Skip to main content
Blog Post

Scrum Master Engagement Patterns: The Development Team

September 23, 2019
Last year, I ran a (non-representative) survey on how Scrum Masters are allocating their time when working with a single Scrum Team. Much to the surprise of many readers, the direct Scrum Master engagement with a single Scrum Team of average size and a typical 2-week Sprint turned out to be about 12 hours per week.
Blog Post

How do you Incorporate a Design Sprint in Scrum?

September 18, 2019
As part of the Scrum.org webinar “Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer - Martin Hinshelwood - Answering Your Most Pressing Scrum Questions” I was asked a number of questions. Since not only was I on the spot and live, I thought that I should answer each question that was asked again here, as well as those questions I did not get to.
Blog Post

Not All Feedback is Created Equal!

September 17, 2019
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.
Blog Post

Hiring the Right SM or PO

September 10, 2019
A customer I was working with asked me to help out with the intake process for recruiting a new Scrum Master and a new Product Owner. I asked them what they had so far. They provided a clear job description describing what they wanted to see from the candidates.
Blog Post

Scrum Accountability

September 3, 2019
‘Autonomy without accountability equals anarchy’ summarizes an essential design element of any agile organization. Without these checks and balances in place any aspiration to transform an organization is likely to fail.
Blog Post

Icebreakers: Absolute Waste Of Time Or Do They Add Value?

August 23, 2019
Icebreakers: are they a complete waste of time or do they add value? Some people absolutely love them, other absolute dislike them because they didn’t add any value. I believe a well-designed icebreaker can kickstart your session, can be fun and get people warmed-up for the rest of the session. Learn about how you can design icebreakers that add value and that grow connection between the participants and the purpose of a session.
Blog Post

Moving Motivators: What Really Motivates You?

August 15, 2019
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.
Blog Post

Team Building Mental Models

August 14, 2019
This post covers four team building mental models — or concepts — that have proven useful in understanding the context of creating agile teams: from Taylorism to Tuckman to Lencioni to Dan Pink.
Blog Post

Can a Developer Be the Scrum Master?

August 13, 2019
This is a common question in my Professional Scrum classes. It often comes up early when we are still learning the basics of the Scrum framework. And it comes up because people are already wearing two hats or are being told by their organizations that they will be.
Blog Post

Scrum First Principles

August 6, 2019
Popularized by Elon Musk, utilizing first principles thinking to solve problems in an innovative, creative, and less biased way has proven popular in the tech community.
Blog Post

Being Nice Isn't Always Nice

July 26, 2019
I recently performed an organizational agile assessment and learned a great deal about how they served their customer’s technology needs. We investigated their technical practices, processes to develop and release, but also dug deep into how the people worked together from the people side of things.
Blog Post

Scrum for Marketing

July 23, 2019
In this blog post, Dave West, CEO and Product Owner at Scrum.org, will explore the benefits of using Scrum for Marketing, dealing with pressures from every side of the business and using Scrum to address complexity.