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.

‘25/10 Crowd Sourcing’ is a structure that allows you to rapidly generate and sift through a group’s boldest actionable ideas in less than 30 minutes. In this article we'll explain how to use this structure to spice up your Scrum Events.

"To ensure continuous improvement, [the Sprint Backlog] includes at least one high priority process improvement identified in the previous Retrospective meeting." - The Scrum Guide, November 2017 That old familiar feeling

I once worked for an organization with many opportunities for improvement. To be honest, it was a mess.

In this post, we’ll bust the myth that a Product Backlog has to consist entirely out of User Stories. By describing the purpose and characteristics of the Product Backlog, we'll also busted the related myth; that User Stories are an inherent, necessary part of Scrum.

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.

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".

There are a number of things that you have to think about when selecting a modern source control system. Some of that is purely about code, but modern source control systems are about way more than code.

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.

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.

"Perfection has to do with the end product, but excellence has to do with the process." - Jerry Moran

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.

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.

Let the coaching experiment continue!   Welcome back to part two of our curiosity filled coaching questions!

In this post we'll discuss the myth that Scrum Teams at best release working software at the end of a sprint, constraining teams that are capable of releasing faster.

Last time I talked about the Ghana Police Service (GPS) I was talking about Professional Organisational Change and the approach the Inspector General of Polic

The question remains as to why managers continue to plan projects based on sequential assumptions.

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.

"That's the thing about zombies. They don't adapt and they don't think." - Max Brooks One of the earliest challenges I ever had to resolve, as a Scrum Master, was the proper disposal of the dead.

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.

In this blog post, we will describe the myth that the Sprint Backlog is fixed during the Sprint. We'll bust this myth by offering the perspective from the Scrum Guide and describing the difference between forecast and commitment.

Do you have time for an experiment? Then please ask me a coaching question!   Welcome to the first of a two part blogpost full of curiosity filled questions on coaching!

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.

We describe the myth that the Scrum Master should always be present during the Daily Scrum. We'll offer the perspective from the Scrum Guide, describe examples of problems in how Scrum is applied and share tips & tricks on how to make the Daily Scrum more effective.

Never an easy answer and always being pulled in multiple directions, a question often asked: How many Scrum Teams should I be on?

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.

Courage however is more than just learning what it means and telling your teams to be courageous.

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? &

An estimate is our best guess for what can be achieved and by when. There are some situations when estimates are very important:

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.

When multiple Scrum Teams are working on one product, shared DoD becomes necessary. DoD helps to ensure that each increment is transparent by the end of every Sprint and creates a shared understanding of what “Done” means.

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.

La aceptación de los PBIs en Scrum es algo que suscita dudas en los equipos. En realidad es muy fácil.

Our real-time, globalized world thrives increasingly on information and technology. The balance of businesses and society has rapidly shifted from industrial (often physical) labor to digital (often virtual) activities.

Hay una secuencia lógica que aquellos alumnos que han asistido al curso de Professional Scrum Master experimentan: Darse cuenta que Scrum no es en muchas ocasiones lo que ellos pensaban. Preguntarse qué hace el Scrum Master todo el día. Y una tercera que revelaré más adelante.

m Una mejor manera de construir productos Scrum es un proceso de gestión que reduce la complejidad en el desarrollo de productos para satisfacer las necesidades de los clientes. La gerencia y los equipos de Scrum trabajan juntos alrededor de requisitos y tecnologías para entregar productos funcionando de manera incremental usando el empirismo.

In this article, I suggest that you take a look at the role of a Scrum Master with a help of causal loop diagrams. They help to see a bigger picture of what is happening over time. Quite often, we observe the cause-and-effect relationships on a short-time horizon period, and do not notice when the links are spaced in time.

In this blog post I've shared the idea of doing a free Retrospective after every training we provide. The goal of this session is to inspect the progress that has been made and define actionable and committed improvements for the upcoming period.

Cuando se trata de literatura ágil, donde hace años no había prácticamente nada, ahora hay una abundancia que hace realmente difícil elegir.

Hay una frase de Ken Schwaber, creador de Scrum, que se ha hecho muy famosa a lo largo de los años. Scrum es simple, pero no es fácil. ¿Cual es la razón de que Scrum sea tan difícil de implementar? He aquí 3 retos típicos con los que seguro que tendrás que lidiar

As the saying goes, it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. The same could be said about DevOps and its implementation in an organization. Yes, the result is magic since it aims to deliver daily business value, but the journey is even more interesting. This journey is full of organizational, technological, but especially human discoveries.

"It's weird when you get roles that coincide with your life" - Lily James

El Nexus Integration Team es un nuevo rol dentro de Nexus, el framework de referencia para escalar Scrum. A diferencia de el Scrum of Scrums, que es solamente una reunión ad-hoc, el NIT, como rol, cumple la función de asegurar que al final de cada Sprint, en el Sprint Review, el Nexus entrega un incremento integrado que cumpla la definition of Done mínima para el Nexus.

Una de las cuestiones que se plantean habitualmente en organizaciones, equipos y Agile Coaches, es el uso de un método que permita organizar el trabajo de forma ágil. El uso de un método como Scrum o Kanban va mucho más allá del proceso en sí, sino que suponen una herramienta para mejorar la capacidad de adaptación, gestión de riesgo e innovación.

En su reciente reporte anual, LinkedIn ha considerado el de Scrum Master como uno de los trabajos con más futuro del 2017. Con un salario medio anual de 100.000$, el número de puestos disponibles para Scrum Masters está previsto que se duplique este año.

I want to address those of you who don't really want the feedback. I mean, as important as feedback is, and as many times as you've heard that the central point of a Sprint Review is feedback…you're tired of it. It's pesky. And it just gets in the way of you doing what you know is right anyway.

'Scrum isn't perfect' is something I hear quite frequently, be it as an excuse not to stick to the few rules Scrum has or not to use it at all. The thing is though that no set of rules is perfect, but we're used to stick to them anyway.

I recently had the pleasure of conducting Scrum.org’s Professional Scrum Foundations workshop to a group of students at the nonprofit job-training program, Year Up, in Boston. Teaching this group of millennials -- motivated, talented young adults from low-income background -- was an illuminating experience that ended up teaching me something about being a Scrum trainer as well as the future of software development.  

La velocidad es uno de los temas de Scrum más discutidos online y offline. Sólo hace falta acercarse a la comunidad de Scrum Masters en Facebook para comprobar como muchas de las cuestiones planteadas están en la linea de la velocidad de entrega de los equipos de desarrollo de Software.

El Sprint Backlog suele generar bastantes dudas en cuanto a su gestión. En ocasiones se convierte en un arma arromadiza que los stakeholders, el Producto Owner o incluso el Scrum Master utilizan para controlar el equipo. ¿Es esta su función?