Most organisations do not fail at agility because of their teams. They fail because their operating model quietly pulls them back to the Industrial assumptions they are trying to escape. The structures, metrics and leadership habits designed for stable, predictable work remain in place, no matter how much Agile language is adopted. Without disciplined operating-model hygiene, the organisation regresses, often without noticing, and agility becomes theatre rather than capability. This article examines why that hygiene is so hard, what it demands of leaders and how Scrum helps expose the work that must be done.

Portfolio management makes sure that money and people actually follow strategy, not just PowerPoint slides. When strategy and spending are misaligned, too many initiatives run in parallel, good ideas wait for funding, bad ideas keep going, and coordination overload quietly increases cost, risk and complexity. In CAO, the organisation is structured into product groups (with value areas), commodity platforms, and go-to-market units. Portfolio management decides how investment flows across these three: which product groups and value areas to grow or shrink, and which platforms to build, extend or retire—managed via a global portfolio, product group portfolios and platform portfolios. The model shifts focus from approving small projects to making a few clear strategic bets. With clear KPIs, loosely coupled product groups and shared platforms, leaders get sharper accountability, faster change, and better control of cost and complexity—especially when global portfolios are framed as product–market plays that align product, platform capacity and commercial focus around the same bets.

A Agilidade não morreu - mas sua aplicação superficial mostrou limites claros. Neste artigo, exploro como os Product Operating Models surgem para conectar estratégia, cultura, estrutura e operação, e como o Agile Product Operating Model(APOM), da Scrum.org, oferece uma arquitetura prática para escalar agilidade com evidencias, valor e contexto.

Scrum’s events are called formal for a reason. It’s not about rigidity—it’s about visibility and shared responsibility. Formal events ensure everyone inspects, adapts, and learns together. Skip them, and you lose transparency, alignment, and trust.

Government has frameworks and governance, but lacks the essential capability that ties strategy to delivery: product leadership. Without clear ownership, outcome focus, or strategic authority, teams default to reactive project behaviour. Professionalising product leadership would create coherent direction, evidence-based decisions, and stable teams able to deliver meaningful, user-centred outcomes.

This blog post addresses the confusion around the Product Owner accountability in Scrum. It clarifies that a Product Owner is a set of accountabilities, not just a job title, and that their core purpose is to maximize the value of the product delivered by the Scrum Team. Ultimately, Product Ownership is a significant opportunity to shape value and provide clarity, focus, and understanding, even in complex product environments.

Many leaders assume that psychological safety only thrives in democratic workplaces where challenging a manager is socially acceptable. But research shows something far more interesting. Psychological safety is not a democratic phenomenon. It is a human one. People everywhere want to prevent mistakes, ask for help, and contribute ideas. The difference lies not in the need, but the way that safety is expressed.

Agile helps teams deliver value sooner, reduce risk faster, and increase transparency while maintaining the ability to change direction quickly based on feedback and lessons learned. But one of the most powerful — and least discussed — benefits of Agile is that it exposes the problems that have been holding us back all along.

In this blog post, I summarized the DORA Report 2025. This year, their main focus was on AI. See the takeaways of the repost.

In diesem Artikel beschreibt PST Simon Flossmann, was er lieber früher über Scrum Masterei gewusst hätte.

What Agile practitioners knew about AI adoption - and why traditional change management was solving yesterday's problem

If your organization is putting in the effort but still feels misaligned, overwhelmed, or stuck in old patterns, the problem isn’t your process. It’s a missing set of core competencies. This article explores the three interconnected capabilities that help leaders and teams move from chaos to clarity. Together, they create the conditions for better decisions, stronger collaboration, and real adaptive capacity.

A breath of fresh air! I recently attended a meetup in Calgary and was happily surprised to hear a presentation about cutting-edge software development.

Most organisations are still run as if the world were predictable, even while their markets move faster than their governance, funding, and delivery can cope. This article contrasts the Industrial Operating Model with an Agile Product Operating Model, and shows how Scrum, Kanban, and Evidence-Based Management give leaders the enabling constraints to redesign their system of work for learning, flow, and genuine product outcomes rather than managed activity.

Skipping events? Trimming “non-essential” parts of Scrum? You’re not optimizing—you’re weakening the framework. Learn why Scrum’s value emerges only when its events and accountabilities are combined into one rhythm.

Ihre agilen Events scheitern nicht, weil den Menschen die erforderliche Ausbildung fehlt. Sie scheitern, weil Ihr Unternehmen die Rituale übernommen hat, aber gleichzeitig die Transparenz, das Vertrauen und die Anpassungsfähigkeit ignoriert hat, die für deren Erfolg unerlässlich sind.

Government delivery often fails before teams even begin, because procurement locks in assumptions and restricts flexibility. Shifting procurement left and adopting Lean-Agile Procurement creates faster, collaborative, outcome-driven contracts. By building commercial capability and integrating procurement into discovery, departments can finally buy learning, reduce risk, and enable true agility.

The Sprint Review is more than just a demo - it is a two-way communication to request feedback and learn from it.

I am often asked whether a Developer can support more than one Scrum Team. The answer is yes, but it's not ideal. Being on multiple teams means attending two (or more!) Sprint Plannings, two Sprint Reviews, two Retrospectives, and two sets of refinements. Not to mention two Daily Scrums—every single day.

The Anatomy of a Product explores products as living systems, revealing how to diagnose and improve every part, from vision to delivery. Using metaphors, practical tools, and real-world stories, it helps product teams think clearly, collaborate better, and build healthier, more purposeful products.

In diesem Artikel erklärt PST Simon Flossmann, wie Scrum Master ihre Product Owner bei der Maximierung des Wertes unterstützen können.

The article explains that psychological safety does not promote repeated avoidable mistakes but instead fosters transparency, learning, and responsible professional behavior. It highlights that teams with high psychological safety are more likely to openly discuss errors, leading to meaningful improvements rather than hidden issues.

81% of Singapore businesses use Agile, but 57% say their teams don't understand it. Discover the real cost of bad Agile implementations and how to spot the warning signs before it's too late.

Your Agile events aren’t failing because people lack training. They’re failing because your organization adopted the rituals while rejecting the transparency, trust, and adaptation that make them work. And often, the dysfunction of mechanical ceremonies isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

AI won't make product managers obsolete - but it will expose who has been doing real strategic thinking and who has been hiding behind administrative tasks. The future belongs to Cognitive Orchestrators who set intent, shape ethical constraints, and elevate decision quality - not passive reviewers of AI output.

With one Scrum Team, most people agree it’s easy to shape your Scrum in many ways. You can aim for innovation, efficiency, or customer-specific work. Just use different practices and it works. Once you add a scaling framework, that flexibility drops. The real optimisation goal shows up. Many times the focus is on: small batches, smooth flow, overlapping skills, standards, waste elimination, reuse. All very useful, but mainly about efficiency. ( Which is okay, actually in my experience it is what orgs want most of the time... efficiency and predictability! ) Those same ideas do not always help when you explore new products or co-create tailored solutions with customers. There, learning, experiments and customer-specific choices may matter more than waste reduction, avoiding duplication or efficiency. So what? Well, if it’s unclear what you optimise for, you might ask for innovation and customer focus, but design a setup mostly for efficiency. The result: strategy and org design become unaligned, and not so very good things happen. Now what? Be explicit about which one you’re really optimising for. And then look at the frameworks principles/mechanics and ask: What are these really trying to maximise?

Scrum Teams don’t start with every skill—they grow them. By sharing what they know and acquiring what they need, teams expand their collective intelligence and improve continuously. Whether it’s asking, buying, or working for new capabilities, growth is a team sport in Scrum.

Dieser Artikel zeigt Ihnen, wie Sie kulturelle Dysfunktionen diagnostizieren und entscheiden können, welche Auseinandersetzungen zu führen sinnvoll sind.

Despite a decade of digital progress, government still defaults to fixed-scope, output-driven delivery. An Agile Product Operating Model offers a structural fix, replacing fragile project teams with stable, outcome-focused product lines. With smarter funding, lighter governance and real product leadership, departments can boost resilience, value and supplier collaboration at scale.

When innovation goes outside-in, structure becomes strategy — and teams become the multiplier.

How leaders can make organizational design a practical, everyday tool rather than a last-minute fix. With Org Topologies, you learn to see the real patterns shaping performance, involve people in designing meaningful change, and evolve your organization with purpose. It’s a guide for leaders who want clarity, adaptability, and results that last.

Most Scrum problems don’t come from the team at all. They come from a lack of real business engagement. In this blog, PST Robb Pieper explains why active leader involvement is the difference between stalled delivery and meaningful results. Download our guide to learn how to build the level of engagement Scrum depends on.

One of the core aspects of Product Ownership is to create alignment across everyone who is involved with the product in some way. A great way to do this is to establish a compelling Product Vision, a strategic objective that helps everyone to envision the future of the product.  The problem usually starts with the word “compelling”. How would one know if the Product Vision is compelling enough or not?

Nos últimos meses, o debate sobre “Agile is Dead?” voltou a ganhar força — e não por acaso. Em workshops, conferências e discussões estratégicas, sinais consistentes apontam para uma desconexão crescente entre a promessa da agilidade e o que muitas organizações realmente praticam. Ao mesmo tempo, a aceleração trazida pela IA pressiona modelos tradicionais de execução e expõe fragilidades antes toleráveis. Este artigo explora por que essa narrativa emergiu agora, o que está por trás da sensação de “morte” da agilidade e quais forças estruturais estão remodelando a forma como times, produtos e empresas precisam operar. Uma reflexão necessária para quem deseja entender o que está mudando — e o que vem a seguir

I am often asked, how many teams can a Scrum Master support? Like so many things in Scrum, the answer is that it depends. The maturity of the teams, the organizational structure, the priority of the work and even the seniority of the Scrum Master are all factors to consider. There is no single, "right" answer.

In diesem Artikel erklärt PST Simon Flossmann, wie du mit dem Coaching startest.

Leadership resistance to your pre-mortem reveals whether your organization’s operating model prioritizes comfortable narratives over preventing failure. This article shows you how to diagnose cultural dysfunction and decide which battles to fight.

Most teams move slowly not because they lack effort, but because 75–85% of their delivery time is spent waiting in queues, handoffs, and decision delays — flow efficiency exposes this hidden latency.

Scrum Masters often fall into the trap of facilitating every Scrum event, turning themselves into meeting hosts instead of enabling self-management. The Scrum Guide doesn't require the Scrum Master to run any event. Their accountability is to create the conditions where the team can facilitate their own work. Each Scrum event already has a natural owner, and that over-facilitation slows transparency and adaptation. The highest expression of Scrum Mastery is when the team handles its events independently, proving that self-management has taken hold.

Organizational performance isn’t driven by strategy alone but by the structure that supports it. Different goals—speed, adaptability, efficiency, innovation—require different org designs. Change fails when people don’t own it or when structures don’t fit the real work. Org Topologies offers a practical way to visualize, design, and evolve your organization with purpose.

I am a big fan of the annual State of Agile report from Digital.ai. Each year, the report looks at things like why organizations adopt Agile, what frameworks they use and what challenges they’re facing. But this year was different.

Scrum Teams don’t just need skills—they need expertise: deep understanding built through experience and curiosity. Expertise isn’t about knowing everything; it’s about learning fast, connecting dots, and turning insight into smarter action. Because in complex work, speed of learning beats depth of knowledge every time.

Reflecting on 10 years at Scrum.org, in this post, Dave West explores the core of the agile movement: empowering people and teams. Contrary to popular agile sentiment, middle management is not the problem but the key to success, as they create the environment for change. The persistent challenge of achieving true empowerment requires understanding and shifting organizational power structures and incentives. Finally, Dave considers AI as a potential catalyst—a "missing piece"—that, when combined with frameworks like Scrum, could finally unlock the door to fully empowered teams.

The UK’s new SME Office signals progress, but real change needs adaptable delivery, smarter contracts and risk-based governance. SMEs bring speed and focus, yet face barriers baked into procurement and policy. Success will hinge on measurable shifts in participation, payment speed, modular contracting and genuine discovery-led delivery.

Self-management is crucial for any Scrum Team’s success, yet many teams and organizations struggle to truly embrace it. So what can you do about it? In this blog, PST Robb Pieper shares practical ways to enable and support real self-management.

The AI Fluency framework helps us build a mindset of how to think about working with AI. But how?!

A 40+ team retail division transformed delivery through a fundamental culture shift: from starting work to focusing on finishing it, creating trusted predictability.

Self-organization is not something that needs to be earned. And besides that - to be honest - deciding what teams' people will work on is not rocket science either. By trusting the team to own how they work together to deliver the product, the organization is empowering them to figure out the best way to deliver the product.

Okay, let’s talk numbers. Real ones. Actual data shows how Asia, and especially Singapore, is diving headfirst into Agile and Scrum at a remarkable pace. Adoption is rising, investment is soaring and the region is transforming faster than ever. But the real story is what these numbers reveal about the future of work in Singapore and why deep, real Agile understanding matters now more than ever.

In diesem Artikel beschreibt PST Simon Flossmann die Auswirkungen von „Wir machen Scrum, aber...“