When Professional Scrum Trainer Jim Sammons is working with new Scrum Masters, one of the things that he suggests is that they need to keep improving. Of course the next question that they ask is how. In this short Scrum Tapas video, Jim discusses some of what he suggests to these Scrum Masters an...

I have my own biases,  having seen co-located teams work very well and having struggled with “dislocated” teams, I often recommend my clients to reconsider “dislocated” teams. 

The software development organization at TRUMPF was practicing Scrum, but in an inconsistent way. They turned to Professional Scrum Trainer Thomas Schissler to help them practice Scrum correctly and they underwent the Professional Scrum Developer training class to help train their teams. This was a ...

At a recent training class one of the delegates spoke about their present company, about how it was the most “Agile” place he had ever worked.

I share my thoughts in this video about the practices and activities the Scrum Master should be doing to increase his/her awesomeness. Hopefully it will help you to find the gap towards awesomeness.

Every year I like to deliberately go somewhere far from the crowd to take a break and reflect. You can say that it's similar to a retrospectives. Often times I may not realised whether as a Scrum Master my service to the organisation is already effective or not.

A customer I was working with asked me to help out with the intake process for recruiting a new Scrum Master and a new Product Owner. I asked them what they had so far. They provided a clear job description describing what they wanted to see from the candidates.

The Liberating Structure "Wicked Questions" makes paradoxical realities transparent. By doing so, you can engage in deeper strategic thinking and explore new possibilities.

Why is it that when the going gets tough, “agile” gets the blame? There is so much online bashing of [insert random agile framework or method] going on, that it made me wonder if there is a pattern behind it. I believe there is.

This blog gives a Lean perspective on the Agile Manifesto.

The unpredictability of the market and competitors are the main reasons of traditional management is not enough/fit to reach success.

Unclear language leads to incomplete transparency and ambiguity. The careful use of words like ‘bug’ will improve decision-making in your organization.

In this episode of the Agile Atelier podcast with Rahul Bhattacharya, Patricia Kong and Kurt Bittner join him to talk about Evidence-Based Management and agile measurement. (47:31 Minutes)

If Scrum were to be reduced to one purpose and one only, it would be the creation of a "Done" increment. Although the DoD serves as a crucial part of Scrum, it is also often neglected by many Scrum teams. Try out the DoD EvoCycle, a simple technique to effectively manage your Definition of Done.

Want to know if your team or organisation is suffering from Zombie Scrum? Find out with our free symptom checker and get help. And join our worldwide research into how teams work with Scrum, and what works for them.

In this video, Professional Scrum Trainer Don McGreal boils down Scrum to 3 main advantages (1:22 Minutes).

‘Autonomy without accountability equals anarchy’ summarizes an essential design element of any agile organization. Without these checks and balances in place any aspiration to transform an organization is likely to fail.

In this webinar Brandon Shangraw and Abel Rios from Stack Sports, along with Patricia Kong, Scrum.org talk about their journey using Scrum and Nexus. (61:00 Minutes)

Being a Scrum Master requires to take many different stances and approaches when working together with teams and individuals. Two of them that are probably used most are “Coaching” and “Mentoring”.

An example of how to use Liberating Structures to improve the Sprint Review.

Icebreakers: are they a complete waste of time or do they add value? Some people absolutely love them, other absolute dislike them because they didn’t add any value. I believe a well-designed icebreaker can kickstart your session, can be fun and get people warmed-up for the rest of the session. Lear...

Learn more on how to tackle impediments as a team by running experiments, iterating and visualizing on the solution.

In this video, Professional Scrum Trainer Peter Goetz interviews fellow PST Punit Doshi about the Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) training class by Scrum.org. (13:03 Minutes)

Have you ever been curious about what really motivates the people you work with? What are they looking for in their role and in their work? If you can find an hour with your team, I recommend you to try the Moving Motivators practice (Management 3.0). Let's unpack how to prepare and run the exercise...

This post covers four team building mental models — or concepts — that have proven useful in understanding the context of creating agile teams: from Taylorism to Tuckman to Lencioni to Dan Pink.

In this video, Professional Scrum Trainers Joshua Partogi and Barry Overeem talk about the Professional Scrum Master II training class and what experienced Scrum Masters can expect to learn in the class.

This is a common question in my Professional Scrum classes. It often comes up early when we are still learning the basics of the Scrum framework. And it comes up because people are already wearing two hats or are being told by their organizations that they will be.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Martin Hinshelwood answered Scrum related questions from a live audience.

In this article, I’ve described my personal journey in becoming a Scrum Master and included recommendations for new Scrum Masters.

Scrum.org is stating it: "The PSM III credential is very difficult to earn, as it is used to demonstrate the certificate holder’s ability solve advanced, complex problems in real-world applications of Scrum.

In this video, Professional Scrum Trainer Thomas Schissler interviews fellow PST Roman Doroshenko about his experience in the Professional Scrum Developer Class. (3:40 Minutes)

Yaki Koren describes his experience attending a Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) class by Scrum.org (www.scrum.org/psd). (2:44 Minutes)

How a Scrum Master can use the “Strategy Knotworking” to help the Scrum Team turn their ideas and ambitions into reality.

Popularized by Elon Musk, utilizing first principles thinking to solve problems in an innovative, creative, and less biased way has proven popular in the tech community.

How effectively are you maximizing value when dependencies tell you what to do first? Dependencies impact the core of the role of Product Owner.

In this video, Professional Scrum Trainer Don McGreal shares how your attitude towards Scrum can hurt or build your success.

In my role as an Agile coach and Scrum trainer, I get the chance to talk to a lot of Scrum Masters and teams.

I recently performed an organizational agile assessment and learned a great deal about how they served their customer’s technology needs. We investigated their technical practices, processes to develop and release, but also dug deep into how the people worked together from the people side of things....

In this Scrum Pulse webinar, Kurt Bittner from Scrum.org and Ralph van Roosmalen from Management 3.0 discuss the challenges leaders face as they try to grow their agility, how they can help their organizations to improve, and tools and practices that can help them to help themselves and their teams.

Conflicts are fascinating. Now, this may be the organisational psychologist in me talking, or the facilitator who senses them in the groups I work with.

This video is a presentation by Professional Scrum Trainer Roland Flemm from Agile Week Riga titled, Iterating Toward Professional Scrum. 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. (38:02 Minutes...

By using an expert-less, community-driven approach, organizations are put in a position to thrive on complexity rather than being defeated by it.

The traditional approach of RFI – RFP – Review – LOI is neither lean or agile. The Lean Agile Procurement approach reduces the sourcing cycle time to days, with collaborative clarification of the product with prospective partners while reducing the risk of a poor partner and company evaluation.

Why run a Liberating Structures immersive workshop? Since the beginning of 2019, the Hands-on Agile meetup in Berlin has been exploring how to apply Liberating Structures to Scrum.

I agree that forcing self-organizing teams to do something seems counterproductive.  However, even in that scenario, there are only a few hard and fast Scrum rules.

This video is a presentation from Agile Week Riga titled, Iterating Toward Professional Scrum.

High performing teams are the cornerstone for good Scrum. Reaching a high performant state requires time. In many cases, this time is not given to a team because the team composition changes frequently.

Who wouldn't want to achieve awesomeness at work? Great Scrum Masters help make this a reality. The world is changing more rapidly than ever, bringing with it more unknowns than known. And without strong leaders to guide our teams through this time of complexity and uncertainty, we won't fare ver...

In part 1 of this 3 part Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainers Bjorn Persson and Henrik Berglund discuss what it means to be a facilitator and gives some tips to improve your facilitation techniques.  (4:15 Minutes)

In part 3 of this 3 part Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainers Bjorn Persson and Henrik Berglund discuss what it means to be a facilitator and gives some tips to improve your facilitation techniques.  (3:16 Minutes)