Community Blog

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.

From my experience, nothing is more important for Teamwork than trust. If having the secondary importance, it’s TRUST as well. You can't build a good team while they lack of trust.

This is the start of a series of articles about the Scrum.org PSM II class. It will address the most common questions asked. This article is focused on the difference between the PSM and PSM II class.

Flow of work and, most importantly, value is paramount. There are times when you keep looking at the process and don’t understand what is going on, what is wrong, and why stuff is not getting to done. Read to learn how flow can help while limiting work in progress.

The House of Scrum metaphor and sketch seemed to have piqued some interest last year. In this video I go over the 3-5-3 framework, giving a high level overview of Scrum..

Organizations are always on the lookout to cut costs and scale back when they have unfavorable reporting periods. Hiring freezes, and cutbacks in training and traveling tend to be popular and convenient.

People may have talked about these things earlier and I would like to share my experience around it. This story is long dated back when I was working on a software product for a manufacturing domain client.

I read somewhere that multi-tasking makes you stupid. So, I did some research to understand why. What I learned was both interesting and revealing.

This is the first part of a 2-part blog post series about dealing with very large Product Backlog items. Part 1 intends to focus on the Scrum Team, Part 2 will be released shortly after our Webinar on April 29th and will focus on the “Epic” challenges agile leaders are facing.

Uno de los servicios del Scrum Master es eliminar los impedimentos que tiene el equipo de desarrollo. Pero no todos los problemas son impedimentos. Hay que entender que el Scrum Master no es un solucionador de problemas.

A college roommate of mine retired this week, after a long and successful career. While he's figuring out the next chapter of his life, it caused me to think about whether the notion of a "career" is even relevant in today's world.

Many large legacy organizations are moving toward agile delivery methods in hopes of releasing faster to market. Based on my experiences, they look at it solely from a production view of getting software released faster and more often. This view has them believing this will result in getting more features released.

Through my professional experience, while serving my customers, working with Scrum Teams and training people in Professional Scrum, I have observed that some Scrum Masters only work to serve the Development Team and the Product Owner.

Ask any Agile practitioner these days what Agile values are and he/she, most likely, will recite you some lines from the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

As many Professional Scrum Trainers have experienced, there is always a good discussion around the Sprint Goal. A similar discussion recently led me to address this not so well understood aspect.

One of the most important things we can do to help individuals and teams improve is coach them to embrace the agile mindset. The Manifesto for Agile Software Development provides values and principles to help guide teams in navigating the complexities of product delivery.

Our trainings around Scrum aim at gaining knowledge in applying Scrum to improve on product development. To achieve this in an ideal way, we deliver our training in the language spoken locally.

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.

Some teams of knowledge workers (En.wikipedia.org, 2019) work primarily on complex problems. Scrum operates in the complex problem domain, so it can be a natural choice.

A common phrase that I use in my classes is that Scrum is like the poker game Texas Hold’em; it only takes a few minutes to learn but a lifetime to master.  The “few minutes” may be a bit of a stretch but my students get the point. 

What is Scrum Team Velocity? This is a tricky one, and you need to be answering it in the context of the organization you are interviewing with and its complementary practices.

I have been fortunate enough to have a successful career as a change agent. I leverage my experience of navigating the world with Cerebral Palsy — a world that was not yet ready to deal with a person with a disability — to help companies deal with their disability: their inability to change from the status quo.

Have you heard the term “lamp post metric”? [i] This is a measurement that is easy to gather and may even seem like common sense. If you lose something on a dark night, where are you going to look?

In the previous 3 articles I reviewed some of the most important Agile metrics that Dan Vacanti’s ActionableAgile software helps you to get with ease.

In the first part of Getting to 85 – Agile Metrics with ActionableAgile we looked at the Cycle Time Scatterplot created by ActionableAgile software.

This question "What is the duration of a Sprint" is seemingly simple, but depending on the interviewing situation, company, interviewer, and their familiarity with Scrum you might need to give them more or less details and answer additional questions your answer might bring up.

In today’s complex ever-changing work, we need to make full use of the collective intelligence of the whole team, even if the whole organization to be able to solve and deliver on these needs.

In the first part of Getting to 85 – Agile Metrics with ActionableAgile we looked at the Cycle Time Scatterplot as generated by ActionableAgile software. That piece also discussed some ideas the scatter plot could bring about and conversations that potentially might occur.

Scrum and Kanban are a great combination. With this insight more and more Scrum Teams become aware of terms and phrases used in Kanban. Like 'WIP'.

The topic of Agile Metrics inevitably comes up in many situations and conversations. For the Scrum practitioners these somehow are a subset of Velocity and Burn ups and downs. Now, there's a whole world out there, that operates with much reacher vocabulary of metrics. Professional Scrum With Kanban (PSK) by Scrum.org brings that world of fantastic Agile Metrics back to Scrum. In this series of posts I will review those metrics using great software - ActionableAgile, provided by fellow PST, Daniel Vacanti.

Scrum con “User Experience” es mucho más que “Dual Tracking”. La agilidad provee un contexto para el aprendizaje continuo.

As a Professional Scrum Trainer for Scrum.org I get to think about the Definition of "Done" and its meaning a lot.

As leaders, we are connected 24/7. Being connected with our mobile devices has meant we’re always available all the time. We have the pressure to move faster. Do more with less time. To our benefit and also to our detriment, we end up doing it.

One of the regular listeners, Daniel Lachmann-Nishibane, appeared on www.agile.fm after he has participated in one of my recent Professional Agile Leadership (PAL-E) certification courses in Munich Germany.

What exactly is “agile” or even an agile leader? This is one of the biggest problems our industry faces. Ask a room full of people to answer and you may get as many answers. Common ones include “it’s a mindset” or “it’s a software methodology” etc…

A few days ago, I was observing a Sprint Retrospective. The Scrum Team decided to work on the Definition of Done (DoD), identified as the most important topic to adapt for the next Sprint. The discussions were open and animated, when an unexpected discussion emerged during the session.

An Agile mindset is crucial in management roles for organizations that are moving towards Agility.

There has been so much written about Velocity and its impact on teams yet it is one metric that eludes everyone and keeps cropping up whenever there is discussion around productivity.

Hearing a senior executive announce "We're committed to becoming agile!" is not the bombshell moment it used to be. It no longer indicates a personal revelation or board-room epiphany.

As a Global Vice President at a major financial institution, I spend two days a week teaching Product Ownership, Agile Leadership, Scrum, and Kanban to 25 employees per week. As a Professional Scrum Trainer, I’ve taught over 1500 people through the years. This experience has made me a better leader.

An executive is a person who owns the strategy or sets the direction of travel or sets justifications for spending. This exec could be the Product Owner for a chunk of the organization.

The 2019 Scrum Master Trends Report by Scrum.org and the State of Agile 2018 shows numbers that provide insight in the maturity of agile adoptions.

The Scrum Team consists of three roles. The only three roles needed in Scrum. But all needed! And all equally important to be successful. This first sentence is all there is to it. And if we would practice Scrum within our companies the way described in this first sentence we can all be successful in delivering incremental value to our customers each Sprint.

The purpose of Scrum is to create a potentially releasable Done Product Increment, in order to realize business value. Many teams struggle in improving their Definition of Done. The technique described here allows for greater transparency on what the Definition of Done is, and what the next steps are.