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.

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.

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

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 this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Tolga Kombak answers Scrum questions from the audience.

"You are not doing Scrum." How many times have you heard that? Scrum Police are a legion.

In this article we will investigate how an effective Product Backlog refinement can be conducted in Scrum.

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

A few years ago I went to a training course given by Ralph Kimball, the “inventor” of the Data Warehouse. It was a great experience but one of the main learnings for me was something he said that applied to all teams not just Data Warehouse teams.

If you can create a vision for your Scrum Team, and you find them all aligned in the right direction, your work has a reasonably good chance at success.

Have you ever wondered - what is the value of Success? This question is not easy to answer, and everyone will have a different answer.

In many organisations I see Scrum not producing its anticipated value. The concept of value varies across organisations.

Over the last year Steve Trapps and I have been chatting to people in the Agile community, in case you haven't seen it yet here is the output from our opportunity to grab Dave West the CEO and Product Owner for Scrum.org.

Las organizaciones se enfrentan a clientes que piensan que pueden demandar lo que quieran, hay que darles lo que piden y todo se puede hacer con el nivel de presión adecuado.

Being agile means adapting to change. To limit negative performance impact of team changes, we need to apply the “adapting to change” concept to our team composition as well. This Whitepaper explores how to enable Scrum Teams to embrace these changes.

Professional Scrum Trainer Yuval Yeret (@yuvalyeret) joined fellow Professional Scrum Trainer Ryan Ripley (@ryanripley) to discuss Scrum and Kanban sitting in a tree…along with the Professional Scrum with Kanban course from Scrum.org.

El Sprint Backlog suele generar bastantes dudas en cuanto a su gestión. En ocasiones se convierte en un arma arromadiza que los stakeholders, el Product Owner o incluso el Scrum Master utilizan para controlar el equipo. ¿Es esta su función?

TL; DR: Ideas on How to Improve Your Product Backlog Management Techniques Scrum is a simple, yet sufficient framework to build emerging products, provided you identify in advance what is worth building. But even after a successful product discovery phase, you may struggle to make the right thing...

El Nexus Daily Scrum es un evento del Framework Nexus de Scrum.org que sirve fundamentalmente para gestionar las dependencias entre varios equipos Scrum y analizar el impacto de las mismas. Este evento se usa cuando se escala Scrum y se realiza todos los días antes del Daily Scrum de cada equipo.

La aceptación de los PBIs en Scrum es algo que suscita dudas en los equipos. En realidad es muy fácil.

If technical debt is the plague of our industry, why isn’t the Scrum Guide addressing the question of who is responsibly dealing with it?

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

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.

The following 5 tips to increase the Emotional Intelligence of a Product Owner as inspired from Scott Watson’s work, an emotional intelligence speaker and trainer.

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...

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.

Saying no is an integral part of any Product Owner's job. In this short video, I explore the reasons why we might be saying yes when no is a more appropriate answer (these reasons are from a great book by Dominica DeGrandis Make Work Visible) and how to say No when you need to.

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.

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...

A couple of years ago I blogged on Innovation Accounting in Scrum, and the bringing of empiricism to Product Ownership. On Tuesday I gave a presentation on this topic to the Agile Northants UK meetup. There was a pretty good Q&A afterwards.

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.

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.

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.

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.