Most organizations are using Scrum, however, many of them feel like the agility of their organization has degraded, and they might be right! Often, using Scrum starts out as a way to improve development efforts coordinated within an IT division or department, but that is not the most effective organ...

Hello great people of the world. It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post here. This time I want to share my experience working with Development Teams and a Product Owner at iPrice group who upgraded the way they ran their Sprint Planning.

When I work with my clients on Scrum in a Marketing context the discussion about the Marketing Backlog and how to move from a big bang marketing campaign to a more iterative approach via smaller slices of stories is naturally a key area we focus on. 

A short story illustrating how fear cripples estimating and how empathy can come to the rescue.

Scrum is based on self-managed teams. Self-managed teams are able to evolve and adapt quicker in today’s highly complex working environments than traditional command-and-control management structures.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Simon Bourk was live and answered the audience's questions about Scrum.

Autonomy is a critically important concept in agile culture, however ignore its counterbalance -accountability - at your peril.

Why do I think team coaching is a bad idea? Don't get me wrong, I believe team coaching can have a great amount of added value. It’s just that I often find that teams receive coaching while they should not even be a team.

Ahhh... the never-ending debate. What's the value of (Scrum) certifications? Is there any value? Why should you get certified? Is it even necessary? In this blog, Chee Hong gives his opinion about the value of certifications and the reasoning behind getting certified.

In the webinar, Kacper Mazek - Principal Consultant at Radically, Edwin Dando - Director at Radically and Professional Scrum Trainer, and Leona Cheffins - HR Business Partner at Vodafone, discuss how they used different tools, models and frameworks that helped Vodafone's business teams with Agile de...

This article on Product Backlog refinement shows that Refinement is more than just a meeting where the whole Scrum Team is having a discussion. It requires and involves everyone with shared and special responsibilities.

In this webcast, Professional Scrum Trainer Venkatesh Rajamani fields Scrum questions from the participants.

The Product Owner role is implemented in organizations in various different ways. The responsibilities and authorities of Product Owners vary across organizations, departments, teams and Product Owners. This can be explained to some extend, because it is a role that people need to grow into. The rol...

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Boris Steiner looks at several anti-patterns that he has observed over the years participating in Sprint Reviews and ways he has found to overcome them.  (4:40 Minutes)

This week, we are building our new website with a Scrum Team. Practicing what we preach, we are doing this in the most Agile, iterative way we can. So yes, we're making all the expected mistakes. In this post, we share what we learned about flow and releasing more often - with examples that are as r...

In this live webinar, Eric Naiburg, Director of Marketing and Operations for Scrum.org, describes how organizations can overcome these impediments by growing their Agile practices through empiricism, protecting Agile values, and changing the organization organically, team by team, product by product...

I have an important favor to ask to Scrum practitioners who are asking their team to commit themselves to their sprint backlog at sprint planning.

In this post, we explain one of the more complicated Liberating Structures called Ecocycle Planning. It helps to bring clarity in your activities as an individual or as a group of people and to identify where your energy and time you should go.

Scrum prescribes one person in the role of Product Owner (PO). Not multiple people, not a committee, just one person.

This is a great exercise to learn more about your team; to find out more about each other’s concerns and dreams and, importantly, what you can do to support them. I attended a get together / workshop style event in which we discussed how we could support each other in our day to day lives. I'd l...

A couple of weeks ago we looked at Monte Carlo analysis. We saw how this technique can be used to forecast Sprint capacity, and to anticipate the likely completion schedule for a given backlog of work.

In Scrum, Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of product being developed by Development Team. This implies that a product’s success relies heavily on the Product Owner role.

Most of the concepts in Scrum are easy to understand but extremely difficult to master. This is due to the fact that Scrum is designed for perfect, and reality never is. The same principle applies to the Definition of Done.

Over the years, I've seen countless Scrum adaptions, and I thought perhaps it would be interesting to sum up some of the common misinterpretations. I would love to hear about the misinterpretations that you have faced, so feel free to participate in the comment section.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Steve Porter looks at the impact that undone work has on technical debt and discusses some techniques to use when dealing with such issues.  Steve discusses value creation and what needs to be done to ensure value is a consideration in the proces...

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Wilbert Seele discusses why working with the Scrum Team to decide which method for capturing requirements is the right way to decide. No one method is a must and since it is all about communication, the team should be involved to pick what will ...

This article aims at helping Scrum Masters to conduct the *MOST AWESOME* Sprint Review they ever witnessed. (This article could have been titled: 41 tips that will make your Sprint Review awesome!)

I remember being told, many years ago when I started university, that Information Technology is a numerate discipline.

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave West, Chief Product Owner of Scrum.org about the state of Scrum, the latest revision to the Scrum Guide, the rise of Digital and the way Scrum.org maintains its courseware.

What can a Scrum team learn from the World’s Greatest Sports Teams? This is the first in 3 blogs that will share a number of Leadership lessons that can be used to build high performing Scrum teams.

In 2015, Cathay Pacific had a major project on their hands which concerned the development of a new Internet Booking Engine (IBE). They needed a framework that would help them deliver within a specific time line.

Leveraging the power of the crowd, Professional Scrum Trainer Ryan Ripley addresses the questions of the webinar and provides guidance and advice to the most pressing questions and situations.

In this post, we’ll explain the Liberating Structure ‘15% Solutions‘ and how we've used it. It’s a wonderful structure that can ignite big change by starting with small, individual contributions.

In Scrum classes we often ask the attendees to draw a picture of the Scrum framework, in order learn what their current understanding of the framework is. In many cases people are close to remembering the three roles, three artifacts and five events.

It has been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results, and yet we engage in an unconscious fiction of predictability every day. We work in an uncertain world, and our main goal in pursuing agility is to confront the unknown, and in doing so, to mast...

Agile coaching is a journey into irony. One of the chief discoveries you can make on this voyage is that the more experienced you become, the worse at the job others often think you get.

A goal, a forecast of functionality, plus the plan to deliver it. the Why, the What and the How. Sprint Goal + Sprint Backlog. How do these relate, plus a practical example.

Big organizations use Scrum as a driver of agility. But often after launching, management start focusing on the speed of development instead of quality. DoD is often weak and the company's agility is reduced as a result. In this article we will use system diagrams to analyze the reasons why it happe...

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Daniel Ziegler discusses the Sprint Review and how the Product Owner works with stakeholders and the Development Team on managing and reviewing requirements, Product Backlog Items and their completion. He describes how there is no official "sign...

Dear friends, I want to share an unusual view of Scrum with you. Perhaps you've never thought about such a point of view before. I hope it will be useful.

Does your Finance Department discourage Agile software development because it would all be charged to operational expense?

In this webinar, Professional Scrum Trainer, Rich Visotcky talks through real-life examples of how an engaged Product Owner can generate the most value. He also touches on examples of how a Product Owner can be overly present and cause more harm than good.

Getting your thoughts down on paper is a great way to reflect on and sort out the complicated aspects of our industry. The three Vs of Product Ownership is an example of this and is a major theme of our book — and the topic of this post.

When delivering a Professional Scrum Master training or helping clients creating awesome products with Scrum, some people ask me how to adapt (downgrade) Scrum to make it work in their organizations.

Often I hear people say that Scrum does not take care of risk: there is no risk log, risk is not on the agenda of the Sprint Review or Retrospective as a standard agenda-item. The Developers need to be accountable for the quality of the product and how it's made. And ultimately each role in Scrum h...

This presentation by Professional Scrum Trainer, Chuck Suscheck describes the discovery techniques of BDD and exemplifies an end-to-end automated business scenario so that you can see the direct tie between business needs and software execution possible with BDD.

Agility is the ability of an organization to adapt to new conditions and to change its direction. The modern service-based format of the production-based economy of the previous century renders the competence of companies to change even stronger than before.

In this session, we explore how to integrate Peter Senge's 5 Disciplines of Learning Organizations with the Nexus Framework to help organizations to scale their business agility with Scrum. Along the way, we find out what Michelangelo had to say many centuries ago that can guide and inspire them in ...

The purpose of Scrum is to deliver Increments of releasable functionality. So at each Sprint Review, a “Done” Increment is required to make transparent the progress made by the team.

There is often confusion when organisations transition to an agile way of working, particularly with the mapping of roles. This blog explores the role of Project Managers in Scrum.