Community Blog

30 years ago Nirvana released "Nevermind" with a boy diving into a pool reaching for a dollar bill. I am sure you are also very familiar with the iconic song Smells like Teen Spirit from that album.

A few years ago, I bumped into an ex-colleague of mine who was working with someone who I had also previously worked with - both of us were, or had been, a Scrum Master for this ex-colleague.

In this blog series I would like to address topics that relate to professional team coaching as well as Professional Scrum. In the course of becoming a Professional Team Coach, I noticed a lot of interesting topics for Scrum Masters who want to improve their coaching stance.

First of all, I'd like to note that models and terms I am using and discuss are not mine. They come from training and coaching sessions belonging to Vroemen from Teamchange. The connection I make to Scrum is my interpretation. 

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.

When working with a flow-based Kanban system there are a few statements that I would suggest most teams should bear in mind.

I have my own biases,  having seen co-located teams work very well and having struggled with “dislocated” teams, I often recommend my clients to reconsider “dislocated” teams. 

Software developers are mostly guys, happy to work by themselves at night in dark rooms. And they turn coffee, cola and pizza into code. Right?

High performing teams are the cornerstone for good Scrum. Reaching a high performant state requires time. In many cases, this time is not given to a team because the team composition changes frequently.

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?

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. 

Building (and hiring) a great team takes time and effort. Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” became a staple reading in an Agile community these days.

Most organizations are using Scrum, however, many of them feel like the agility of their organization has degraded, and they might be right! Often, using Scrum starts out as a way to improve development efforts coordinated within an IT division or department, but that is not the most effective organization structure to potentially get maximum benefit from Scrum.

This is a great exercise to learn more about your team; to find out more about each other’s concerns and dreams and, importantly, what you can do to support them. 

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.

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.

The Scrum Values are easy to remember, but it can be difficult to understand what they mean, how to apply them, and how to recognize them in teams and individuals. These values are essential to maximize the benefits of Scrum.  In this post, we look at how focus is essential in order to get anything meaningful done.

In a previous post describing challenges to creating a Done Increment, I identified impediments as one of those challenges.  More specifically, NOT removing t

If you’ve learned Scrum and tried to implement it in any large organization you’ve likely run into a few issues. Getting dedicated people on your team is hard. Building cross-functional teams is really hard.

 

Where do you spend your days in the workplace? Are you living in the Scrum-oriented trenches of your organization, like the vast majority of us?

Have you ever seen a Sprint Backlog that can be reused across Sprints? I have!

I’ve been witness to the start of hundreds of teams and projects. There’s a point at which, during the launch of a new team even before the first Sprint, I can tell with fair certainty whether the team will be successful or not.

I am a Scrum Trainer with Scrum.org.  I work with lots of organizations to help them become more agile.  I see a lot of bad Scrum.  More than my fair share.  Sometimes I see so much bad Scrum that it makes me question why I do this.  This post is my at

A common challenge for businesses developing new products is having a coherent and universal understanding of what the value proposition for the organisation is.