From Spotify to The Liberators to Self-Made: Eight Self-Assessments to Get You Started.

Scrum Master job descriptions typically include the following: “Help remove impediments for the team” or “Accountable for removing impediments”. Organizations clearly find impediment removal to be an important aspect of the role. But what is meant by impediments? Should a Scrum Master remove all the...

In this live session of Ask A Professional Scrum Trainer, Lavaneesh Gautam answers questions about the Daily Scrum, performance measurement, facilitating the Sprint Retrospective, Scrum with Kanban and more!

In this article, we discuss how forecasting in VUCA has always been problematic and the questions that should be asked instead.

Although Scrum is a well-known framework for agile software development, implementing Scrum alone won’t guarantee success. Software development in an agile setting calls for specialized technical abilities, effective process management, and collaborative skills that help teams produce high-quality s...

A prompt engineering guide covering the basics, services to enhance your prompts, and how to use ChatGPT to generate prompts. (Yup, that works, too.)

In this recorded session of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, Reshma (Simran) Nagrani answers questions about the Scrum Master Accountability, estimations, metrics, facilitation techniques and more! (58:45 Minutes)

Solving your customers’ problems in a complex environment requires communication skills, empathy, patience, diplomacy, and professionalism. So let’s have a look at some typical agile negotiation scenarios.

The lack of a standard and evidence-based mechanisms to measure performance and agility leaves many organizations in the dark regarding what activities are needed to not only lead to agility, but what activities leaders should support and promote help to make enterprise agility sustainable, repeatab...

Sprint Goals and Product Goals are really tough to grasp an apply. Most people just restate the PBIs as the goal. Here's a checklist to help you make useful Sprint Goals and Product Goals.

The Definition of 'Done' probably is the most misunderstood concept of the Scrum framework. In this article, we will learn some common dysfunctions or antipatterns associated with the Definition of 'Done' and also certain tips or remedies to overcome these.

During our last webinar, Joanna Plaskonka and I received a lot of questions regarding metrics and the Scrum Team. In this post I will try to address a few of them.

When Scrum Teams experience a work quality issue, they sometimes shift the responsibility for quality control to the Product Owner as a solution. Not only is this impractical, but it's also anti-Scrum. Here's why.

I ran three comparisons, using the identical prompt to trigger answers from the new GPT-4 and previous GPT-3.5 models. Read on and learn what happened. It was not a foregone conclusion.

The Definition of 'Done' is probably the most misunderstood concept of the Scrum framework. In this article we will discuss:  What Is the Definition of 'Done'  How it can be used in Scrum Events

Sentiment surveys at the Sprint Retrospective can be an early warning indicator that something is wrong.

Business agility is only possible with technical excellence. Learn more about the twelve success principles of employing a Definition of Done as a quality standard to support your organization’s path to agility.

Let’s harden a popular Scrum Master interview guide in the age of ChatGPT!

Advanced ChatGPT Prompts for Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and Developers

Will Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches soon be replaced with a chatbot? In this ChatGPT job interview, I put OpenAI’s latest generative AI to the test.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Jay Rahman will be available answers questions on leadership, Product Ownership, Scrum Mastery and more! (58:14 Minutes)

Is your organization having trouble instilling self-management? Then this is the article for you!

I gotta say, refining work items is usually, by far, the Scrum Team’s least popular activity.  No one gets up in the morning saying, “I can’t wait to refine the Product Backlog!” In this article, we will discuss five reasons why refining your Product Backlog is worth the time.

Understanding the “why” behind the Scrum framework can help Scrum teams improve their ability to deliver value to the organization.  We previously discussed the purpose behind each Scrum event and the purpose behind each Scrum accountability.  In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into the purpose...

​​​​​​​Scrum Teams that understand the “why” behind the Scrum framework can better increase value delivery to the organization. Internalizing the purpose behind the events, artifacts and accountabilities of Scrum allows the team to get the most benefit from them.  In this article, we will discuss th...

Suppose you are looking to fill a position for a Scrum Master (or agile coach) in your organization. In that case, you may find the following 73 interview questions helpful in identifying the right candidate.

In this episode of Ask a PST, Yuval Yeret answers the audience's pressing Scrum questions focused around leadership, how leadership and Scrum Mastery are intertwined, and how leaders can engage with Scrum. Yuval is co-author of the Scrum Guide Companion for Leaders. (57:35 Minutes)

Garbage in, garbage out: Learn about 14 first principles to help your team succeed with an actionable Product Backlog.

10 simple principles of a critical scrum success factor to improve your team’s effectiveness, team spirit, and reputation.

I think of the three accountabilities in the Scrum framework as creating a balance of power.  But what happens when an individual fulfilling one (or more!) of the accountabilities in Scrum gets a bit — um — power hungry?  In this article, we will discuss a few examples of how people fulfilling each ...

Epics and features are complementary Scrum practices that some Product Owners use to organize their Product Backlog. Like a folder structure, they are a convenient way to group PBIs into meaningful groups.

Many people using Scrum today have no formal training or are new to agile frameworks. It’s the perfect environment for myths and misconceptions to spread.

Erfahren Sie mehr darüber, worauf Sie achten sollten, wenn Sie Ihre Teamkollegen, die das Produktinkrement erstellen, auf dem Pfad der kontinuierlichen Weiterentwicklung unterstützen wollen.

Scrum Guide 2020 mentions Sprint Goal and Product Goal because Scrum teams must have a Share Goal. The Share Goal is always essential, even though the Scrum Guide didn't say it before. Basically, the Common Goal helps the Scrum Team become consciously Autonomous. Because Autonomy will lead to chaos ...

Learn more about what to look out for if you want to support your teammates who build the Increment.

Liberate your Sprint Review from being just a demo. There is much more to it than that! I'm sharing eight things you should do in the Sprint Review

The work of solving a complex problem (for example, a feature) with interdependent tasks rarely distributes evenly among the people in a cross-functional team. The solution is a team of multi-skilled specialists. A team of multi-talented people experience fewer bottlenecks as they can help overloade...

In this blog post, I explain the difference between the attitude of a programmer and a product developer, why it matters, and some tips to make the shift.

Fourth blog, in a blog series about the upcoming book: Creating Agile Organizations - A Systemic Approach, by Cesario Ramos & Ilia Pavlichenko.

In this blog post, Sander Dur explains technical debt vs undone work...

Das Sprint Planning ist ein zentrales Scrum-Ereignis, welches entscheidet, wie sich das Leben Ihrer Kunden mit dem nächsten Inkrement verbessern wird. Erfahren Sie mehr darüber, wie Sie Ihren Kunden durch die Vermeidung von 20 gängigen Sprint Planning Anti-Patterns helfen können.

The Scrum Guide doesn't provide a complete list of the skills required for any of the accountabilities on a Scrum Team. For example, it doesn't specify that Developers must use Java or C# code. The Scrum Guide simply states that Developers need all of the skills to deliver a Done increment of produc...

TL; DR: Scrum Master Anti-Patterns The Sprint Planning is a core event that defines how your customers’ lives will improve with the following Product Increment. Learn more on how to improve its effectiveness by avoiding 20 common Sprint Planning anti-patterns. 🇩🇪 Zur deutschsprachigen Versio...

The reasons Scrum Masters violate the spirit of the Scrum Guide are multi-faceted. Typical Scrum Master anti-patterns run from ill-suited personal traits to complacency to pursuing individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.

Scrum is a tactical framework to build products, provided you identify what is worth making in advance. But even after a successful product discovery phase, you may struggle to create the right thing in the right way if your Product Backlog is not up to the job—garbage in, garbage out.

Recently I was asked to answer some questions for a journalist on how to structure IT organizations. The questions were interesting and I wanted to share my responses here.

The Scrum Guide defines Sprint Goal as the single objective for the Sprint, is a commitment by the Developers, and is part of the Sprint Backlog. While many agree the importance of it, equally struggle in creating a good Sprint Goal. So let me share with you how I helped a Scrum Team write a good...

TL; DR: Scrum Master Success — My Top-Nine Indicators How would you know that your Scrum Master is competent? What are indicators for Scrum Master success? Is the regular use of the Confluence retrospective template one of the desired signals? Or is the quest to understand contributing factors fu...

With the rapid increase in the adoption of Scrum and other Agile frameworks over the past several years, I’m not surprised that a few misconceptions and myths about Scrum have surfaced.  While many more organizations embrace Scrum, many individual practitioners have not undertaken formal training.  ...

Misconceptions about Refinement—the process of adding detail, order and size to individual Product Backlog items can be highly detrimental to a team's ability to deliver value to the business frequently. In this article, we will discuss some of the most common myths about Refinement in Scrum.