Community Blog

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.

In football, the team that wins is the one that gets the ball in the other team’s goal most times. Not the one that runs the most.

Many thanks to attendees at my PAL-E workshop in London on 26-27 October who reviewed & debugged my change story for "what is organizational agility?"

Do you always hear the same people speak up when you present a new idea or when you ask for feedback? You might be dealing with an important voice here. The voice of the system! A voice any leader should (learn to) listen to. If you don’t? It will never go away!

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.

Imagine for a moment what frequently asked questions around agile transformations look like. Which questions do you hear most often as it seems agile transformation has been a hot topic lately?

The core responsibility of the agile leader is creating the right context for the agile teams so they can thrive and self-manage. One of the characteristics of this context is all about ownership. In my book ‘Agile Leadership Toolkit’ I dedicate a whole part to this important topic.

Have you ever been curious about what really motivates the people you work with? What are they looking for in their role and in their work? If you can find an hour with your team, I recommend you to try the Moving Motivators practice (Management 3.0). Let's unpack how to prepare and run the exercise and end with some learnings.

This video is a presentation from Agile Week Riga titled, Iterating Toward Professional Scrum.

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

Overcome common transformation mistakes and enhance your agility.

This is the first part of a 2-part blog post series about dealing with very large Product Backlog items. Part 1 intends to focus on the Scrum Team, Part 2 will be released shortly after our Webinar on April 29th and will focus on the “Epic” challenges agile leaders are facing.

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.

As people become more empowered and capable of taking ownership of their process and executing on their decisions, the next area to focus is raisin

Now that we’ve covered the essentials of self-organization and intrinsic motivation, let’s dive into how you make decisions that enable and empower others.

Once you have started to create a strong foundation, the second action of an effective servant-leader is to empower and enable others.

I’ve had this ongoing discussion with a few of my colleagues who says that the term “agile leader” is an oxymoron - that the ideal organization is a bunch of Scrum Teams and not much else.

"An Agile Coach know more than just Scrum", said one consultant in a boardroom meeting, "he/she knows organisation dynamics, executive coaching and other Agile practices like Kanban and DevOps", he continued.

What can you do as a Leader to help your Scrum Teams to become mature? Discover a 5-level maturity pattern that you can use as a reference.

According to Forrester Research, 90% of Agile teams use Scrum.[1] One reason for this popularity is that Scrum is a simple framework that promotes transparenc

Do you ever influence or coach people?  How?  Do you use a gut feel approach or do you have coaching patterns that you use?  I have several coaching patterns that I step through when trying to influence people.

We talk about coaching a lot in the agile world. However, what we are actually expected to do is not usually about coaching.  We do other things. We teach.  We facilitate.  We advise. We solution.  We manage.  

Per a January 20th, 2017 article by Daniel Shapero, VP of Talent Solutions and Careers at LinkedIn, the role of Scrum Master is in high demand. It’s ranked number 10 on his list of most promising jobs of 2017.

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.

I was honored to participate in the Women in Agile panel discussion last week.

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

The Scrum framework thrives on empirical process control. The inspection of observable results gives us insights in what might be most valuable next, always acknowledging that the future is unwritten.

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

In a previous post describing challenges to creating a Done Increment, I identified a lack of team collaboration as one of those challenges.

In a previous post describing challenges to creating a Done Increment, I identified a lack of team ownership as one of those challenges.

EMBARRASSING CONFESSION

UNFLATTERING WISDOM OF HIND SIGHT

In the Professional Scrum Product Owner course, we teach that high performing Product Owners are entrepreneurial. They not only act with the business in mind, they have the authority to make important decisions. What should we do now versus later?

In the Professional Scrum Product Owner course, we teach that high performing Product Owners are entrepreneurial. They not only act with the business in mind, they have the authority to make important decisions. What should we do now versus later?

 

You hear a lot in Agile circles these days about the ‘declining need for managers.’ We may not need the managers of yesterday but, make no mistake, we certainly need the leaders of tomorrow.

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.

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.

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

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

I’ve been working in software for a long time, and for most of that time I’ve been trying to find better ways of delivering working software.

If this post resonates with you, please consider spreading the message so we can educate and inspire others.

If this post resonates with you, please consider spreading the message so we can educate and inspire others.

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 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.

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.