As people become more empowered and capable of taking ownership of their process and executing on their decisions, the next area to focus is raising the bar. This is about a drive for continuous improvement. In this article, we look at 4 ways to raise the bar.

Agility is a continuously evolving state that is unique to a specific organization, given the organization’s people, its constructs and its history. A traditional (industrial) approach to becoming more Agile (adaptive) commonly creates no more than an illusion of agility.

The 2019 Scrum Master Trends Report is an update to the 2017 Scrum Master Salary Report that Age of the Product conducted in 2017. By partnering, we have secured a larger sample and broadened the reach of the research, growing from over 500 to more than 2,100 respondents and adding more geographies ...

The 2019 Scrum Master Trends Report is based on a 2018 survey of over 2100 participants, with a focus on trends useful to both new and experienced Scrum Masters.

In this webinar, Nic Easton, Nexus Scrum Master, Net Health, and Patricia Kong, Product Owner of Enterprise Solutions, Scrum.org walk through how they worked together to help Net Health address these challenges using Evidence-Based Management (EBM), a framework by Scrum.org that helps organizations ...

Recently as I was delivering a keynote about leaders sharing their failures one person from the audience asked me mine. I shared some from my blog I wrote a couple years ago...

Hello, great people of the world. Welcome back to the Scrum Master blog series with yours truly. As we enter the new year, we are seeing Scrum becoming the most commonly used framework to manage complex product delivery in the industry.

In my career, I have had the great privilege to witness different companies undergo many different phases of agile transformations. I’ve met many amazing Scrum Masters along the way that have evolved to take on major responsibilities in their organizations.

How are you interacting with your employees today? Are you taking the time to make an authentic connection?

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Chuck Suscheck discusses some ideas that he has learned when building software over the years on how to make decisions on prioritization, especially as they impact architecture and design. (3:21 minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Magdalena Firlit describes what it means to be a leader within an organization that is acting in an agile manner and things that they should understand and look out for. This is the first in a three part series. (1:27 minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Magdalena Firlit discusses ways that leaders in organizations that are trying to improve their agility can support their Scrum Teams and help them to be more successful.  This is the second in a three part series. (2:49 minutes)

McKinsey & Company and Scrum.org conducted a joint study exploring the values and traits that make agile teams successful, helping to guide companies with concepts and ways to better recruit and coach their teams. This report summarizes the findings.

Dave West, Product Owner of Scrum.org, co-authored a paper in collaboration with McKinsey about favorable personally traits for team members in agile teams. In this episode of the Agile.FM Podcast with Joe Krebs, receive confirmation about some well known facts such as handling ambiguity but also so...

A discussion is raging among Project Managers about the Iron Triangle because the authors of Scrum say “Scrum breaks the Iron Triangle”.

Why would Product Owners prevent value delivery, you ask? They shouldn’t, and don’t want to, but yet I see them do it every day. And usually, it’s without them even knowing they’re doing it. Here’s four observations of how Product Owners prevent value delivery, and suggestions to improve.

Scrum stands on the three legs of transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Of these, transparency can arguably be said to come first. Unless a situation is made clear it cannot be inspected, and any consequent adaptation arising therefrom is likely to prove futile.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Martijn van Asseldonk answered the pressing Scrum questions of the audience.

One common misconception of agile is that it simply allows you to get everything done faster. This is simply not true. Agile allows us to plan a much smaller scope of work, delivering iteratively and incrementally to deliver the least amount scope needed to solve the problem/capture the opportunity....

This is the third post in a series on tools for Scrum Masters and their teams.

The Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) course has now been out for more than 6 months at Scrum.org. As one of the first few trainers who wanted to teach this course when it came out, I find it is a great way to combine the Scrum framework with Kanban as a strategy to deliver value to your customer...

Scrum is simple to understand. The Scrum Guide is just 19 pages. Over the years, I've met many Scrum practitioners who have never read the Scrum Guide or they have read it once and once only. I believe there's something special about the Scrum Guide and because of this, it's important that we consid...

When practicing the guitar, there have been times when I got very demotivated and frustrated until I found out I was focusing on my mistakes instead of enjoying all the good licks I was producing on my guitar as well. I learned that focusing on the good things I play makes practicing the guitar much...

In working in today’s knowledge work economy, it surprises me that many leaders still use traditional ways of leading their people. Leaders still put most of the focus on the work to be done instead of focusing on the people to create an environment where great work can be done.

A couple of months ago I blogged about some of the tools and toys that live in the trunk of my car. I take these along everywhere I teach and coach. Since posting, people have suggested additional items that just must be in my toolbox.

In the past years I’ve been the king of procrastination... there's a way to reduce anxiety by thinking differently, this article explains my way of doing it.

Now that we’ve covered the essentials of self-organization and intrinsic motivation, let’s dive into how you make decisions that enable and empower others.

The year 2018 was about amplifying. Amplifying my message, thoughts, ideas, inspiration and passion. My energy and stamina are not what it once was. The journey ahead of me is smaller than the one behind me.

About 40 people gathered at the nlScrum meetup dedicated to physical and digital tools for the agile workspace. Tools that help developers, coaches and trainers to survive in the toughest environments.

In this episode of the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast, Patricia Kong and Kurt Bittner explore Nexus, a scaling framework developed by Scrum.org to tackle just that: the use of Scrum in larger organizations and multi-team product development efforts.

A few days back I did a Scrum Tapas Video explaining a few of the rules within Scrum. Besides these rules, there are also certain guidelines which help Scrum Teams to make the best possible use of Scrum framework to create maximum Business Impact.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Hiren Doshi describes value streams, how Scrum can help surface issues and impediments within the value stream and ways to "open the pipe" to create greater efficiencies.

The Scrum framework deliberately leaves the manager role out, thus allowing business to structure and organize how it sees fit. 

As an agile coach and trainer, I have had the opportunity to reach thousands of students that are just beginning their journey into the Scrum and agile world.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Chad Beier hosted an interactive Q&A session on how to rationalize your demand (where the work comes from) and your delivery (the people doing the work) to inform your decisions on how to organize your teams and backlogs.

Once you have started to create a strong foundation, the second action of an effective servant-leader is to empower and enable others.

A real-estate software company went through an Evidence-Based Management (EBM) workshop with Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma. Upon implementing EBM they learned how to measure the value of their work and drove its largest revenue growth in 10 years.

The Development Team is both self-organizing and cross-functional and by the end of each Sprint provides an increment that is ‘done’ and releasable. The team defines how to organize work in a Sprint.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainers Hiren and Punit Doshi provide some examples of impediments that they have run into while working on Scrum Teams and ways that they went about handling them. They also investigate how a Scrum Master can help the Development Team deal with potent...

In this presentation at TEDx Toronto, Professional Scrum Trainer, Dave Dame gave an inspirational talk reminding us that that when you see the world differently, you have a different world available to you. (15:41 Minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Piyush Rahate briefly talks about some of the rules in Scrum, why they are important and how they can be applied. (2:23 Minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Jeff Bubolz provides some tips from his experience working to deliver a product with multiple Scrum Teams. Jeff discusses Product Ownership, Backlogs, Daily Scrums and more. (5:41 Minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Krystian Kaczor discusses the purpose that the Nexus Integration Team plays when scaling Scrum beyond 2 Scrum Teams to deliver an integrated product. (4:43 Minutes)

This is the truth. If we turn things upside down organizations can't truly embrace Agility. I would be lying if I said that we can improve our product delivery process even more. A small poem about Agility & Scrum

This case study follows the journey of Akbank, one of Turkey's largest banking organizations. They started their journey in 2010 and now have grown to have 950 people and 143 Scrum Teams.

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...

Does a Scrum Master really need technical business knowledge? If you’re trying to break in the world of Scrum, you might be asking yourself: Does a Scrum Master really need technical knowledge? Do they need business knowledge? I’m here to set the record straight.

Servant-leaders must create a strong foundation that helps people feel empowered to take action, enables them to move forward in a common direction despite uncertainty, and to feel inspired and resourceful during challenging times.  The 4 V’s can help you establish this strong foundation:  Vision, V...

William Davis shares his experiences about becoming an advanced Professional Scrum Master (PSM II). William took a course with me (Joe Krebs) in the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area in November 2018 and shortly after passed the PSM II exam.

Many Agile coaches and Scrum Masters believe they know best. They believe teams must follow a certain set of steps and do things a certain way, and if they do, those teams will be more productive, happy, and successful than ever.