Community Blog

Executives: there are many reasons for agility. You already know this.

Many folks on LinkedIn these days, seems to have a renewed interest in firing the Scrum Master. I have been asked quiet a few times personally as to what will the scrum master do now that we are heading to a ‘New Normal’.

Scrum is a straightforward framework to develop complex software products in a complex environment but hard to practice.

As a coach, I’ve gotten many inquiries from colleagues and students asking for advice. How do I support my team during a time when we have and are still experiencing so much change and high levels of uncertainty?

It is a time of unprecedented challenge. Firms are experiencing extraordinary disruption.  Productivity is impacted. Delivery has stalled. Leaders worry about survival, remaining profitable and/or competitive in a distributed environment.

Scrum Master's role is unique, and comparing with any traditional roles will limit our thinking and exploring a beautiful journey of servant leadership.

am bracing myself to hear, “Sorry, we have not updated our [insert product] [insert service] for accessibility under new health guidelines” or “Sorry for the inconvenience, please check back to see when we have updated to accommodate accessibility.” Sorry is not inclusive.

What is agile – I asked everyone what it means to them. Got responses like “being flexible,” “respond faster,” “move quickly,” and “adapt to change,”

I struggled in the past when people were asking me to explain Scrum quickly and without putting metaphor and success stories.

There has been no shortage of articles on how to work remotely recently, including our series on Remote Agile.

"What is worry about our product is keeping you up at night? What can we build or test this Sprint to make you sleep a bit better?". In this post we share this and 9 other Powerful Questions to help your team find better Sprint Goals. And what to do when these questions don't help you at all.

Like other PSTs, I was recently approached by few agilists to help them with PSPO-I certification. Here is one such conversation -

During a 20/20 vision on my writings, I discovered clusters of knowledge that are essential to Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches: Genuine coaching techniques, knowledge of psychological principles and above all, understanding and developing “Self” awareness.

Difference between Project Manager and Scrum Master.

Treacherous bottlenecks can nullify all your hard work, no matter how industrious you are.

The Scrum values help build the foundation of Trust. Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation, the three pillars to embrace empiricism flourish on the foundation of Trust.

Can a Development Team member work on more than one team at a time? Here is what is not written in the Scrum Guide.

Inspiration for fulfilling the stances of a Scrum Master, remotely.

Covid19 turned our lives upside down in scrambling to find new ways of how to socialize, shop for groceries, and change the way we work. However, this gives us a new opportunity to re-imagine the way we work as we shift from the ‘workplace’ to the ‘workspace’.

This eighth article now looks into supporting a distributed Development Team organizing a remote Daily Scrum.

This blog is part of a series of peek previews from my upcoming book Coaching Agile Organisations

*Covid is a fictional character based on my imagination that represents the strain of CoronaVirus that is causing the disease Covid-19. This is just a very simple and sincere attempt to put my knowledge and understanding about Covid-19 to test in this article and I tried making the connection with Scrum. I hope you enjoy it.

Good Scrum Masters are passionate. Great Scrum Masters are dispassionate.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

In my 100th episode of Agile.FM,  I had the opportunity to speak with Jim Benson, the co-creator of Lean Coffee.

This blog post uses a metaphor to illustrate the potential impact of having more than one product owner per product.

The COVID19 pandemic gives us plenty of opportunities to think about uncertainty, complexity, and how to deal with those using Empiricism.

Emotions are part of the human experience. Emotions are essentially energy in motion (e-motion).  When our emotions are flowing freely, they can bring us energy and provide the fuel for us to transform and grow.

A few weeks ago, I had a wonderful conversation with Diana Larsen on Agile FM, and it did not come as a surprise, that the topic of retrospectives came up. Diana is the co-author of the book Agile Retrospectives , which has been very influential in many agile careers, including mine. 

A number of weeks ago I was chatting to Jeff Gothelf the co-author of Lean-UX and co-creator of our Professional Scrum with User Experience class. He described a project that he is working on which sparked my interest and is something I believe to be relevant to our Scrum community. I wanted to share some of this discussion with you.

Have you always wondered about the difference between agile and Scrum? You’re not alone, these words are commonly interchanged for one another but they are not the same thing at all.

This seventh article now looks into organizing a remote Sprint Review with a distributed team: How to practice the review with virtual Liberating Structures, including and giving a voice to team members, stakeholders, and customers.

Although most people see the value of Sprint Goals, how to create them is a huge source of confusion and frustration. Is the Spring Goal there before the Sprint Backlog? How do you create a Sprint Goal out of the unrelated set of items at the top of your Product Backlog? And should everything on the Sprint Backlog be related to the Sprint Goal? In this post I work from examples of a real product, and the Sprint Goals we used there, to answer those questions.

Working overtime in stressful situations is not a viable long-term remedy and should not be seen as a professional solution, but as a warning signal to be heard courageously.

From my experience and observations, my concern is weak understanding that the Evidence-Based Management (EBM) framework is empirical. It requires transparency, frequent inspection, and adaptation.

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En Scrum la planificación no es una etapa o un evento único, es una actividad continua durante todo el Sprint.  La Adaptación continua no es sinónimo de desorden o improvisación.

Scrum es un marco flexible que ofrece muchas ventajas para el desarrollo de productos complejos, pero puede ser fácilmente mal interpretado. Justamente esa libertad puede llevar a distorsiones en su uso.

Are scrum and personal effectiveness compatible? In recent weeks I have experienced using Scrum for my personal organization.

As an active agile Scrum Consultant and Professional Scrum Trainer, I am constantly helping a large number of agile teams. Unsurprisingly all the teams I am supporting are experimenting with different ways to make remote working, work!

Like many Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Agile Managers, I am beginning to understand organizations are complex adaptive systems.

In this episode, I will try to show how understanding mental models can significantly improve the abilities of leaders like Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Managers. This is because Mental Models are at the core of knowledge and learning.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

This sixth article now dives into organizing a remote Sprint Planning with a distributed team: practices, virtual Liberating Structures, and lessons learned.

As promised, here is the part two of the two part series "how to lead live virtual class like a pro" where I'd be emphasising on the execution part- facilitating the class effectively.

We all are going through a tough time – both socially and professionally. People have been asked to maintain distance to break the COVID-19 outbreak chain. Most of us have isolated ourselves for the past few weeks.

Nobody really saw COVID-19 coming. Most people thought it would be similar to previous virus outbreaks and peter out without any meaningful impact on our daily lives. As the situation unfolded, we struggled to fully grasp the exponential nature of it.

COVID-19 and the corona virus currently occupies our daily lives. All news outlet report on it almost 24/7. What used to be smalltalk about the weather is now about this horrific virus.

Large numbers of Product Owners begin their work by creating requirements. In some situations, these scopes are dictated by others. Their work mainly consists of describing demands, thus apparently appearing as a scribe in their role.