3 Do-it-yourself workshops to create, use, and improve your Definition of Done

Eine meiner Lieblingsübungen aus meinen Professional Scrum Product-Owner-Kursen ist die Frage, wie als Mitglied des mittleren Managements am besten Product Owner Sabotage betreibt. Die Regeln der Übung sind einfach: Sie dürfen keine Form von illegalen Aktivitäten anwenden.

One of my favorite exercises from my Professional Scrum Product Owner classes is how to best sabotage a Product Owner as a member of the middle management. The exercise rules are simple: You’re not allowed to use any form of illegal activity. So, outsourcing the task to a bunch of outlaws is out of ...

Lors de mes formations officielles Scrum.org et en coaching d’équipes, on me demande souvent comment faire avec la nature centralisée des organisations. Dans cet article, je partage une alternative aux structures descendantes de nos organisations traditionnelles, les DAOs. Nous découvrirons ce qu’el...

A collection of powerful questions & opportunities to help your team reflect, learn, and improve, continuously.

The Agile Manifesto (penned in 2001) includes four values and 12 principles that describe a new approach to complex work. Agile is an umbrella term comprising a variety of frameworks and approaches to value delivery, including Scrum.  Previously, we discussed the 12 principles included in the Agile ...

In my Professional Scrum Training and coaching sessions with teams, I’m often asked about how to navigate organizations’ centralized planification. In this article, I'll share an alternative to traditional organizations’ top-down structures - DAOs. We will discover what they are, how they support Sc...

I learn all the time, and 2021 taught me a lot. Based on those lessons, I’d like to share an update on what organizational agility means to me in 2022. I hope you find it useful for what it does and does not mean for you.

"Scrum is a lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems."1 Scrum Teams generate value by creating and delivering Done Increments.

SAFe® war schon immer ein kontroverses Thema innerhalb der agilen Gemeinschaft. Deshalb habe ich bereits 2017 eine erste Umfrage zum Net Promoter Score® des Scaled Agile Framework SAFe ® durchgeführt. Das Ergebnis war damals -52.

The Scrum framework comes with its own guardrails and values, but it is worth taking a moment to consider the base upon which Scrum is founded by examining the principles and values of the Agile Manifesto.  The Agile Manifesto includes four values and 12 principles that describe a better way to appr...

TL; DR: The SAFe ® NPS ® Score as a Scaling Framework Is -56 SAFe® has always been a controversial topic within the agile community. Therefore, back in 2017, I ran a first survey on the Net Promoter Score® of the Scaled Agile Framework SAFe®. The result back then was -52. Four and a half years la...

Spark small and incremental change in your Scrum Team, with our community-driven actionable quick tips.

Forget all these Agile Maturity Scans which are often treated as management reports and too focussed on the mechanical side of "do these things and the maturity goes up". Change itself should be considered an empirical journey with no end state. It’s always on the move, so start with making your tra...

A guide on how to act professionally by seeking out evidence to test what you believe to be true about Scrum, teams, and change

How to Fail as an Agile Coach in Scrum by Scrum.org trainer Chee-Hong Hsia.  ​​​​​​​Helping organisations in their Agile journey sustainably while respecting the three Scrum accountabilities. A must-read if you're a dedicated Agile Coach or working with Agile Coaches in your organisation where Scru...

TL; DR: Product Owner Interview Questions: The Product Mindset If you are looking to fill a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following 82 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. This 8th set of Product Owner interview questions addresses the ...

In this Blog, Dave West explores how we are transitioning into the deployment phase of the digital age.

Spark small and incremental change in your Scrum team, with our community-driven actionable quick tips.

Surprising insights from scientific studies into when and why code smells are introduced, and practical recommendations for how to write better code

Was ist Product Backlog Refinement? Scrum Teams machen es ständig. Es passiert im Sprint Review, nach dem Daily Scrum, im Sprint Planning und als Teil der Entwicklung. Sie diskutieren über die bevorstehende Arbeit, um sie zu präzisieren.

Familiarize yourself with the principles of Liberating Structures and learn how they can strengthen your Scrum Team.

A common question we get asked is how do we get started with creating a Definition of Done? Let's explore how we can obtain transparency of where you are, your destination should be, and what your possible first steps are to get there!

Read on and learn more on how to best sabotage a Scrum Master from the exercise results of more than ten PSM I and PSM II classes. (I slightly edited the suggestions for better readability.)

Myth 1 – Scrum is a Methodology To bust this first myth, I would prefer to differentiate between the concepts of methodology and framework. Methodology vs. Framework A specific methodology is a well-defined set of principles, concepts, tools, and associated practices that guide processes to...

Why it matters to have a shared understanding of the product your Scrum team is building.

Insights from 7 scientific studies into what it is that Product Owners do and what makes them successful

Aligning Scrum Team Topology to Strategy with OKRs and Product Goals Yeah, I know. Could I squeeze more buzzwords into the title? I guess I could include Digital Transformation, Cloud, AI, and Machine Learning for effect. But seriously, I wanted to share some insights around how to align your Scr...

Many self-managing teams struggle to reach a truly high-performing state. When an organisation moves to a self-management model, a key service centralised management traditionally played – giving feedback – is often ignored, leaving teams struggling to truly grow. In this article, we share how to g...

It might surprise you that even those with years of Scrum practice sometimes make statements about the framework that are, well, inaccurate. The Scrum Guide outlines how teams can learn to work together to deliver complex work. It’s not a how-to list of instructions, and perhaps that’s what leads to...

​​​​​​​According to the 15th annual State of Agile Report, there has been a tremendous increase in the adoption of agile frameworks this year.  Within software teams, agile adoption grew from 37% in 2020 to 86% in 2021.  This rapid growth undoubtedly means many individuals working within agile frame...

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PSTs John Riley and Ben Thorp answer questions related to regulating workflow effectively and developing a test-first mindset. They provide insight on practices and techniques useful to kickstarting continuously delivering software and non-softwar...

TL; DR: The Agile Metrics Survey 2021 If you value agile practices, it is crucial to know if a job offering or a prospective business partner that claims to be “agile” really keeps its promises. Unfortunately, as agility usually cannot be observed directly, and certainly not from the outside of a...

TL; DR: Maximizing Utilization as a Relic from the Industrial Management Past There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Since Scrum is an intentionally incomplete framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone. For example, what if the focus of ...

All teams have leaders. They're re accountable, amongst other things, for their team’s effectiveness. Perhaps the best way to enable this effectiveness is to empower the team. But how to empower the team? This article covers three easy tips to do just that.

A lot of talk in the Agile space centres on breaking down silos, and yet it appears that in practice it is one of the things that is met with the most inertia.

We started the Scrum Guide for Leaders series with a discussion of what Scrum means for you as a Leader. Next, we discussed the conditions where Scrum's Empiricism, Self-Management, and Continuous Improvement can thrive. We then explored some concrete examples of how adopting the Scrum Values as a L...

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

As mentioned earlier, Scrum is founded on empiricism - transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Empiricism is only possible in certain cultures and contexts. Leaders have the role of creating and nurturing the culture and shaping the context.

The 2020 version of the Scrum Guide dropped the classic “three questions” of the Daily Scrum. Yet many teams stick with the practice, even when it doesn’t produce the collaboration that is the hallmark of a valuable Daily Scrum. When a Scrum Team I worked with said that their Daily Scrum was lacklus...

(And that should benefit experienced Scrum Masters too)

TL; DR: My Top Ten Worst Scrum Anti-Patterns I recently was invited to a Scrum.org Webinar, and I picked a topic close to my heart: the worst Scrum anti-patterns.

If you’re leading Scrum Teams or generally are a leader in an organization that’s leveraging Scrum?

All elements of the Scrum framework play a role in enabling empirical process control. Sprint Goal is a commitment that reinforces empiricism, however, it remains a part of Scrum which often is being neglected or causes challenges to many Scrum Teams.

Agile isn’t the right fit for every business problem–it’s simply a tool in the toolkit–one of many.

In this blog post, Dave West answers the question - How do you, for the lack of a better word, “manage” Stakeholders?

In a recent class, a student asked, “What are the common difficulties teams face when starting with Agile?”  To  answer this question, I refer to the Tuckman Model of group development. Psychologist Bruce Tuckman discussed team performance in his 1965 paper, Developmental Sequence in Small Groups...

This latest update to the interview guide addresses Product Owner anti-patterns from Product Backlog management and refinement to the Sprint Review.

What drives you to achieve? Money? Promotion? Skill mastery? Whatever it is that motivates you, that’s okay — be thankful that you are motivated to move forwards. Without motivation in any form, you can personally and professionally stagnate to a point where you become a detractor in a team environm...

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