This blog post discusses how the Circles of Improvement from the book by Stephen R. Covey: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, work in Scrum.

Organizations need to move fast and receive ongoing feedback from customers to drive sustainable innovation through continuous discovery and value delivery. But there is a problem — dependencies.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, Professional Scrum Trainer Peter Gfader answers your technical questions about Scrum. (57:26 Minutes)

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.

When people form a Scrum Team they have to figure out how to become a real team, rather than a collection of individuals. The Scrum Team Charter Canvas is a helpful tool to facilitate Scrum Team formation.

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. One failure symptom of a botched agile transformation is the frustrated Scrum Master.

In this video series, Scrum.org has worked with Atlassian University to design a set of videos to help Scrum practitioners improve how they use Jira while practicing Professional Scrum. This series is ongoing and will continue to evolve and grow over time.

TL; DR: The Developers Code Fallacy — They Should Talk to Customers, Too, Though There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum.

Fake Scrum is around us everywhere we go. It's unavoidable. Just look on the internet lookup fake Scrum right now and you're going to find all kinds of interesting articles that describe Scrum in very weird ways. There are at least five ways you can tell if you've got fake Scrum going on.

Three Wide-Spread Stakeholder Failures There are plenty of Scrum stakeholder failures. Given that Scrum is a framework with a precise and concise yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone.

One of my customers is hiring for the Scrum Master Role and asked if I had a handy-dandy Scrum Master Job Spec that they could use....

Are agile and Scrum the same thing? Learn about the difference from the team at www.FractalSystems.co.uk

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

Agile frameworks such as Scrum have continued to gain traction because of their ability to vastly improve business outcomes and employee engagement. Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams, and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems.

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.

If you are looking to fill a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following 71 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. They are derived from my fourteen years of practical experience with XP and Scrum, serving both as Product Owner and Scrum Master ...

TL; DR: Three Wide-Spread Scrum Master Failures There are plenty of Scrum Masters failures. Given that Scrum is a framework with a precise and concise yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. Learn more about three widespread examples of how Scrum Masters fail their team in ...

Companies have shifted to long-term remote work and employees across many different industries are accepting that the pre-pandemic workplace will not come back. I call this "radical remote".

Make no mistake: Your Product Backlog is the last line of defense preventing your Scrum Team from becoming a feature factory; hence Product Backlog defense is vital: Figure out a process that creates value for your customers. Moreover, have the courage — and the discipline — to defend it at all cost...

What is the common perception of what “ship it fast” means? What seems to be important about shipping fast? And what are ideas to improve the situation in your team or organization? Check the article to find inspiration.

Some time ago, someone on Reddit asked whether there would be any other profession that requires attending a 2-day training class and would then pay as well as a Scrum Master job.

A few weeks ago, Scrum.org hosted a webinar on Product Backlog anti-patterns, which left several questions unanswered as we ran out of time. In this blog post, Stefan Wolpers answers those questions.

Peer Recruiting is the new hiring: Shortly, all creative, technology-based organizations will need to abandon the command & control structures that served the industrial world of the 20th century so well. Instead, they will reorganize themselves around autonomous teams to deal with the complexity an...

I am sure you must have come across funny mirrors in theme parks or fun carnivals which makes you see a ludicrous version of yourself, maybe a heavier or lighter version.

The Agile Culture gap is the nr. 1 cause for immature Agile implementations. You should read this blog if you want to understand how culture affects Agile transformation.

Scrum has proven to be an effective product delivery framework for all sorts of products. However, Scrum is equally well suited to build the wrong product efficiently as its Achilles heel has always been the product discovery part.

The most common cause of a Scrum Team (ST) not accomplishing their Sprint Goal, not having things DONE at the end of the Sprint , is that everybody is busy individually working on their Sprint Backlog items. When you look at the Scrum board, most of the things are OPEN / IN PROGRESS, touch tim...

With the Scrum Team Survey, you can create transparency with your team around five core questions: Are you building what stakeholders need? Are you shipping fast enough?...

TL; DR: How to Make Agile Work in Fast-Growing Startups For years, I worked in several Berlin-based, fast-growing startups in my capacity as Scrum Master, agile coach, and Product Owner. These are my lessons learned on making ‘agile’ — including Scrum as a framework — work in a fast-growing start...

We created 8 do-it-yourself workshops to help Scrum Teams engage and involve their stakeholders. Give it a try, and let us know how it went. Let’s unleash organizational superpowers, together!

On today’s episode of YOUR DAILY SCRUM: How Should Organizations Treat Agile Consultants? Today's question is about how contractors and consultants are treated in Agile organizations.

Like a job ad for a Scrum Master position, the equivalent for the Product Owner position also reveals excellent insight into an organization’s progress on becoming agile.

Are you considering a new Scrum Master job? However, you are not sure that it is the right organization? Don’t worry; there are four steps of proactive research to identify suitable employers or clients for Scrum Masters and avoid disappointment later.

My teams want to use Agile/Scrum - is that aligned with the fact that we’re using EOS® in the organization? My teams use Agile/Scrum, can we use EOS®?

As of January 10, 2021, Scrum.org has renamed the former Professional Scrum Developer Training (PSD) to Applying Professional Scrum for Software Development (APS-SD). At the same time, the Professional Scrum Foundations (PSF) training has also been renamed to Applying Professional Scrum (APS).

While the new Scrum Guide is less prescriptive and more inclusive, it also ties loose ends by including elements better, namely the previously free-floating Sprint Goal and the Definition of Done with the creation of Scrum commitments. This inclusion works remarkably well in the former’s case; regar...

This blog addresses unanswered audience questions from the Scrum Pulse Webinar - A Cycle Time Journey: 164 to 8 Days in 6 Months.

If you are looking to fill a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following 71 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate.

TL;DR: The Scrum Product Owner in 58 Theses The following 58 Product Owner theses describe the PO role from a holistic product creation perspective. They cover the concept of the Product Owner role, product discovery, how to deal with external and internal stakeholders, product portfolio and p...

If you are looking to fill a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following 71 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate.

The new Scrum Guide describes the whole Scrum Team as self-managing. But how do you lead these teams? Do they need leaders? And if so, where should we leaders focus on? Peter Koning - author of Agile Leadership Toolkit - gives three practical tips

In the 2020 Scrum Guide, the Definition of Done is created by the Scrum Team. In previous versions of the Scrum Guide, this responsibility was explicitly owned by the Development Team. I will explain the intention of the change and what it means for Scrum Teams.

The more Scrum Teams are empowered to make and own decisions about their work, the more benefits they will realize.

A Sprint Planning checklist? How dare you: Agile is a mindset, not a methodology. It is a journey, not a destination. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, and what else could you possibly cover with a checklist, the mother of all standardized processes?

From Scrum Master to Development Team members, this set of questions addresses the foundations of a Scrum Team capability to build valuable products: technical excellence and what it takes to achieve this proficiency level.

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

Check out this webinar with Digital.ai and Scrum.org to learn about the practices, tools, and values that have allowed many agile teams to thrive while working remotely and the steps that your organization can take if you have teams or individuals who are struggling.

TL; DR: The Cargo Cult Agile Checklist for Download You want to know the state of agility in your organization? Here we go: Download the checklist, distribute it generously among your colleagues, and run a quick poll.

Scrum and agility create frameworks for diversity. A healthy mix of men and women will benefit from this. In this post I want to explain why.

Last week, someone on Reddit asked whether there would be any other profession that requires attending a 2-day training class and would then pay as well as a Scrum Master job.