Resources

One of the primary purposes of a retrospective is to create action items, but it’s not uncommon to come up with action items that aren’t actionable.  They’re aspirational.  This blog gives you some ways to ensure your retrospectives have actionable items.

Three simple retrospective formats based on the Liberating Structures "Conversation Cafe", "Troika Consulting", and "Discovery & Action Dialogue"

Some time ago, whilst discussing this topic with my fellow Professional Scrum.org Trainer Todd Miller, he shared his experience with using White Elephant principles to enable a participative facilitation environment (thanks Todd!). It inspired me to use it and write this blog. 

Powerful Product Owner. It sounds like a threat, isn’t it?  Anyone overpowering affects the whole team’s activity and outcome. No wonder this affects retrospectives as well. 

Why many Scrum teams struggle with continuous improvement, and how you can do better

A self-managing team is a fundamental part of effectivity. How can this happen during your Sprint Retrospective? Check it out!

Scrum Values make the use of Scrum successful. How can you and your Team live these values during the Sprint Review? Check it out!

How does your Sprint Retrospective support adaptation in order to minimise deviations from agreed goals? Each of the Scrum Events serves to adapt. So does the Sprint Retrospective. Check it out!

In a recent episode of Your Daily Scrum, Professional Scrum Trainers Todd Miller and Ryan Ripley teach you the Scrum Framework in 7 minutes!

In today's vlog I would like to come back to the fundamentals of Scrum ... Done Increment.

A Scrum Event is a meeting. So why don't we just call it that? Why create a new word? Given the poor reputation that meetings have, maybe it's not a surprise. Rather than replicate the name and pain of meetings, the Scrum Events are designed to replace them and be all that you need. The power of the Scrum Events is in the way they're time-boxed and in their purpose. Let's take a closer look.

This workshop was delivered on 16th September 2021 and focused on introducing the core concepts of the Sprint Review and its empirical nature.

According to the 15th annual State of Agile report, there has been a tremendous increase in the adoption of agile frameworks over the last year. Within software teams, agile adoption grew from 37% in 2020 to 86% in 2021.

This workshop was delivered on 5th August 2021 and focused on highlighting the value of people in the product delivery world and some of the things that need to change.

There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone.

When using the Scrum framework, the Retrospective is the final event in a Sprint.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, Professional Scrum Trainer Punit Doshi answers audience questions about New Scrum Masters, metrics, Sprint Retrospectives, Sprint Planning and more!

How does the Sprint Retrospective supports Transparency? Transparency being one of the core underlying concepts of the Scrum framework. What questions can you ask with your team about your Sprint Retrospective to raise transparency?

We’ve already discussed the importance of decentralised command and decision-making in an earlier blog, outlining how managers need to be able to train, mentor and teach their teams.

Complaining is like releasing gas. It’s a natural occurrence. Everyone does it. But no one wants someone else to do it next to them. How to complain less and do more by Sahin Guvenilir.

Join me and explore the reasons and the consequences of this Sprint Retrospective anti-pattern in 83 seconds...

In their book Agile Retrospectives, Esther Derby and Diana Larsen popularized the idea that a Sprint Retrospect comprises five stages. The second stage refers to gathering data so that the Scrum Team can have data-informed Retrospectives.

On today’s episode of YOUR DAILY SCRUM: Can the Scrum Team skip their Sprint Retrospective?

I sat, as an observing consultant, in my third Retrospective of the day. I noticed high energy and openness as the room's buzz showed me signs that this team was genuinely collaborative...

This blog post describes some lessons that I learned from facilitating a retrospective in a real prison for a group of my cellmates, political prisoners.

Sprint Retrospective is the last Scrum event within a Sprint. During this event entire Scrum Team- Scrum Master, Product Owner & Development Team inspects the Sprint and decides how to improve the next Sprint.

Scrum is defined completely in the Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, the originators of Scrum.  The Scrum Guide is maintained independently of any company or vendor and therefore lives on a brand neutral site.  The Scrum Guide is translated and available in over 30 languages.

Ideas on how to use Powerful Questions virtually and help teams find their own solutions to persistent problems.

As per Scrum Guide – The Sprint Goal is an objective that will be met within the sprint by implementing the Product Backlog, and it guides the Development Team on why it is building the Increment.

An attendee of a course I delivered recently reached out to me post course to ask a question. [This is something that I always encourage, with new knowledge often comes new questions]

Facing a large number of risks while delivering products seems to be normal. And, it is. It is common and natural. What we need to do, is manage the risk.

We often try to make massive change once we realize something isn't right and this doesn't normally go so well. When it comes to making progress everyone wants to LEAP; take BIGGER steps.

Philips, with their roots in complexity science, used both the Scrum framework and Liberating Structures to help people navigate challenges, from small to complex, by working together effectively. This case study is the first in a series to demonstrate how Scrum Teams (can) use Liberating Structures to deliver more value to their stakeholders. Each case study focuses on how one particular Liberating Structure was used to help Scrum Teams overcome a the company challenge frequently experienced by many teams.

In May 2019, I spoke at the Agile Manchester conference, where I presented my talk "The Product Owner's Toolbox".

“Can an R&D team of chemists, physicists, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers and embedded software developers optimize teamwork and value by using Scrum? And can live virtual Scrum training deliver a practical Scrum learning experience to everyone on such a functionally diverse team?”

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Piyush Rahate provides examples of why a Sprint may be canceled, ways to avoid canceling a Sprint and what might happen if the decision to cancel is made. (4:05 Minutes)

The fact is, Scrum and DevOps works well together.

In our work of building Agile capability in organisations and training, mentoring and coaching hundreds of teams, we saw that Scrum Teams that embraced and lived Scrums core values, exhibited the same characteristics that Google found in its quest for the secret of high performing teams.

Scrum is a straightforward framework to develop complex software products in a complex environment but hard to practice.

Inspiration for fulfilling the stances of a Scrum Master, remotely.

This eighth article now looks into supporting a distributed Development Team organizing a remote Daily Scrum.

*Covid is a fictional character based on my imagination that represents the strain of CoronaVirus that is causing the disease Covid-19. This is just a very simple and sincere attempt to put my knowledge and understanding about Covid-19 to test in this article and I tried making the connection with Scrum. I hope you enjoy it.

A few weeks ago, I had a wonderful conversation with Diana Larsen on Agile FM, and it did not come as a surprise, that the topic of retrospectives came up. Diana is the co-author of the book Agile Retrospectives , which has been very influential in many agile careers, including mine. 

Although most people see the value of Sprint Goals, how to create them is a huge source of confusion and frustration. Is the Spring Goal there before the Sprint Backlog? How do you create a Sprint Goal out of the unrelated set of items at the top of your Product Backlog? And should everything on the Sprint Backlog be related to the Sprint Goal? In this post I work from examples of a real product, and the Sprint Goals we used there, to answer those questions.

Working overtime in stressful situations is not a viable long-term remedy and should not be seen as a professional solution, but as a warning signal to be heard courageously.

This sixth article now dives into organizing a remote Sprint Planning with a distributed team: practices, virtual Liberating Structures, and lessons learned.

The Scrum Master encourages the Scrum Team to improve, within the Scrum process framework, its development process and practices to make it more effective and enjoyable for the next Sprint.

In this blog post I explain why the Sprint Goal is key for an effective implementation of Scrum and how it is widely present in the Scrum framework by exploring its “lifecycle”. 

In every Sprint, Sprint Retrospective is an excellent chance to inspect and adapt the way of working.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Dominik Maximini provides a short overview of each of the Scrum Events, describing their use, value and expected timing. (3:10 Minutes)