Scrum Masters, ask yourself - Are you a natural servant leader, or do you struggle to be the inspiring coach that creates high-performing teams? If you have a real desire to change and are ready for some tough self-reflection, this article may inspire you, and give you hope that you can influence ma...

A few months ago we looked at how teams can optimize flow across the Sprint boundary, a technique which is founded on their ability to make limited and sustainable commitments.

We've all seen it. The Scrum Team that goes through the motions, implements all the mechanics of Scrum, and still when we look at what's going on it doesn't feel right.

During a recent meetup of The Liberators Network, we got together with 30 enthusiastic Scrum Masters.

If you’re new to Scrum and want to get the most out of a team of under-performers, you should try Scrum!!

Your organization has been disturbed by late launches in its last few new products, and now management has charged you with “getting to the bottom of the problem.”

In this post I'd like to discuss "Empathy - why it is important in teams and what you can do if you struggle with it". First, we all know what the role of the Scrum Master is, right?

Changing the way we work is extremely difficult — we all know this. It requires us to find novel solutions to wicked challenges, to deal with cultural baggage (‘the way we do things here’) and to bring along the people needed to make a change successful.

It was 8:59 am on Monday. It was another week which I thought was going to be amazing. Last week our company just closed another round of investment. The company is currently strategizing to scale agility throughout the company.

Overcome common transformation mistakes and enhance your agility.

It is not against the rules of Scrum Framework for a person taking the Scrum Master role also be a member of the Development Team. I've been there. In this post I intend to highlight some of the challenges in form of conflicts of interests that prevents a Scrum Master to coach effectively while bein...

The Scrum Master is often expected to facilitate and animate every Scrum events. But, according to the Scrum Guide, the role of the Scrum Master regarding the different events is to ensure that the event takes place and that attendants understand its purpose.

This article provides five examples of how Liberating Structures are valuable for Scrum Masters.

Many organizations struggle in their implementation of Agile and/or their evolution of agile once they start their journey. They use practices, people, and technology to find a way to overcome their disability of delivering value to market too slowly.

Last week, I had a long discussion with my friends about how to scale up the Scrum Team from the startup product. That was an interesting topic and we had many things to discuss. Some of my friends raised some interesting questions.

The comparison between Kanban and Scrum obviously comes up often when we're talking to teams, especially in the context of Professional Scrum with Kanban. While they are more similar than many practitioners realize, one key difference is the perspective on Teams. 

Teams are becoming the fundamental organizational entity, individual responsibility is being replaced by that of the team. But responsibility does not come about all by itself.

I was working with various groups over the last year and noticed some commonalities in the problems they faced. In this blog I want to share some common collaboration problems and solutions I experimented with.

Flow of work and, most importantly, value is paramount. There are times when you keep looking at the process and don’t understand what is going on, what is wrong, and why stuff is not getting to done. Read to learn how flow can help while limiting work in progress.

The House of Scrum metaphor and sketch seemed to have piqued some interest last year. In this video I go over the 3-5-3 framework, giving a high level overview of Scrum..

Organizations are always on the lookout to cut costs and scale back when they have unfavorable reporting periods. Hiring freezes, and cutbacks in training and traveling tend to be popular and convenient.

Building (and hiring) a great team takes time and effort. Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” became a staple reading in an Agile community these days.

A few days ago, I was observing a Sprint Retrospective. The Scrum Team decided to work on the Definition of Done (DoD), identified as the most important topic to adapt for the next Sprint. The discussions were open and animated, when an unexpected discussion emerged during the session.

Hearing a senior executive announce "We're committed to becoming agile!" is not the bombshell moment it used to be. It no longer indicates a personal revelation or board-room epiphany.

The 2019 Scrum Master Trends Report by Scrum.org and the State of Agile 2018 shows numbers that provide insight in the maturity of agile adoptions.

The purpose of Scrum is to create a potentially releasable Done Product Increment, in order to realize business value. Many teams struggle in improving their Definition of Done. The technique described here allows for greater transparency on what the Definition of Done is, and what the next steps ar...

The Scrum Guide is markedly ambitious in the standard of professionalism it demands of a team. Development Team members must be self-organizing and cross-functional, to the point that they will repeatedly and sustainably create a valuable product increment...

This blog post is about what I learned working with my team as a Scrum Master and improved between one year using Professional Scrum with Kanban.

In my experience, the word YES is one of the biggest things holding the organization back from focusing on their desire towards innovation, disruption, agile, or more customer-centric.

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. It will be demonstrated with valuable outcomes, higher quality, and growth in the capabili...

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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

Hello great people of the world. It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post here. This time I want to share my experience working with Development Teams and a Product Owner at iPrice group who upgraded the way they ran their Sprint Planning.

Scrum is based on self-managed teams. Self-managed teams are able to evolve and adapt quicker in today’s highly complex working environments than traditional command-and-control management structures.

Photography may sound simple but is actually a problem of complex domain. There are many variables - light, subject, motion, distance, composition, framing - that come into play while capturing an image. Although, with current range of cameras equipped with highly adaptable sensors (empiricism) man...

I’ve been in a situation a few times where I’ve interviewed a candidate for a role. I’ve matched their CV to a well-prepared job specification...

This article on Product Backlog refinement shows that Refinement is more than just a meeting where the whole Scrum Team is having a discussion. It requires and involves everyone with shared and special responsibilities.

This article discusses the growth of agility for customer-facing products with 3+ teams, probably tens of teams with Nexus and/or LeSS.

If you've been at an Agile conference, been a Scrum Master for quite some time and joined an Agile meetup group (here in The Netherlands there are several), then you probably found that games can be very quick ways to energize any meeting and to drive learning through fun.

In every Scrum.org Professional Scrum Development class, we touch upon both technical and collaboration practices to help improve the development teams explore new options.

You’re likely to have been asked the question: “we need to go faster, how many more people do we need?” Most people naturally understand that just adding a random number of people isn’t likely to make us any faster in the short run.

A couple of weeks ago we looked at Monte Carlo analysis. We saw how this technique can be used to forecast Sprint capacity, and to anticipate the likely completion schedule for a given backlog of work.

The Agile Manifesto statement of “Customer Collaboration over Contract Negotiation” is less than helpful when it comes to writing contracts for projects to be worked in an Agile fashion.  Contracting for Agile software development projects continues to be a major organizational impediment.

You want to know IF and HOW you can "UP your Scrum" as a Scrum Master? Read this post by Professional Scrum Trainer Jasper Alblas.

Over the years, I've seen countless Scrum adaptions, and I thought perhaps it would be interesting to sum up some of the common misinterpretations. I would love to hear about the misinterpretations that you have faced, so feel free to participate in the comment section.