams, we’ve also seen some of our Agile practices being challenged by this new reality.

The other day I had a conversation with a colleague. He was looking for an opener for a talk - something catchy to illustrate to his audience (mostly finance and banking) that there could well be a need to change their current ways of working.

Recently I ran into a beautiful piece of text, written by Rachel Naomi Remin. In this text I read the following phrase: "Perhaps the secret of living well is not in having all the answers, but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company."

Not all companies need to be agile companies. What does it really mean to be an agile organization and how do you know if you need to be one? Watch this short 4 minute episode of Responsive Advisors Agile B-Sides video blog to find out!

Software and online-services companies are undergoing quick implementation of the Scrum framework in their Products. Scrum is a process framework that enables deliver complex products iteratively and incrementally while controlling the risk.

This blog post gives you an overview of the paper "Liberating Structures - an Antidote to Zombie Scrum". It describes what Zombie Scrum is about and offers tangible examples of how to recognize, treat, and prevent Zombie Scrum by using Liberating Structures.

On November 22nd, 2019, I gave the closing keynote at Scrum Deutschland, a talk called 'The Four Things You Do To Prevent Value Delivery'. In this keynote, I discussed the trends I found during my research at multiple organizations.

Outcome mapping enhances Product Backlog transparency by making transparent the relationships between goals, stakeholders, outcomes and outputs created by a Scrum Team

I’ve been teaching the class Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) for the last year now and I strongly believe parts of its content will send some of our current practices and books to the Agile museum.

Last week, about 30 members of the Hands-on Agile community in Berlin came together to identify opportunities for personal and professional growth for the coming year, using Liberating Structures’ Ecocycle Planning in the process, to further your Scrum Master career 2020.

Can anyone be a Product Owner (PO)? What’s the best position in the company to fill that role? With Scrum you have one and only one Product Owner for a given product...

Hello awesome people. Today I want to share with you my personal guidelines that I have been using to recruit/hire Scrum Masters from the job market.