System optimization: Upgrading Team Competencies When developing complex innovative products, the Development Team will have different a workload for each one of their members. The speed of the entire Development Team is often limited by the speed of the specialist with peak loads. To overcome th...

"To ensure continuous improvement, [the Sprint Backlog] includes at least one high priority process improvement identified in the previous Retrospective meeting." - The Scrum Guide, November 2017 That old familiar feeling Have you ever had a sense of déja-vu in a Sprint Retrospective? You know...

Last time I talked about the Ghana Police Service (GPS) I was talking about Professional Organisational Change and the approach the Inspector General of Police (IGP) is taking; using Scrum to incrementally make changes to the organisation. While Nana Abban and the IGP have been focusing on the big p...

As a travelling Scrum and DevOps consultant I’m constantly asked “should our team use Scrum”? Now you might think that being a Professional Scrum Trainer – and serious Scrum fanboy – I would always answer “Yes!”. Well, you would be wrong. I frequently talk people out of Scrum – for the right reasons...

In this blog post I'll share my view on the Scrum Master as the Change Leader. I'll briefly describe the common misunderstandings and the preferred stances of the Scrum Master. The services a Scrum Master provides for the Development Team, Product Owner and organisation, and the 3 levels that can be...

Never an easy answer and always being pulled in multiple directions, a question often asked: How many Scrum Teams should I be on?

When multiple Scrum Teams are working on one product, shared DoD becomes necessary. DoD helps to ensure that each increment is transparent by the end of every Sprint and creates a shared understanding of what “Done” means.

In this session, Professional Scrum Trainers Sanjay Saini, Hiren Doshi and Nagesh Sharma discuss how they work with organizations and individuals to change thought processes to become more agile. They will look at real-world examples of how they have built successful Scrum Teams, driving agile think...

"It's weird when you get roles that coincide with your life" - Lily James Introduction Impressive-sounding job titles are a recurring joke in large organizations. They often bear little relationship to the devil's brew of chaos and drudgery which is a daily reality for most. Cynics may hol...

I recently had the pleasure of conducting Scrum.org’s Professional Scrum Foundations workshop to a group of students at the nonprofit job-training program, Year Up, in Boston. Teaching this group of millennials -- motivated, talented young adults from low-income background -- was an illuminating exp...

Most of the Agile transformations I have witnessed have started like this: First, a company raises a strategic initiative on so-called Agile implementation. A large budget is allocated and a tender is arranged to purchase Agile coaching services from companies on the market. Then employees are train...

“The secret of success is to be ready when your opportunity comes” - Benjamin Disraeli A glance back at “Done” A few weeks ago we looked at the Definition of Done, which describes the conditions which must be satisfied before a team’s deliverables can be considered fit for release. Th...

I hear it all the time. Whether it is a consulting engagement or in a Professional Scrum Course, the desire to modify Scrum comes up frequently. 4 Questions to Ask 1. Where does the transparency hurt? Transparency usually brings pain, especially when you are early in your Scrum adoption....

This blog post will focus on how to get started and succeed with Zombie-Scrum. What do you really need to have in place? What are the tips & tricks to give your Zombie-Scrum implementation a kick-start? How to make it sustainable? This article will offer you some nice recommendations.

I have read in several Lean and DevOps sources that the Sprint events imply a kind of waste, so teams are supposed to move to a Continuous Delivery or Kanban lifecycle as they become mature. This post is to discuss that is simply not true, regardless what lifecyle each team chooses as their favourit...

The Sprint Goal is an important part of Scrum. It's like a burning torch that unites the Development Team and helps it move forward during the Sprint. However, the Sprint Goal is not discussed very often, and in this article, I would like to talk about the deep importance of this component. ...

True story - happened in one of my recent Professional Scrum Master workshops. I think had just mentioned that there is no "Sprint Commitment" in Scrum, only a "Sprint Forecast".

Several of us in the Kanban and Scrum community got together recently to build a bridge between Scrum and Kanban. We are writing a series of blog posts looking at this bridge from different perspectives. In this post, we present a primer on the Scrum Framework from a Kanban perspective.

Although I’m generally considered to be a strong leader with the people I am privileged to serve, I am still susceptible to making mistakes. We all get caught up in the moment every now and again, and sometimes forget that it’s all about empowering, engaging, and empowering our people. Even great le...

Are you ready to escape the average and become awesome? Do you want to overcome your fears and follow your dreams? We all want to escape the average and the humdrum. The essential step in achieving any great goal is to "START." Inspired by author Jon Acuff's book, Start, I've come up with this ...

"Coming together is a beginning, keeping together is progress, working together is success." - Henry Ford What do the Ford Motor company (Henry Ford, Clarence Avery, Peter Martin, Charles Sorensen), the Google team (Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, Omid Kordestani), and Walt Disney and ...

Recently I attended training on Nexus at Scrum.org’s Boston headquarters. Nexus is based on the core principles and values of Scrum and allows companies to apply Scrum at scale while retaining the bottom-up intelligence of self-organisation.

Several of us in the Kanban and Scrum community got together recently to build a bridge between Scrum and Kanban. We are writing a series of blog posts looking at this bridge from different perspectives.

What makes a great team? Why do some teams achieve greatness, seeing their vision become reality, while others seem to go nowhere?

Learn how to Maximize the value delivered by a combination of internal and external Scrum Team members as we walk through the steps of creating a client-agency partnership using Scrum with Scrum.Org and Blue Coda.

What makes the software development work great? Obviously, technology, right... Wrong! In an interesting article in "Peopleware", authors Tom and Timothy describe how the most important aspect of software development is not technology, but people.

“Scrum begins with Done”. The assertion might seem counter-intuitive, as though we must start by defining the end.

"It's not our fault! The Product Owner is responsible for backlog management, the PBIs aren't well defined." "It's not my fault! The Development Team owns the Sprint Backlog, moreover, the PBIs went through refinement and they have the same level of detailing as the others." "I'm working on th...

Agility is important to an organization and the path to agility becomes more clear by understanding the purpose of pursuing agility. The product owner role is key in increasing the benefits an organization can gain in their path to agility.

When talking about Scrum, people often imagine the picture above: framework and its roles, artifacts, and events. Scrum rules are fairly simple, and they are thoroughly described in the Scrum Guide.

“Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience; you will find it a calamity” - Samuel Johnson A few weeks ago we looked at the problem of technical debt, and at the challenges a Development Team faces when managing it. Technical debt can be defined as the longer term cons...

"As remote teams become more and more common, Scrum Masters must find a way to effectively do Scrum while working with far flung team members." "We are not a software development company, what you are talking works only for software development. We operate in a very different business. That stuff...

Many times, clients ask Agile Coaches like me to come in and share our "expertise" with them. But sometimes they really don't want our "Expertise". What they really want is someone with lots of TLA's to come and tell them that there pre-existing opinions are correct.

Sometime back I read a short SciFi story in a book named People Tools, Story was about a spaceship conducting man’s third ten year expedition to the nearest star. The first two voyages didn’t succeed when the four member crew neared earth. Scientists were puzzled as there were no technical issues wi...

It was only about 30 minutes into the meeting when the senior developer uttered the dreaded words: “Rewrite”. That was the point where what should have been a simple 6-step upgrade turned into a 9 month nightmare upgrade/rewrite costing us millions with nothing new to show for it and left us with a ...

"There are no shortcuts when it comes to getting out of debt" - Dave Ramsey Technical debt can be defined as the longer term consequences of poor design decisions. In a sense it’s like any other debt - there ought to be a clear understanding of why it is incurred, and how and when to pay it b...

Over the last weeks I've been working on a paper about the role of a Business Analysts within Large Scale Scrum, and I thought I'd write a little post on it too, here it goes. On the website of the IIBA you can find their definition of a Business Analyst. a liaison among stakeholders in order ...

The blog post covers 8 preferred stances of a Scrum Master and common misunderstandings.

The Scrum Values are easy to remember, but it can be difficult to understand what they mean, how to apply them, and how to recognize them in teams and individuals. These values are essential to maximize the benefits of Scrum.  In this post, we see how openness is crucial when we are dealing with co...

"Gross ignorance is 144 times worse than ordinary ignorance" - Bennett Cerf Acceptance Criteria: The conditions under which a piece of work may be held to be complete and fit for potential release. Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD): A development approach in which acceptance crit...

Do you want to work in an ecstatic state, losing track of time, doing meaningful work? Here’s how using Scrum helps!

In this introductory-level article we look at the mechanics of a Sprint, and at how team members are expected to collaborate in order to produce a release-quality increment. The first day: Sprint Planning The whole team, including the Product Owner, meet on the first day of the Sprint and cond...

Let’s start with a question. When is the Sprint Planning over? Usually, the first answer that comes to mind is “when the time-box expires”. It is a good answer. However, Sprint Planning is a maximal time-box. We can end the Sprint Planning earlier, can’t we? Yes, when we are done with planning, we c...

A recurring Scrum myth I see in my training and coaching is that there is no planning in Scrum. Unfortunately, this myth can lead to two negative consequences. The people in organizations responsible for budgets, product management, sales, and marketing may be unwilling to try Scrum. ...

The Scrum Team consists of 3 distinct Scrum roles that promote self-organization: the Scrum Master, the Product Owner, and the Development Team. The accountability of each role complements the accountability of the other roles. Hence, collaboration between these roles is the key to success: Th...

When Scrum is introduced in a company, most of the time, the development team embraces it with lots of enthusiasm. Scrum embodies self-organizing, autonomous, multidisciplinary teams that acknowledge individual qualities and reinforces the strengths of the team as a whole. Who doesn't want to be par...

THE (MIXED) BLESSING OF NEXTGEN REWRITES About 10 years ago, I experienced the mixed blessing of being part of yet another nextgen rewrite project. I was guiding a team of about 25 really smart team members, part of a much larger team of about 150+ people. Our team was responsible for completely...

At Amsterdam Airport Schiphol we're using an Agile approach to realize a large digital program. This program includes 5 value streams with multiple teams. Due to the increasing scale of the program, some challenges arise. For example: How to organise a Sprint Review with an increasing amount of t...

IMAGINE Imagine you have just been asked to build an Agility Enablement Organization for your company. Sounds like fun, but there are some constraints you need to work within or around… There are 100+ teams with varying levels of interest in Agile You only have a small team of enablers ...

NEW YEAR RESOLUTION So it's a new year. New Year, new start, yadda yadda yadda... Maybe you are considering some New Year Resolutions so I wanted to invite you to take our 2017 waste-loss challenge by decreasing your Sabotagile Quotient. This challenge builds upon my previous blog - "Agile or S...