This article aims at helping Scrum Masters to conduct the *MOST AWESOME* Sprint Review they ever witnessed. (This article could have been titled: 41 tips that will make your Sprint Review awesome!)

This is the last in a series of 3 blogs presenting the result of an interesting research study from Sam Walker.  Walker discovered that the most successful sports teams that ever existed all shared one single element: They all had a team captain with 7 overlapping traits that made them extremely suc...

What can a Scrum team learn from the World’s Greatest Sports Teams? In this the second of 3 blogs I'm sharing the character traits of an Elite Team Captain.

I remember being told, many years ago when I started university, that Information Technology is a numerate discipline.

In this webinar, moderated by Ravi Verma, panelists Uta Kapp and Dave Dame discuss 7 agile habits that Scrum Teams can gain when they embrace diversity.

Does your Finance Department discourage Agile software development because it would all be charged to operational expense?

The Times News were on a journey to re-platform their system. While working diligently behind feature flags, using elements of Scrum, it wasn’t clear to the stakeholders the value being delivered and how well the teams were progressing towards their end goal.

This is the second in a series of posts exploring Scrum Mastery. In our first post, we introduced the 4 dimensions of Scrum Mastery. Scrum requires self-managing, cross-functional, collaborative teams. The success of Scrum hinges on the strength of a team. In this post, we will explore the Team Iden...

Bottom line - Toyota Improvement and Coaching Kata is the perfect partner for flow-based retrospectives.

"An Agile Coach know more than just Scrum", said one consultant in a boardroom meeting, "he/she knows organisation dynamics, executive coaching and other Agile practices like Kanban and DevOps", he continued.

Bottom line - PSK improves the performance of Scrum teams, but WiP must be optimized for flow and work in progress should not relatively age compared with other in progress items

Imagine this, you are at the weekly company meeting in a room of 60 people. All of them are co-workers who you have been working with for several years. You feel engaged and committed to the goal set by your company. 

The purpose of Scrum is to deliver Increments of releasable functionality. So at each Sprint Review, a “Done” Increment is required to make transparent the progress made by the team.

Bottom line - WiP limits must be applied to improve flow of the delivery of value. It's a key lever to improve the performance of Professional Scrum Teams, and it's required by the Kanban Guide for Scrum.

Why are there so many meetings?" is a complaint a Scrum Master often hears, especially from team members who are new to agile practice. It's the refrain of those in an organization which is more likely to be doing agile rather than being agile.

In this post, we bust a myth that is at the heart of why refinement feels like a chore to many Scrum Teams: the belief that ‘Product Backlog refinement’ should be done as one or more required ‘meetings’ that must be attended by everyone in the team. We also offer some alternative approaches that fit...

Improve and Accelerate Software Delivery for Large, Distributed, Complex Projects: The Nexus Framework is the simplest, most effective approach to applying Scrum at scale across multiple teams, sites, and time zones. Created by Scrum.org–the pioneering Scrum training and certification organization f...

It is beyond debate I'm afraid; business projects are prone to failure – particularly large and complex projects. There is some irony in that, no? The more you hope to achieve, the more likely you are to be unsuccessful. Learn how the tech industry uses the Scrum Framework to curb failure and delive...

Do your team members have a tendency to pick up the next task to work on in case they get stuck with current task because they are measured for ‘utilization’? Such multitasking isn’t just bad, but also has harmful effects and causes stress on the person as proven by a study at Stanford University.

Over a wet weekend in the UK, my 12 year old daughter was looking for something to do and decided to draw a poster to while away some time. My daughter decided that she would help me by making a poster about Scrum ( honestly!, I am not making this up. I didn't realise how much I talk about a scrum ...

I remember going on a PRINCE2 course a few years ago, and trying to determine how this celebrated stage-gated framework might be applied to an agile mode of delivery. I was employed in the UK public sector at the time, and I had come to know how instrumental "PRINCE2 compliance" can be to the striki...

In this blog, PSTs Sjoerd Kranendonk and Wilbert Seele explain how to achieve more and risk less by being a less visible Product Owner. In the Scrum Guide the following is written about the role of the PO: "The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the ...

Being a Scrum Master of a team with strong personalities can be challenging at times especially when two or more people believe that their approach is right.

One of the most common questions I am asked in my Professional Scrum Master (PSM) courses and in coaching engagements is: How do we build trust? This is a complex topic. And there are no simple or quick processes or techniques that will guarantee an outcome. Nor can you know how long it w...

Originally Broadcast on the Passionate Team Podcast in this episode they talk with Dave West, CEO and Product Owner of Scrum.org about how Scrum enables passion among Scrum Team members.

“Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.” - Edward de Bono If you are ever hired as an agile coach,...

As an Agile Coach, you frequently encounter situations which demand quick thinking to get things moving in the right direction. Over time I have found few techniques which come in handy and always keep these in my playbook in case needs arise. This is the third part in the series of tools that I hav...

We regularly work with teams that see the Daily scrum as irrelevant, disruptive, and boring. They are often right. Here are three common anti-patterns and three potential solutions.

Working as a Scrum Master I asked myself... "How do I know if my team are demonstrating the Scrum Values? What can I use to show their current state?" Remembering an exercise I did some years ago whist at my local Agile group - Agile Yorkshire, I thought I could use a "Spider Web" to visua...

This is second part in the series of tools that I have found useful in my role as Agile Coach – Timeboxing.

You’ve implemented Agile into your organization and hired professionals with Agile experience on their résumé to back it up. Yet, something is still not right. The gains that Agile promised don’t seem to be coming to fruition. Delivery times aren’t faster than they were before.

As an Agile Coach, you frequently encounter situations which demand quick thinking to get things moving in the right direction. Over time I have found few techniques which come out handy and always keep these in my playbook in case need arise. This is first part in the series of tools that I have fo...

Chris is a true example of an new type of leader. Not because he is a great speaker, nor because he has a big vision or has world changing ideas. Just because of one seemingly simple skill. A skill which is very hard to master. He recognizes the defining moments when he has to live the ambition. He ...

Today we announced a new class Professional Scrum With Kanban. This class helps teams practicing Scrum to apply the practices of Kanban without breaking Scrum. It shows how visualization and flow are great partners in delivering Done software and how Scrum with Kanban helps teams become more profess...

A friend sent me an e-mail, asking me to summarize Nexus and the Scaled Professional Scrum class. Here's the gist of what I sent in return. Why Nexus? If you know Scrum, you already know the basic principles and most important things needed to scale Scrum: inspect and adapt cycles, and the imp...

A facilitation technique to make the purpose of your work as a Scrum Team clear.

An online version of The Definitive Guide to Nexus

In this article we’ll bust the myth that in Scrum too much time is spend in meetings. We’ll not only describe how time-consuming the Scrum events factually are, but also clarify the purpose and importance. After explaining the origins of this myth, we’ll offer some practical tips to prevent or resol...

Many Scrum Teams use User Stories as a technique for creating their Product Backlog Items (PBIs). But when the teams bring big stories to the Sprint, this causes lots of problems. The common recommendation is to slice stories so that the team can take 6-10 of them to the Sprint. Let's discuss in det...

Flashback to 1995, Jeff and Ken had presented their paper at OOPSLA on Scrum. People recognizes it as one of the new ways of working. Fast forward to Feb 2001, no ski resort gathering and no Agile manifesto. People are trying different methods, frameworks and practices for improving the state of sof...

Yes, you read it right, it was really challenging for me, and may be other PSTs have the same or different experience. A couple of times I thought about quitting it but because of some or the other reasons I continued. This article is an attempt of sharing my journey, may be useful to you before you...

People in the Agile community must have heard or have came across this white paper multiple times. We have been preaching about it in our training classes but I am not sure how many of Agile community members have actually read it thoroughly. The paper was published in Jan 1986 issue of HBR and is v...

"See it all. See it fairly. Be truthful, be sensible and be careful with language" - Henry Grunwald In Scrum we care about the precise and considered use of language, since any obfuscation reduces transparency. When we try to implement Scrum, we can sometimes find that the pressure is on to c...

Use "Shift & Share and Caravan" as facilitation pattern in Scrum for Sprint Reviews, brainstorms and involving stakeholders. Spread novel ideas across groups of any size with "Shift & Share" and rapidly receive feedback with "Caravan".

Today we bust the myth that it is the responsibility of the Scrum Master to resolve all problems that are hindering the Development Team.

The Scrum Framework The Scrum Framework is a lightweight framework that defines three Roles, three Artifacts and five Events, which is used to develop and maintain complex Products in complex environments. Scrum doesn't prescribe a lot of things you must do, the Scrum Framework doesn't include exte...

Appreciative Interviews (AI) is a Liberating Structure that helps identify enablers for success in less than one hour. By starting from what goes well - instead of what doesn’t. In this post we'll share examples of how we've applied this structures within our Scrum training and coaching engagements.

I have created a little exercise that I like to use to help focus the on things we can change, or at least situations to seek out or avoid, to help focus change efforts. The essence of it is summarized in a picture. I call this the agile affinity model, and the dimensions the key drivers of empiric...

Here I am sitting in my hotel room while looking at my half-empty wine glass and the stars outside while preparing for my last Professional Scrum Master (PSM) class for the year 2017 and pondering about all of the classes I have facilitated over this year. PSM has been a transformational course for ...

Scrum is a framework that thrives on self-organizing teams. It gives you boundaries (e.g. time-box of a Sprint), clear accountabilities (e.g. Product Owner optimizes value), and goals (e.g. “Done” Increment). But it doesn’t tell you exactly how to do the work. Every Scrum Team needs to figure out...