In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

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

We all are going through a tough time – both socially and professionally. People have been asked to maintain distance to break the COVID-19 outbreak chain. Most of us have isolated ourselves for the past few weeks.

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.

Many teams are finding that they need to adjust to a new reality amid the covid-19 pandemic. Strategic plans lie in tatters, urgent unplanned work fills the board, stakeholders are hammering teams with requests, and routine has gone out of the window. This is a time for a Scrum Master to be pragmati...

This fourth article now addresses basic remote agile anti-patterns — the pitfalls any distributed team wants to avoid to become successful.

Scrum.org CEO Dave West looks back at March and how the Scrum.org Community has rallied in the wake of COVID-19.

While working remotely might feel good right now, we are up for trouble. Anxiety-invoked behavior and stress are likely to happen very soon. Let's discuss what is coming at us.

The urgency of having the right type of conversation, especially today in a remote setting, has significantly increased overnight. This blog provides a perspective on a particular type of conversation and my own “personal experiences”  that show we need them more than ever.

Completing an Agile Coaching certification doesn’t make you an Agile Coach. So where do you start and how do you chart your own journey?

Let's talk about behavior leaders need to exhibit in these difficult times.

Agile has always been about colocation, about direct communication, physical boards, and all the other haptic and analog moments to create value in the digital realm...

Even if you don't know what the Scrum Framework is all about, or even if software development (and for that matter, any kind of product development) or delivery is not your area of work and have stumbled upon this blogpost while doing your research on COVID-19, I urge you to read on. 

What is a Product Owner? What are the differences between a Product Owner and Project Manager? Isn’t a Product Owner some kind of an Agile Project Manager? These are some of the questions we often get from people in our Scrum.org classes.

After covering the Scrum Master and the Product Owner, this article addresses Development Team anti-patterns, covering all Scrum Events as well as the Product Backlog artifact. Learn more about what to look out for if you want to support your fellow teammates.

In this article, we shall investigate why the learning and development of multi-functional specialists in Scrum is the core of organizational Agility and value optimization. Many Development Teams are not collaborating as real teams, but as a collection of narrow specialists focused on "their" tasks...

Learn how individual incentives and outdated organizational structures — fostering personal agendas and local optimization efforts — manifest themselves in Scrum stakeholder anti-patterns which easily can impede any agile transition.

This blog post talks about using the Fish! philosophy for Sprint Reviews.

This article goes into detail how anti-patterns can evolve and possibly create other issues for the Scrum Team.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum. Urgent items There might be urgent changes popping up during the Sprint. How do we d...

An introduction of the Brazilian - Portuguese edition of the paper "The 8 Stances of a Scrum Master". The translation and new visualizations are created by Fabio Fioratti Azevedo and Danilo Almeida.

Choosing how you will walk through your day, having fun with your colleagues and clients, actively listen and participating in collaborations, and ensuring others also have a great day...

A descriptive approach to do throughtput-driven sprint planning in Scrum.

Bringing transparency by inspecting the Product Backlog and adaptation (building) the Sprint Goal, a forecast, and the Sprint Backlog.

This post reflects on a workshop, in which we will observe four systemic thinking perspectives. After reading you will have an insight into constellation work and how it can be utilized to incorporate the four key systemic thinking perspectives into your own agile team coaching workshop design.

In this blog, we’ll dive deeper into the topic: “Scrum Master vs Project Manager”. If you’re having a similar question about the Product Owner vs the Project Manager.

In your Scrum Master mission, a manager has asked you to support the implementation of an Agile framework in a team that, according to him, really needs it!

Technical debt seems like a topic that resides completely in the domain of a Development Team. They are responsible for delivering a potentially releasable Increment after all. But might there be more to it for a Product Owner? More to know, more to deal with, more to take care of it? In my opini...

This article is about how we improved on the Spotify inspired model in one tribe inside a Large Dutch Bank.

A topic at the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos this year was the question "How do we upskill a billion people by 2030?"

On November 22nd, 2019, I gave the closing keynote at Scrum Deutschland, a talk called ‘The Four Things You Do To Prevent Value Delivery.’ In this keynote, I discussed the trends I found during my research at multiple organizations. 

Choosing how you will walk through your day, having fun with your colleagues and clients, actively listen and participating in collaborations, and ensuring others also have a great day. I have written a short story a while ago about the basics of the Fish! Philosophy for being an outstanding team me...

If you are working as a Product Owner, there is—very likely—room for improvement. This list of some of the most common Product Owner anti-patterns might be a starting point.

In my previous 2 episodes of this series on Systems Thinking, I elaborated on what Systems Thinking is and on the Wicked Problems Systems Thinking is trying to solve. In this episode, I want to explore Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS).

Sprint Planning is a core event, defining how your customers’ lives will improve with the next Product Increment. Learn more on how to improve its effectiveness by avoiding 20 common Sprint Planning anti-patterns.

This is quite a long read which you can download as the whitepaper "Systems Thinking in Organizational Coaching".

Before and during the Sprint, effort needs to be put into coordination to ensure the Scrum Teams deliver a working integrated product. This situation can be improved with Multi-team Product Backlog Refinement sessions.

How to make Scrum work? Read on to learn more about my top three objectives for Scrum Masters striving to achieve Scrum Mastery.

I recently read the book The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom. And I noticed strong correlations with what it takes to be an effective Scrum Master.

In this 3rd article, I build on the previous two articles and give an example of how to use the two Pattern Languages to develop your pattern sequence.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Naveen Kumar Singh answered questions from a live audience.

There is one product, one Product Owner, one Product Backlog — a simple rule. How is that supposed to scale, you might ask, isn’t that approach turning...

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma discusses how the Scrum Master as a servant leader can create an atmosphere where the Scrum Team members feel comfortable being able to hold each other accountable. Ravi provides stories, examples and strategies for creating an atmosph...

The agile movement really has changed the way we lead our people. Giving them more freedom and autonomy to do their job often improves the quality, productivity and happiness of the people.

In my earlier article, I explained what Scrum Patterns are and why they could be useful for you in your transformation. In this blog, I discuss how to select and use the Scrum Patterns from the Pattern Languages.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ram Srinivasan takes a look at 8 common myths and misconceptions from people about Scrum discussing why they are not true and what it really means. (10:53 Minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Vajaria discusses some of his experiences when a Product Owner or Scrum Master either also plays another role on the Scrum Team or when Development Team members perceive that they do. He talks about how it can change the dynamic of the team...

Scrum Master anti-patterns: The reasons why Scrum Masters violate the spirit of the Scrum Guide are multi-faceted. They run from ill-suited personal traits and the pursuit of individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.

The Clerk is your personal waiter for all your user story serving. Gathering all the wishes, user stories and demands is what The Clerk does.

The Manager is concerned with the wellbeing of the Scrum Team. The Manager loves to see happy, engaged and motivated people. (S)he loves it when people are developing themselves, learning new skills, obtaining new knowledge and making mistakes.