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..."

 

Comme on l'a vu durant la présentation, l'Agilité a des impacts à tous les niveaux et touche même les bases de données. Pour être capable de travailler efficacement dans un contexte Agile, le DBA doit ajuster sa manière de travailler autant en conception, que durant la réalisation ainsi qu'au moment de déployer l'application

At some occasions we stop to look back. We see the trail we left behind, the bigger picture, the impact we made. Small or big. We think of the impact we hoped to make, small or big.

This is a list of 10 questions a Scrum Master may ask a Product Owner, in order to help coach them in their role.

This blog post talks about the issues caused by unlimited budgets.

According to the Scrum guide, sprint retrospectives are "an opportunity for the Scrum Team to inspect itself and create a plan for improvements to be enacted during the next Sprint."

Inspiring Lessons From the Life Journey of Mr. Warrick Dunn   __________    

It is my favorite time of the year - Fall, the season of thanks, reflection and resolutions.

Recently I read the book 'The People's Scrum' by Tobias Mayer. In this book he spends a chapter on describing the differences between project culture and team culture. To me, the given examples of both types of culture are highly recognizable and I can easily extend and complement the list of examples with my own experiences.

Where do you spend your days in the workplace? Are you living in the Scrum-oriented trenches of your organization, like the vast majority of us?

​​​​​​​In my previous blog post 'The 9 Smells of an Organization' I described the difference between the terms commitment and forecast. This resulted in an intriguing discussion that triggered me to elaborate some more on this topic and share the highlights of this conversation.

Are you considered an authoritative "leader" in your organization? Do you spend your day at the top of the tower or in the trenches?

A few months ago I first saw the brilliant speech 'The Smell of the Place' by Prof. Sumantra Ghoshal. It's about corporate environments and the faults of management in creating a positive work place.

A lot of people talk about scaling Agile. It’s all the rage nowadays. Everyone wants to scale Agile. But what does that actually mean? What does it imply? What are the underlying assumptions?

When Scrum is introduced in a company, most of the time, the development team embraces it with lots of enthusiasm.

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.

The subject of this blog post might seem unusual. But having worked with multiple development teams, I've gained some experience with team members having (symptoms) of Asperger's. I mostly contributed to the team as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach.

Before I begin, I have to make sure you’re not fixed on a misconception. The Daily Scrum is not a status meeting, nor a report back to the team. It’s a planning event.

In this blog, an overview of the professional QA as a quality coach for a cross-functional team is discussed.

When do you use Nexus?

The story of the Wygat Weed Whacker goes back many years – to the time we bought our first home in the beautiful town of Allen, TX.

 

A lack of defined engineering practices, standards and tooling is an often observed problem in software development, regardless of whether Scrum is used.

 

This blog post is about a little box. A little transparent box. The box contained only one sticky note. A sticky note with a milestone.

Although the Daily Scrum seems to be a simple and straightforward event, I still encounter a lot of teams struggling with it. In this blog post, I'll share my tips & tactics.

Update: after receiving some valuable feedback, I've added the third lesson learned. 

Have you ever seen a Sprint Backlog that can be reused across Sprints? I have!

The concept of user stories is a well-known tool for describing requirements. In a simple format, it captures the ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘why’ of a requirement.

GREAT DALLAS ICE STORM OF 2013  

This blog is the sequel to my earlier blog - Ent

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.

WALT'S CHALLENGE   

The Scrum Guide begins the description of the role of the Product Owner as follows:

There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love...

A pair of recent findings from the Standish Group confirm the astonishing success and cost savings of Agile approaches over waterfall.

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.

This is the final post in a three part series. Please like, share,and/or comment.

This is the second post in a three part series. Please like, share and commentand I’ll be sure to update you when the next post in the series comes out.

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.

Through my years of trial and error,  I have learned there is no one size fits all solution to transitioning organizations to agile...context is king!

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.

VersionOne does an annual "State of Agile Development" survey and publishes the results for the cost of your email address.  Thanks VersionOne!