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I remember going on a PRINCE2 course a few years ago, and trying to determine how this celebrated stage-gated framework might be applied to an agile mode of delivery. I was employed in the UK public sector at the time, and I had come to know how instrumental "PRINCE2 compliance" can be to the striking of a defensive organizational posture. When all eventually fails you must be able to show that you followed appropriate procedure.

In this blog, PSTs Sjoerd Kranendonk & Wilbert Seele explain how to achieve more and risk less by being a less visible Product Owner. In the Scrum Guide the following is written about the role of the PO: "The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the Development Team."

One of the reasons Scrum allows opportunistic discovery is due to its short and fast feedback loops. With the aim to build a high-performing Team and to get the best potential out of each individual and to help them be successful, Agile Coach needs to provide straight feedback to them. But giving straight feedback is a daunting task especially since we are dealing with human emotions. In general, just the utterance of the statement, “I would like to give you feedback” sends the heart racing for a lot of people.

If you give a developer a verbal warning for surfing social media all day, you are crushing their autonomy. Insisting on core hours of 10am-4pm violates self-organisation. Personal development plans are so PRINCE II. Right? Well, maybe. On the other hand, having someone relatively experienced and influential on your side, to help shape your career and keep you off the annual redundancies list might actually be quite useful.

In this blog post we've shared our ideas on "Your Scrum Master Journey" and the first steps we've made at a Dutch customer.This week Christiaan Verwijs and I facilitated a workshop at a Dutch customer in which Scrum Masters could provide a pitch for participating in "Your Scrum Master Journey".

Last year, Stefan Wolpers and Age of Product conducted a Scrum Master Salary Survey of the agile community. The effort resulted in the Scrum Master Salary Report 2017. This year Scrum.org will be joining this survey effort with Stefan Wolpers and Age of Product, with the goal of collecting data from more participants on a global scale to help increase participation and gather new insights.

Being

In the "Scrum from the trenches" blog post series I like to address topics that I encounter in practicing Scrum in the real world, with real teams. Sharing where theory comes into practice, what challenges teams encounter along the way and ways to help Scrum practitioners use the power of empiricism to overcome these challenges.

Over the years, the tools we use to develop and deploy applications are significantly more robust, and most companies are working to become more efficient with their processes. But what is the next step toward improvement in software development? New expectations.

As a Product Owner, there is nothing more frustrating than having to use valuable development time to deal with technical debt. Like death and taxes, it’s just never a good time when those lurking defects decide to unravel.

Have you ever been in a situation where someone is talking to you and when they ask a question like, “What do you think?” you realize that you were zoned out?

 

In this blog post we’ll share the string of Liberating Structures we used at a Retrospective for a rapidly growing startup.

One of the most common questions I am asked in my Professional Scrum Master (PSM) courses and in coaching engagements is: How do we build trust?

When coaching for organizations, I

As an Agile Coa

“Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong.

As an Agile Coach

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.

An organization with a diversity of gender, race, sexuality, and disability make fuller products and services.

In my Scrum Master training courses, I get a lot of questions about the workload of a Scrum Master. One question I hear frequently is this: Is the Scrum Master role a full-time job?

I would like to discuss Scrum and XP because I often get a question "When should I use Scrum or XP?" from people in the community.

We regularly work with teams that see the daily scrum as irrelevant, disruptive, and boring. They are often right. Here are three common anti-patterns and three potential solutions.

It’s been so exciting to hear so much positive feedback and interest in the new Scrum.org Kanban for Scrum Teams guide and the accompa

Working as a Scrum Master I asked myself... "How do I know if my team are demonstrating the Scrum Values? What can I use to show their current state?"

In this series, I want to Introduce some helpful tips for Scrum Masters on “Systems Thinking” - a diagnostic Tool and a disciplined approach for examining problems more completely and accurately before acting.  Lights on! Camera !   

I’m lucky enough to work with different teams on a regular basis. In some cases, these teams have been doing scrum for years. These teams have become highly proficient when it comes to the events in Scrum.

This is second part in the series of tools that I have found useful in my role as Agile Coach – Timeboxing.

By Jochen (Joe) Krebs (jkrebs@incrementor.com) and Nils Oud (noud@incrementor.com)  Suddenly I find myself giving genuine compliments to students who I found troublesome and ill-motivated in the old situation

You’ve implemented Agile into your organization and hired professionals with Agile experience on their résumé to back it up. Yet, something is still not right. The gains that Agile promised don’t seem to be coming to fruition. Delivery times aren’t faster than they were before.

Work is complex, and to honour the empirical approach is harder. It requires trust, in order to be transparent. To enable the responsiveness that agile promises there needs to be discipline and rigour.

Simon Sinek in his book „Start With Why“ talks about the importance of knowing why we are doing things before we think about what and how to do it.

As an Agile Coach, you frequently encounter situations which demand quick thinking to get things moving in the right direction. Over time I have found few techniques which come out handy and always keep these in my playbook in case need arise. This is first part in the series of tools that I have found useful in my role as Agile Coach

Try organizing a party in a “Yes, but…” atmosphere. The result is probably a zillion obstacles identified, but no party.

TRIZ is a facilitation technique to stop counterproductive activities and make space for innovation.

By Jochen Krebs (jkrebs@incrementor.com) and Nils Oud (noud@incrementor.com)  The most timid girl in the class confided me (as did several other students):

In everything we do there should be some value - some importance in what we do. If not, then why do it?

"The most important metrics are: did we execute the way in which we said we would, and did we deliver the value to the business that we had promised?" - Jamie S. Miller

Chris is a true example of an new type of leader. Not because he is a great speaker, nor because he has a big vision or has world changing ideas. Just because of one seemingly simple skill. A skill which is very hard to master. He recognizes the defining moments when he has to live the ambition. He knows when he has to lead his people by entering the 'battle' first. Let me tell you why.

Is it possible to use Scrum with Kanban? After a year of exploring the idea and working out the details, our answer is yes. Get ready to make your team stronger and more effective.

Today we announced a new class Professional Scrum With Kanban. This class helps teams practicing Scrum to apply the practices of Kanban without breaking Scrum. It shows how visualization and flow are great partners in delivering Done software and how Scrum with Kanban helps teams become more professional.

GameStorm is a technique for brainstorming developed by Bart Hufen from BrandNewGame. It uses gamification to identify areas for improvement and to make their impact transparent. We have adapted it for use in Sprint Retrospectives to support continuous improvement in teams.

We are going  towards "Agile" Transformation, One of our goals is to increase velocities across all our teams by X% , H

Scaling is a popular strategy these days: scaling innovation, scaling agile, scaling whole organizations. But scaling can easily undermine agile principles like focus and minimal viable product, and the abilities to deliver, learn quickly, and pivot decisively when required.

Un Scrum Master que le dice al equipo de desarrollo y al Product Owner que según alguna experiencia cada miembro del equipo de desarrollo solo puede desarrollar...

The Scrum Master role is a new one and often mis-understood by teams and organizations who are Implementing Scrum. When I work with organizations often I see Scrum Masters role is not taken very seriously,

I have recently been helping a new Scrum team get started with the framework and helping them to set themselves up with the best chance of being successful with Scrum.

In this post, we address the myth that the Sprint Review is primarily an opportunity to ‘demo’ the increment to stakeholders. Although a demo certainly can be part of a Sprint Review, it fails to capture what the Sprint Review is actually about...

Being a professional with a disability is like working two careers:  The one I get compensation for - leading organizations to adapt continuous change. The other career - managing an organization of personal support workers to allow me to have a full life. 

A friend sent me an e-mail, asking me to summarize Nexus and the Scaled Professional Scrum class. Here's the gist of what I sent in return.