What really makes a transformation of your organization successful? Which elements should be in place? Which complicated framework for scaling agile should I choose?

In this little blog I want to share a simple canvas that I use to kick-off agile adoption and answer the following questions:

Today we re-structure our Professional Scrum Master assessment (PSM) and certification products changing the focus of PSM II and introducing PSM III.

During the 5th edition of Scrum Day Europe, Laurens and I facilitated a workshop on how to “Add Visual Flavor to Your Organization Transformation with Videoscribe.”

These days scaling Scrum is a hot topic. How can I use Scrum to deliver a big product with multiple teams? The most common approach I see at my customers is scaling Scrum by adding more Scrum teams with a Product Owner and Scrum Master per team.

If you’ve learned Scrum and tried to implement it in any large organization you’ve likely run into a few issues. Getting dedicated people on your team is hard. Building cross-functional teams is really hard.

This week, co-creators of Scrum, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, released a new version of the Scrum Guide

As Agility in Mind launch our new training course designed to help distributed teams work effectively, we share our experiences on the

Recently I came across a post by Mike Cohn “Incentives and Deterrents for Starting Daily Scrum on Time”, on Linkedin

Today Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, the creators of Scrum delivered a webinar on their latest update to the Scrum Guide.  The update was a simple one, adding the 5 values of Scrum to the Guide.

The purpose of Scrum is to create a potentially shippable Increment by the end of a Sprint.  This is so important that people now use many terms to describe this Scrum artifact.  Working.  Releasable.

In my last post, I explained the pattern of the evolution of the Product Owner. This blog is about the evolution pattern of a Scrum Master.

What is a good Product Owner and am I the right person to fill in this role? If you have ever struggled with this question, you should probably keep reading.

Interview after the 3 day training with 3 students, asking them 3 questions: 1. "Why did you take this class?" 2. "What was your personal highlight of the class?" 3. "What will you do differently on Monday?"

Working with a range of people, it is interesting to observe how many are aiming to “Do Scrum” or “Get Agile”. The issue with this thinking is that people are focusing on the transport, not the destination.

I'm sure you've heard of Waterfall, ever heard of Water-Scrum-Fall? Ever heard someone in a product development group tell you “they use a hybrid-agile approach”? There’s a million ways people continue using a traditional, phase gated, software development lifecycle approach and marry it with an agile framework or methodology.

When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail! Huh? I don’t know; it’s something my father always said.

As we approach the mid-year point in our jobs, I often find that knowledge workplaces have a tendency to slow down a bit and lose some steam - even the ones that leverage Scrum.

Fifteen crucial responsibilities of an entrepreneurial Product owner. Maximize value & Optimizer, The Product Vision, Value, and Validation, Return of Investment, Reducing the Total Cost of Ownership, Stakeholder Engagement and Collaboration, Business Agility.

At a recent course, one of my attendees talked about his use of a "to delete" status for items in his Product Backlog. Where items had been in his Product Backlog for more than 3 months he tagged them as "to delete".

The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand the spirit of Scrum and hereby apply the Scrum framework better.

Over the past 10 years I have worked with many organisations and helped them to use Scrum to create innovative and sometimes market leading Products. I have seen a lot of Scrum during this time, much of it done well, but some of it done badly.

Scaling Scrum. Agile at Scale. Enterprise Everything. Everyone is using the Scaled Agile Framework SAFe.  Scaling, Scaling, Scaling. If you’re working in product development, you’ve probably had a few conversations on this topic.

The most common question I am asked at my courses is - what makes a good Scrum Master? I always answer this question with a story from my own experience working with Scrum Masters (good and bad) over the years.

The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better.

In the past few months I've been working with a company whose products are most hardware, circuit boards, and firmware.

When do you estimate and what do you do when you need more time for discussion? In this third post of this series on Product Backlog refinement you will find some good practices on how to facilitate an effective and efficient refinement meeting.

The most common question I am asked at my courses is - what makes a good Scrum Master? I always answer this question with a story from my own experience working with Scrum Masters (good and bad) over the years.

Last week I participated in a Product Owner course facilitated by Gunther Verheyen. What triggered me was the part where we discussed the difference between having a

In this blog series, you will get some good practices and guidance for having better, more effective and more vivid Product Backlog refinement

Yes, of course it is! Scrum is a framework to help teams and organisations on their path to agility, but it is by no means the only way to be agile.

One of the most challenging activities in Scrum is Product Backlog Refinement. During training courses I get many questions on this activity. What do you do during Product Backlog refinement? How do you prevent discussions going off track or in too much detail? Who should be there? When do you estimate? In this blog series, you will get some good practices and guidelines for having better, more effective and more vivid Product Backlog refinement.

2012

When facilitating a Scrum Master training, the Sprint Goal is a topic that often causes a good discussion. Participants question the background, purpose and advantages of using a Sprint Goal.

Question from a budding Scrum Master, who is transitioning from a background as a traditional project manager:

Last year, I was facilitating a workshop on Agile and began the conversation, as usual with introductions. I asked each attendee what was the most important burning question that brought them to the workshop. One of the attendees replied

This week I facilitated a Scrum Master training in which we gathered the most common pitfalls of the Scrum events. It resulted in a nice overview with lots of recognizable pitfalls. In this blog post I'll share the results with you, completed with some ideas of my own. As you will see, it's only a brief description of the pitfalls.

This video captures the feedback from the students on the Professional Scrum Foundation workshop facilitated in India.

Scrum is a framework within which people can address complex problems, and productively and creatively develop products of the highest possible value. It's tool organizations can use to increase their agility.

This blog is the feedback on Scaled Professional Scrum using Nexus Framework and over 50 practices from the participants who attended my SPS workshop in India.

I am sure it would not come as a surprise, but our website (www.scrum.org) needs a major refresh.

The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring Scrum is understood and enacted. Scrum Masters do this by ensuring that the Scrum Team adheres to Scrum theory, practices, and rules.

Recently I wrote an article about the characteristics of a great Product Owner. It gave me the idea to do the same for the Development Team and Scrum Master.

Nexus and SPS have been online for a while. There are organisations around the world giving it a try and, of course, there are questions about how to set up and begin using Nexus in an organisation.

After downloading and studying the Nexus guide, you have questions about how the Nexus Integration Team actually works, so here are some keys to understand the role and its fit within the Nexus.

During a recent Product Owner training I gave the participants the assignment to complete the sentence "A great Product Owner..." The result was a nice overview of characteristics, skills and conditions necessary to fulfill this role in a great manner. In this blog post I'll share the result, completed with a short explanation and some more ideas of my own.

Last week I attended a workshop provided by Patrick Verheij, who is a board member of the Agile Consortium. Patrick explained the foundation of Agile and shared a characteristic of "Agile DNA" within organizations

What is a 'Product Owner'?

Recently I had a discussion with a developer about the amount of meetings we're having nowadays within organisations. Part of it was related to Scrum, "Since the introduction of Scrum all I do is attend meetings". And part of it wasn't, "Every week I need to discuss how to improve the productivity of my department... cancelling these type of meetings might be a good start..."