Community Blog

Some years ago, I was working with a team developing a new product at a technology company.  The team was concerned that their Time to Market (T2M) was too slow, and they believed that they would be able to improve it by automating their build-and-test process. Automating any manual process is usually a good investment to improve T2M, but I suggested that we should first look at their overall T2M using a very simplified value stream map to understand where they were spending their time. 

Recently I had an epiphany, realising that most of my writing has been for Product Owners and how to they should interact with the environment, but what about how to interact with Product Owners? What are some characteristics and traits you may encounter as a stakeholder, manager or leader of a Product Owner.

Forget all these Agile Maturity Scans which are often treated as management reports and too focussed on the mechanical side of "do these things and the maturity goes up". Change itself should be considered an empirical journey with no end state. It’s always on the move, so start with making your transformation brutally transparent.

How to Fail as an Agile Coach in Scrum by Scrum.org trainer Chee-Hong Hsia.  ​​​​​​​Helping organisations in their Agile journey sustainably while respecting the three Scrum accountabilities. A must-read if you're a dedicated Agile Coach or working with Agile Coaches in your organisation where Scrum is being adopted.

This is the third and final video in the series about responsibility.

In this second video in the series about responsibility, Professional Scrum Trainer Mark Wavle explores the leader's role in unwrecking responsibility issues. Topics covered:

Extremes of responsibility are wreckers of teams and leaders. In this Unstuck Leadership Moment, Mark explores two unhelpful and unhealthy responsibility stances.

In this blog post, PST David Sabine shares a real life story focused around transparency.

In this Unstuck Careers Leadership Moment, PST Mark Wavle explores the power of building a sense of ownership with the people we lead. Three primary questions are explored:

TL-TR La réussite de l’entreprise est directement liée la satisfaction des utilisateurs aujourd’hui mais aussi dans la durée.

In this Unstuck Careers Leadership Moment, PST Mark Wavle explores one of the challenges that many servant leaders face.

It's time to look at the Scrum Events

In this Unstuck Careers Leadership Moment, PST Mark Wavle explores the question, "How do I help an unmotivated team?"

We started the Scrum Guide for Leaders series with a discussion of what Scrum means for you as a Leader. Next, we discussed the conditions where Scrum's Empiricism, Self-Management, and Continuous Improvement can thrive. We then explored some concrete examples of how adopting the Scrum Values as a Leader can help you create these conditions.

As mentioned earlier, Scrum is founded on empiricism - transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Empiricism is only possible in certain cultures and contexts. Leaders have the role of creating and nurturing the culture and shaping the context.

In this Unstuck Careers Leadership Moment, PST Mark Wavle explores the question, "How do I know if my measures are the best ones?"

If you’re leading Scrum Teams or generally are a leader in an organization that’s leveraging Scrum?

When we are confident that we know everything, certain that our perspective is correct and our plan is good, we miss things. Sometimes these things are critical.

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?

There are loads of blog posts, articles and podcasts about agile - what it should be, what it should do, how it should look? The problem is that a lot of what’s out there is hypothetical and not based on field experience.

This blog post discusses how the Circles of Improvement from the book by Stephen R. Covey: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, work in Scrum.

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.

I had a leadership nightmare. It was as if most of the directors I have heard and met so far gathered and accompanied me….

We’ve already discussed the importance of decentralised command and decision-making in an earlier blog, outlining how managers need to be able to train, mentor and teach their teams.

The term organizational agility is everywhere these days, but what does it really mean? Can we even define it at all? Deepen your understanding of the manifesto and why it is essential to implementing healthy agile that delivers meaningful value.

Have you ever noticed people keep talking about things, but they've not aligned with what their words mean? I have seen agility measured as the number of "agile teams" and the "number of training attendees" more often than I like to admit.

In this post, I will explain the difference between creative and reactive modes of operating, offer some examples of how this shows up in our teams and beyond, as well as some tips for cultivating your ability to stay creative.

In this blog post, Joshua Partogi talks about the meaning of true leadership of the Scrum Master.

The Agile Culture gap is the nr. 1 cause for immature Agile implementations. You should read this blog if you want to understand how culture affects Agile transformation.

For many people, the traditional project management methodologies (see PMI / PRINCE2) are the root of the problems that birthed Waterfall. I assert that this is the tip of the iceberg.

Se você é ou busca ser um Líder Ágil, você precisa conhecer essa técnica de como deixar seu time mais ágil.

Sempre recebo perguntas do tipo: O que é um Líder Ágil? Preciso me tornar um? O que ganho com isso? Resolvi então escrever esse artigo, para tentar ajudar a comunidade.

You certainly know that COVID-19 has caused a great deal of loss. We’ve lost lives and have had a tremendous shift in our daily behavior.

In Leslie Morse's first Scrum.org blog post she explores the intersection of professional coaching and agile coaching, and the opportunity we have as agilists to overcome the limitations of an industrialized mindset and create space for ushering in the future of work.

There is no such thing as an Agile Transformation, Digital Transformation, DevOps Transformation, or any of the Whatever Transformation that you can think of or have been sold. You can’t buy agility, and you certainly can’t install it. There is no end state, no optimal outcome, No best practices. We are no longer factory workers.

How this popular and empowering liberating structure can be used for retrospectives and increasing organizational agility. But can you Open Space be used in a virtual set-up?

Executives: there are many reasons for agility. You already know this.

The Agile Transformation Kata is for example such a practice that reinforces an agile mindset during an agile transformation, and through many reflection cycles allows to adapt to new emerging needs, like COVID-19.

The urgency of having the right type of conversation, especially today in a remote setting, has significantly increased overnight. This blog provides a perspective on a particular type of conversation and my own “personal experiences”  that show we need them more than ever.

The terms "iterative" and "incremental" are used so frequently and naturally in the context of agile that their meaning is no longer challenged.

In this article, I want to clarify the need for agility in modern businesses and what agility in organisational design actually is.

In a series of blog posts, I want to share how you can use Systems Thinking to resolve complex problems.

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.