Community Blog

Introducing Scrum to a team or an entire organization seems so easy. Stop doing what you are currently doing and replace it with Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide.  Implementing what is  described in a 13-page document shouldn’t be so hard, right? That thinking ends already when you hit  the first sentence in the Scrum Guide...

Would you be interested in increasing your chances of success following through on your New Year’s resolutions by 12%? Researchers at Stockholm University and Linköping University in Sweden analyzed resolutions made by 1,066 people and had some fascinating results that might impact not only your New Year’s resolutions but decision-making in general.

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.

Professional Agile Leadership – Evidence-Based Management (PAL-EBM) is the newest course in the Scrum.org portfolio. To prepare the launch and our trainer community for this one-day workshop, we ran several train-the-trainer events. I enjoyed participating in one of those, and I am glad to share my experience with you.

We've all had challenges with various stakeholders coming to us with a whole bunch of different information and wanting a whole bunch of different things. Who do I listen to? What’s most important?

A common trend among Scrum practitioners that learn about the Kata the first time is to build bridges to something familiar, in this case Scrum. We often hear similar questions such as "Is a Kata a Sprint?", or "How long is Kata?". For that reason, I have a put together a quick follow-up video to discuss the differences between Scrum and Kata.

The latest EBM (Evidence-Based Management) guide makes a reference to the Improvement Kata as a way to practice scientific thinking for value-based metrics. That Kata consists of 4 basic routines and was popularized for many years by Mike Rother.

Many years ago, when I began working with clients on full-scale agile transformations (beyond the team-level or product perspective), I realized that organizations would benefit from a practice that help them experiment toward more agility. As a result, I crossed paths with the world of Kata.

When (Patricia Kong - Product Owner of Enterprise Solutions at Scrum.org) taught me how to combine the chocolatey-goodness of Evidence Based Management with the hazelnutty-goodness of Hypothesis Driven Delivery, I was ecstatic! "AHA!", I says to myself.

I need your advice to solve a personal problem...

Gathering the metrics for Evidence-based Management in software organisations can be a strenuous task and I have a number of customers that are fretting on what to collect and from where.

Even though applying agile processes in that context is often a good and valuable idea, business agility is a much bigger term than that. It means how well an organization is equipped to react to market changes, merging customer needs or other factors that impact the business as a whole. 

Just to set the scene, I haven’t figured this out yet. I can tell you my story, in all its ugliness. It’s based on a real story, but it’s changed significantly from reality to protect the innocent. I hope you still find my account useful.

For executives and for change agents who deal with executives in large contexts ...

An executive is a person who owns the strategy or sets the direction of travel or sets justifications for spending. This exec could be the Product Owner for a chunk of the organization.

As a Agile coach, I refer to a few tools to help me think about where my Scrum teams should go next on their path to Agility.

A few weeks ago I headed out to the Scrum.org offices in Boston to participate in training to hone my skills as an Evidence-based Management Consultant.