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Hey everyone. How has your week been going? We are entering summer here in Perth. And in today's vlog, I'd like to share with you how to evaluate the Scrum Master's performance.

Teams often run through the motions of Scrum and get very hung up on story points, velocity, committed percentages and as a result struggle to deliver value. But what I’ll share today is what unlocks the value of Scrum;

Product Owners have a tough job. I was in a Sprint Review recently where the Scrum Team had some stakeholders talking about an idea they thought was excellent. So, like any studious Product Owner, they immediately typed up the idea and added it to their Product Backlog.

Why is it that when the going gets tough, “agile” gets the blame? There is so much online bashing of [insert random agile framework or method] going on, that it made me wonder if there is a pattern behind it. I believe there is.

“We want to be more agile in our delivery.” “We need to build up our teams.” “How can we do Scrum well?” Companies are asking themselves these questions every day and looking in various places for the answers.

The traditional approach of RFI – RFP – Review – LOI is neither lean or agile. The Lean Agile Procurement approach reduces the sourcing cycle time to days, with collaborative clarification of the product with prospective partners while reducing the risk of a poor partner and company evaluation.

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.

One of the regular listeners, Daniel Lachmann-Nishibane, appeared on www.agile.fm after he has participated in one of my recent Professional Agile Leadership (PAL-E) certification courses in Munich Germany.

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.

The purpose of Scrum is to create a potentially releasable Done Product Increment, in order to realize business value. Many teams struggle in improving their Definition of Done. The technique described here allows for greater transparency on what the Definition of Done is, and what the next steps are.

Most organizations are using Scrum, however, many of them feel like the agility of their organization has degraded, and they might be right! Often, using Scrum starts out as a way to improve development efforts coordinated within an IT division or department, but that is not the most effective organization structure to potentially get maximum benefit from Scrum.

I first met Sally,and then later Francis her husband, at a local user group - Agile in Leeds, where Sally delivered a fantastic 10 minute talk on how she implemented Scrum to help Francis with ADHD. 

Getting your thoughts down on paper is a great way to reflect on and sort out the complicated aspects of our industry. The three Vs of Product Ownership is an example of this and is a major theme of our book — and the topic of this post.

Bottom line - Toyota Improvement and Coaching Kata is the perfect partner for flow-based retrospectives.

The purpose of Scrum is to deliver Increments of releasable functionality. So at each Sprint Review, a “Done” Increment is required to make transparent the progress made by the team.

Your team has been trained and coached to deliver new chunks of software in a short time frame. Those using Scrum will be able to deliver in a Sprint. Those using Kanban will deliver as soon as their small feature is done.

This is a very common myth, frequent on people used to develop software only within the context of a closed scope (traditional project).

People always as ask me if agile is just for software. Saying agile is just about software is like saying software is just about science. Initially, computer science was about replacing manual processes. Now, it’s about creating human experiences.

THE (MIXED) BLESSING OF NEXTGEN REWRITES  About 10 years ago, I experienced the mixed blessing of being part of yet another nextgen rewrite project.

Clients and training attendees ask me "Can you use Scrum for something else than software?”. What they usually mean is building some other products or organizing team’s work. Let’s explore a more exotic idea.

IMAGINE Imagine you have just been asked to build an Agility Enablement Organization for your company. Sounds like fun, but there are some constraints you need to work within or around…

NEW YEAR RESOLUTION

Because there's no easy way in telling you this, I'll just share it straight away... Next week I'll be setting up a Jira environment for the product teams I'm coaching...

Empiricism means working in a fact-based, experience-based, and evidence-based manner.

Empiricism means working in a fact-based, experience-based, and evidence-based manner.

EMBARRASSING CONFESSION

UNFLATTERING WISDOM OF HIND SIGHT

SCRUM IS NOT THE END. IT IS A MEANS TO THE END… The end goal of empirically building strong, self-organizing Scrum Teams to help your business…

Organizations who don’t understand why they want to become Agile also often take the wrong path to get there. Agility requires empowering teams and helping them make decisions on their own, learning from their experiences as they go.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at how organizations are using DevOps to improve their software delivery cycle time, their ability to innovate, and their ability to improve quality.

Agile approaches, including Scrum, are empirical approaches to delivering software and business value.

Throughout the Agile Alliance 2016 conference, I was struck by a recurring feeling that many people don’t understand what the Sprint Review is.

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.

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

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

What is a 'Product Owner'?

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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.

GREAT DALLAS ICE STORM OF 2013  

This blog is the sequel to my earlier blog - Ent

WALT'S CHALLENGE   

In Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen’s book Great by Choice, a comparison is made between two expeditions to Antarctica in 1911. One of the expeditions mentioned is that of Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who was first to step on the South Pole.

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

Scrum brings agility to and creates Agile organizations through the implementation of empirical process control, the process of frequent inspection and adaptation.

An analogy I can think of is... I want my dart to hit the dart board, and not necessarily the bull's eye.... as it calls for a lot of details which apparently is missing during estimation.

An analogy I can think of is... I want my dart to hit the dart board, and not necessarily the bull's eye.... as it calls for a lot of details which apparently is missing during estimation.

EMBARRASSING DISCOVERY