Community Blog

Velocity, as a metric used by some Scrum teams, is rife with trouble. David's concise article highlights a common pitfall.

If technical debt is the plague of our industry, why isn’t the Scrum Guide addressing the question of who is responsibly dealing with it?

Writing code is like finding your path through a dark forest. Behind each tree can lurk a monster, a treasure or a pit. Or there is no path at all.

Scrum cumplió 21 años en 2016. Ya tiene edad legal para comprar alcohol en la mayoría de estados americanos. Y durante este tiempo ha crecido mucho. Con muchos cambios.

A few months ago we looked at how teams can optimize flow across the Sprint boundary, a technique which is founded on their ability to make limited and sustainable commitments.

Critical Uncertainties is a powerful Liberating Structure helping groups develop strategies for dealing with plausible yet unpredictable futures. Strategy-making is an essential part of successful software-/product delivery with Scrum. With Critical Uncertainties, teams have an interaction pattern at hand that can support them create resilient strategies.

We've all seen it. The Scrum Team that goes through the motions, implements all the mechanics of Scrum, and still when we look at what's going on it doesn't feel right.

During a recent meetup of The Liberators Network, we got together with 30 enthusiastic Scrum Masters.

"I am a project manager.  What is my role now that we are moving to Scrum?”

A personal story of what encouraged a Developer Culture at NowOnline. And why Scrum really doesn't work without it.

I keep hearing leaders say they’re struggling to manage their organizations through change. They’ve had trouble getting their organization to adopt agile. They’re finding it challenging to find the right talent. They’re struggling to establish the right level of transparency.

If you’re new to Scrum and want to get the most out of a team of under-performers, you should try Scrum!!

An organization’s ability to rapidly and deliberately respond to changing demand, while controlling risk helps ascertain its Agility.

The following 5 tips to increase the Emotional Intelligence of a Product Owner as inspired from Scott Watson’s work, an emotional intelligence speaker and trainer.

In the previous videos, I introduced the Creative reframing technique and discussed 2 Strategies for its practical use. In this final video, I will discuss several activities that agile coaches can use with their teams or clients to make use of the Creative reframing technique.

Your organization has been disturbed by late launches in its last few new products, and now management has charged you with “getting to the bottom of the problem.”

As a Scrum Master, I know that serving Development Team, Product Owner and Organization to adopt Scrum is not easy.

When a lot of organizations are transitioning from the way they used to work to a more cross-functional, agile squad way of working, they usually look for scaling frameworks to help them do it.

In the previous video, I spoke about the creative reframing technique, that coaches could use as a facilitation or professional coaching tool.

In this post I'd like to discuss "Empathy - why it is important in teams and what you can do if you struggle with it". First, we all know what the role of the Scrum Master is, right?

Sanjay Saini, owner of Agile WOW("Agile Ways of Working"), kindly invited me, as an independent Scrum Caretaker, to open and close the event. I hope many Scrum practitioners register at scrumdayindia.org and join the event. In the end, only eager attendants can turn events into insightful experiences!

Creative reframing is an excellent facilitation and professional coaching technique that allows you to explore problems from various, sometimes unusual and unexpected angles.

Saying no is an integral part of any Product Owner's job. In this short video, I explore the reasons why we might be saying yes when no is a more appropriate answer (these reasons are from a great book by Dominica DeGrandis Make Work Visible) and how to say No when you need to.

My mother was the first person who showed me unconditional love. My mother gave me direction and supported me along whatever journey or passion I was chasing. She picked me up when I fell. Celebrated with me in all my accomplishments.

Changing the way we work is extremely difficult — we all know this. It requires us to find novel solutions to wicked challenges, to deal with cultural baggage (‘the way we do things here’) and to bring along the people needed to make a change successful.

It was 8:59 am on Monday. It was another week which I thought was going to be amazing. Last week our company just closed another round of investment. The company is currently strategizing to scale agility throughout the company.

Overcome common transformation mistakes and enhance your agility.

Companies who build hardware often ask if it’s possible to benefit from Scrum. In order to answer this question, I need to first introduce you to my friend Risk.

It is not against the rules of Scrum Framework for a person taking the Scrum Master role also be a member of the Development Team. I've been there. In this post I intend to highlight some of the challenges in form of conflicts of interests that prevents a Scrum Master to coach effectively while being a Development Team member.

When organizations begin their journey toward agility, they think the business outcomes will become instantaneous. They expect the initial decision to lead to immediate success.

The Scrum Master is often expected to facilitate and animate every Scrum events. But, according to the Scrum Guide, the role of the Scrum Master regarding the different events is to ensure that the event takes place and that attendants understand its purpose.

This article provides five examples of how Liberating Structures are valuable for Scrum Masters.

A Sprint Goal is an objective set for the Sprint that can be met through the implementation of Product Backlog (cit. Scrum Guide). Have you clearly defined a Sprint Goal at the end of your Sprint Planning? Is this Sprint Goal understandable and transparent to everyone? Is it defined in a way that provides guidance and flexibility to the Development Team? The aim of this article is to raise awareness on the importance of having a Sprint Goal defined and to provide some suggestions on how to create one.

A paradox is something that is seemlingly absurd but really true. When I experience complexity and uncertainty, I find comfort and power in paradox. It opens up creativity, possibility, and collaboration. Let's take a look at 4 paradoxes we need to navigate in the agile world and beyond.

Scrum Masters are often understood mostly as “team coaches”. Yet, their role is vastly more important. The Scrum Guide emphasizes that Scrum Masters are responsible for leading and coaching organizations in the adoption of Scrum and causing change that increases the productivity of the Scrum Team.

A couple of years ago I blogged on Innovation Accounting in Scrum, and the bringing of empiricism to Product Ownership. On Tuesday I gave a presentation on this topic to the Agile Northants UK meetup. There was a pretty good Q&A afterwards.

I collected lots of feedback from different students around Europe that attended my Professional Scrum Developer Training. Here some photos to give you an idea...

Many organizations struggle in their implementation of Agile and/or their evolution of agile once they start their journey. They use practices, people, and technology to find a way to overcome their disability of delivering value to market too slowly.

Today’s reveal is a very important for us as we have facilitated Open Space events for more than 10 years with clients and in our annual conferences for example in Munich or Amsterdam and New York City.

In your organization, some problems seem to recur, they are difficult to fix using the tools, tricks and practices you developed over the years as a manager. Maybe this problem is different and the perspective of an expert-outsider might help?

In this article I will stress again the utmost importance of understanding the context of the organization as a strategy to achieve a possible, evolutionary and deep application of Scrum within organizations.

I always assume that the people I work with are professionals - and not children. This is why I don’t like maturity models in whatever shape or form. And we’ve got a lot of those in our industry.

Ever wonder what a Scrum Master does all day? If you’re new to the role of a Scrum Master, you might think you have to facilitate all the events, take notes and schedule outlook meetings. Turns out you don’t have to do any of that!

Quite a few teams in organizations implementing Scrum depict their frustration in statements like “Scrum is driving us crazy!”, “It’s too chaotic!”

Last week, I had a long discussion with my friends about how to scale up the Scrum Team from the startup product. That was an interesting topic and we had many things to discuss. Some of my friends raised some interesting questions.

Leadership means having the responsibility to enable an environment that harnesses the full intellectual talent of an organization. We hire a bunch of top diverse talent but limit them by unintentionally having them work only within their part or silo of a large organization.

One of the biggest misconceptions of agile is that it focuses on speed. How fast can we deliver? How fast can we deliver on this project/product?

The comparison between Kanban and Scrum obviously comes up often when we're talking to teams, especially in the context of Professional Scrum with Kanban. While they are more similar than many practitioners realize, one key difference is the perspective on Teams. 

Teams are becoming the fundamental organizational entity, individual responsibility is being replaced by that of the team. But responsibility does not come about all by itself.

I was working with various groups over the last year and noticed some commonalities in the problems they faced. In this blog I want to share some common collaboration problems and solutions I experimented with.