Velocity, as a metric used by some Scrum teams, is rife with trouble. David's concise article highlights a common pitfall.

Critical Uncertainties is a powerful Liberating Structure helping groups develop strategies for dealing with plausible yet unpredictable futures. Strategy-making is an essential part of successful software-/product delivery with Scrum. With Critical Uncertainties, teams have an interaction pattern a...

We've all seen it. The Scrum Team that goes through the motions, implements all the mechanics of Scrum, and still when we look at what's going on it doesn't feel right.

In this talk, Jeff Gothelf, the co-author of the book Lean UX, and Dave West, CEO and Product Owner of Scrum.org, discuss the challenges and benefits of bringing practices from lean UX to Scrum Teams. They answer questions about empirical learning, managing the backlog, understanding the customer an...

In this short Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Peter Gfader talks about how testing can different in an agile environment. He walks through different stages, gives some basic recommendations. (4:33 Minutes)

In this Scrum Pulse webinar, Kurt Bittner and Patricia Kong from Scrum.org introduce the Evidence-Based Management framework.

During a recent meetup of The Liberators Network, we got together with 30 enthusiastic Scrum Masters.

"I am a project manager.  What is my role now that we are moving to Scrum?”

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Mark Noneman answered Scrum questions from the audience.

This meeting of the Practice Agile Community Meetup was virtual and featured a presentation on Distributed Agile Teams.

An organization’s ability to rapidly and deliberately respond to changing demand, while controlling risk helps ascertain its Agility.

In this short Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Punit Doshi provides several ideas to get better involvement from stakeholders during Sprint Reviews including ways to get them to attend if they are reluctant to do so. (5:37 Minutes)

In this short Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Fabio Panzavolta discusses how work is driven from the vision.  He identifies that the Product Backlog is refined and revisited through empirical data, however too often the vision is not refined in the same way, putting the two out of sync...

In the previous videos, I introduced the Creative reframing technique and discussed 2 Strategies for its practical use. In this final video, I will discuss several activities that agile coaches can use with their teams or clients to make use of the Creative reframing technique.

Your organization has been disturbed by late launches in its last few new products, and now management has charged you with “getting to the bottom of the problem.”

In this webinar, Dave Dame, Professional Scrum Trainer explored how Scrum can help marketers deliver better products faster while collaborating with their teams and continuously learning about their customers. Dave shares real-life examples of how marketers have used Scrum to move their products for...

Creative reframing is an excellent facilitation and professional coaching technique that allows you to explore problems from various, sometimes unusual and unexpected angles.

Changing the way we work is extremely difficult — we all know this. It requires us to find novel solutions to wicked challenges, to deal with cultural baggage (‘the way we do things here’) and to bring along the people needed to make a change successful.

It was 8:59 am on Monday. It was another week which I thought was going to be amazing. Last week our company just closed another round of investment. The company is currently strategizing to scale agility throughout the company.

Companies who build hardware often ask if it’s possible to benefit from Scrum. In order to answer this question, I need to first introduce you to my friend Risk.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Reggie Gardner answers Scrum questions from the audience.

The Scrum Master is often expected to facilitate and animate every Scrum events. But, according to the Scrum Guide, the role of the Scrum Master regarding the different events is to ensure that the event takes place and that attendants understand its purpose.

This article provides five examples of how Liberating Structures are valuable for Scrum Masters.

A Sprint Goal is an objective set for the Sprint that can be met through the implementation of Product Backlog (cit. Scrum Guide). Have you clearly defined a Sprint Goal at the end of your Sprint Planning? Is this Sprint Goal understandable and transparent to everyone? Is it defined in a way that...

Scrum Masters are often understood mostly as “team coaches”. Yet, their role is vastly more important. The Scrum Guide emphasizes that Scrum Masters are responsible for leading and coaching organizations in the adoption of Scrum and causing change that increases the productivity of the Scrum Team.

I collected lots of feedback from different students around Europe that attended my Professional Scrum Developer Training. Here some photos to give you an idea...

In your organization, some problems seem to recur, they are difficult to fix using the tools, tricks and practices you developed over the years as a manager. Maybe this problem is different and the perspective of an expert-outsider might help?

In this article I will stress again the utmost importance of understanding the context of the organization as a strategy to achieve a possible, evolutionary and deep application of Scrum within organizations.

In this short Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Jasper Alblas talks about what a Scrum Master does and doesn't do. (1:37 Minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma describes a Sprint Retrospective in Scrum, giving tips for ways to make them valuable and how he has improved them over time. (6:02 Minutes)

I always assume that the people I work with are professionals - and not children. This is why I don’t like maturity models in whatever shape or form. And we’ve got a lot of those in our industry.

Ever wonder what a Scrum Master does all day? If you’re new to the role of a Scrum Master, you might think you have to facilitate all the events, take notes and schedule outlook meetings. Turns out you don’t have to do any of that!

Quite a few teams in organizations implementing Scrum depict their frustration in statements like “Scrum is driving us crazy!”, “It’s too chaotic!”

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods at InfoQ, spoke to Dave West, CEO and Product Owner at Scrum.org about the current state of Scrum and the latest initiatives by Scrum.org.

In this presentation from Agile India 2019, Professional Scrum Trainer Mia Horrigan discusses Evidence-Based Management and how this empirical process can help agile transformations measure and manage the value derived from their transformation initiative. (38:33 Minutes)

This is a video recording of Professional Scrum Trainer Mia Horrigan's presentation at Agile India titled,"Accelerate Improvements Through Retrospectives," where she discusses some Retrospective patterns that she has found useful. (41:13 Minutes)

In this webinar, UX experts and co-authors of Lean UX, Jeff Gothelf and Joshua Seiden, along with Professional Scrum Trainer Gary Pedretti, discuss the focuses of PSU and share tips and techniques on how Scrum Teams can integrate UX practices into their work.

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. 

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.

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..

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.

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 fe...

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.

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.

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.

Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) Gary Pedretti (@garypedretti) and User Experience expert Jeff Gothelf (@jboogie) joined Ryan Ripley on the Agile for Humans Podcast (@ryanripley) to discuss how UX/UI designers can effectively work with Scrum Teams.