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Blog Post

Scrum Teams Need To Share Stories

December 21, 2020
Together with my colleagues Uwe Schirmer and Kurt Bittner, I have compiled a book that contains many of our own stories and those we experienced while working with customers and students: The Professional Scrum Team. Maybe they provide value to you. 
Blog Post

Measuring Agility

December 14, 2020
For organizations in the midst of an agile transformation, the question “how do we know if/when we’re agile?” is pressing.
Blog Post

The Evening Daily Scrum

December 7, 2020
According to the Scrum Guide, the purpose of the Daily Scrum “is to inspect progress toward the Sprint Goal” and “adapt the Sprint Backlog as necessary” and “it is held at the same time and place every working day of the Sprint.” So what is the best time to hold the event each day?
Blog Post

OKRs: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

November 24, 2020
OKRs are a powerful tool for setting and measuring goals, but like all power tools, they can become dangerous in unskilled hands. When used in informed ways, they can improve focus and lift outcomes, but when mishandled, they can increase waste and inflict real damage upon the organizations that adopt them.
Blog Post

The Scrum Guide 2020 Reordered

November 24, 2020
The Scrum Guide Reordered 2020 is based on about 95 percent of the text of the Scrum Guide 2020, extending its original structure by adding additional categories, for example, on self-management, commitments, or accountability.
Blog Post

A Home for Product Goal, Definition of Done, and Sprint Goal

November 19, 2020
In the 2020 Version of the Scrum Guide, the commitments were introduced for each artifact. These then became an element of Scrum; in that they need to be used to gain the maximum value that the Scrum Framework offers. They were always part of a Professional Scrum approach, now there is a clear connection of these commitments to the artifacts. They increase transparency, and the focussed delivery of Value. Each of the commitments now clearly support and sustain an artifact.
Blog Post

Scrum Guide 2020 Update - What has been removed

November 18, 2020
Scrum is described as a framework, not a methodology. The Scrum Guide provides just enough prescription to allow Scrum to work and encourages its ‘users’ to be smart, adding practices and other things specific to them on top of the framework as needed to form their process.
Blog Post

Scrum Guide 2020 Update - Role to Accountabilities

November 18, 2020
With the 2020 release of the Scrum Guide, the term role was replaced with accountabilities. The purpose of this change was to place special emphasis that this is not a job description, but the bare minimum set of accountabilities necessary to execute Scrum. The blog describes how these accountabilities are split into 3 groups.
Blog Post

Scrum Guide 2020 Update - Commitments

November 18, 2020
With the 2020 release of the Scrum Guide, Commitments were added for each artifact. The commitments provide a nice, structural way to describe some of the key characteristics of each artifact. The intent of this change was to provide clarity and make the Scrum Guide simpler to read and use.
Blog Post

Scrum Guide 2020 Update - Introducing the Product Goal

November 18, 2020
With the 2020 update to the Scrum Guide, three commitments were added to the artifacts. The idea of a commitment is to provide additional quality to the artifact to improve transparency. In the case of Product Backlog, the commitment is to the Product Goal. 
Blog Post

Why, What, How - Sprint Planning

November 18, 2020
In the 2020 update of the Scrum Guide, the Sprint Planning section has had a very welcome update. Every part of Scrum has a purpose, a reason to why it's included in the framework, and this update made the purpose - raison d'etre - of the Sprint Planning clearer. Let's see how!