"Perfection has to do with the end product, but excellence has to do with the process." - Jerry Moran Scrum requires a Product Backlog and a Product Owner to account for the value of product increments. For as long as a product exists, a Product Backlog will exist to describe the work which o...

Today I facilitated the workshop "The Scrum Master as a Manager" at the conference "Agile Spain 2017" in Sevilla. In this blog post I'll share the outline of the workshop "The Scrum Master as a Manager". This gives you the opportunity to facilitate the workshop within your own organisation as well.

In this episode Jochen Krebs speaks with Scrum.org  Product Owner and CEO Dave West, about the changes made to the new Scrum Guide release in November 2017.

In this post we'll discuss the myth that Scrum Teams at best release working software at the end of a sprint, constraining teams that are capable of releasing faster.

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...

Capital One was recently faced with the challenge of building a brand new product in 3 months. Not only did they meet this goal, but they were able to deliver their first release 3 weeks early. How did they do it? How were they able to build an entirely new product in such a short time frame? What h...

What is a Product Owner... and how different is it than the role of a Product Manager? Is it different at all? These questions and others are discussed with Dave West, CEO and Product Owner of Scrum.org -- one of the leading organizations helping companies with agile and scrum practices.

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Steve Porter tells a story about his experience as a Product Owner and why his mistrust for the Scrum Team was a mistake and how the Product Owner should use the Sprint Backlog as a way of building that trust.  Steve discusses the r...

In this blog post, we will describe the myth that the Sprint Backlog is fixed during the Sprint. We'll bust this myth by offering the perspective from the Scrum Guide and describing the difference between forecast and commitment.

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...

We describe the myth that the Scrum Master should always be present during the Daily Scrum. We'll offer the perspective from the Scrum Guide, describe examples of problems in how Scrum is applied and share tips & tricks on how to make the Daily Scrum more effective.

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

The PSD training teaches the whole Scrum Team on how to do real Scrum. They work in Sprints, create Done software and use the appropriate tools and practices for it. It is a unique experience on how really good Scrum feels like.

This short video provides an overview of the Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO). Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainers (PSTs) Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham give you insight into the structure of the class and what you will learn. 1:46 Minutes

An estimate is our best guess for what can be achieved and by when. There are some situations when estimates are very important: Coordinate dependencies. It can be very useful to know when the team can proceed working on new design if the key expert is temporarily out of office. Align prior...

Over the past years I have been looking for a metric that could indicate the agility of an organization. After a study of the more common metrics used for products and management reports, I couldn’t really find a metric that indicates the level of agility.

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.

La aceptación de los PBIs en Scrum es algo que suscita dudas en los equipos. En realidad es muy fácil.

In this talk from Scrum Day Germany, Dave West CEO and Product Owner of Scrum.org describes how Scrum is being used at scale and how organizations are managing the friction between the needs of Agile and the traditional needs of the organization. 41:47 Minutes

In this article, I suggest that you take a look at the role of a Scrum Master with a help of causal loop diagrams. They help to see a bigger picture of what is happening over time. Quite often, we observe the cause-and-effect relationships on a short-time horizon period, and do not notice when the l...

Cuando se trata de literatura ágil, donde hace años no había prácticamente nada, ahora hay una abundancia que hace realmente difícil elegir.

Hay una frase de Ken Schwaber, creador de Scrum, que se ha hecho muy famosa a lo largo de los años. Scrum es simple, pero no es fácil. ¿Cual es la razón de que Scrum sea tan difícil de implementar? He aquí 3 retos típicos con los que seguro que tendrás que lidiar

As the saying goes, it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. The same could be said about DevOps and its implementation in an organization. Yes, the result is magic since it aims to deliver daily business value, but the journey is even more interesting. This journey is full of organiz...

"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...

El Nexus Integration Team es un nuevo rol dentro de Nexus, el framework de referencia para escalar Scrum. A diferencia de el Scrum of Scrums, que es solamente una reunión ad-hoc, el NIT, como rol, cumple la función de asegurar que al final de cada Sprint, en el Sprint Review, el Nexus entrega un inc...

Una de las cuestiones que se plantean habitualmente en organizaciones, equipos y Agile Coaches, es el uso de un método que permita organizar el trabajo de forma ágil. El uso de un método como Scrum o Kanban va mucho más allá del proceso en sí, sino que suponen una herramienta para mejorar la capacid...

En su reciente reporte anual, LinkedIn ha considerado el de Scrum Master como uno de los trabajos con más futuro del 2017. Con un salario medio anual de 100.000$, el número de puestos disponibles para Scrum Masters está previsto que se duplique este año.

El Sprint Backlog suele generar bastantes dudas en cuanto a su gestión. En ocasiones se convierte en un arma arromadiza que los stakeholders, el Producto Owner o incluso el Scrum Master utilizan para controlar el equipo. ¿Es esta su función?

In Scrum, the Product Owner is an entrepreneur and the mini-CEO of a product, who is able to make fast decisions. The success of the Scrum Team and company as a whole depends on whether the Product Owner is real.

The webinar covers the following: - How to improve your Sprint forecasting using common Kanban metrics. - How to improve your Kanban team’s kaizen with Scrum’s events, roles and artifacts. - How combining the Kanban practices with the Scrum Framework will enhance the collaboration across your tea...

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...

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.

After experiencing my fair share of frustrating Sprint Review moments, I want to share some tips to improve the feedback you receive.

Some companies develop 1 product with 10s to 100s of people using Scrum. And they do that without adding any roles, events or processes to Scrum. They can do this because they use an organisational design that optimises for the right goals. Design Goals An organisation has a design, just like ...

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...

Agile practices rely on empiricism for the best solution to emerge. But what is ‘empiricism,’ anyway? And how does that affect the development of the optimum product? In this session, Professional Scrum Trainer Mark Noneman looks at what it takes to be a Product Owner who practices empiricism. 

In their first attempt at attaining agility, Intralinks took a well-intentioned “mechanical” implementation of Scrum - done in good faith and with lots of hard work - but failed to deliver against their goal of greater agility. So, they took on a “Scrum Reboot” and succeeded by augmenting the mechan...

In this blog post I'll share my view on the question "What is a Scrum Master actually doing during the day?" I will use different sources and perspectives to answer this question and clarify the title and describe a day in the life of a Scrum Master.

This blog post will be about the question: can you rotate the Scrum Master role? With rotating the Scrum Master role I mean frequently changing the person fulfilling this role.

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. ...

The truth is, worrying about velocity is a trap: it says “we don’t care where we end up, so long as we get there fast.” That’s just wrong. Teams who measure their velocity but don’t or can’t measure customer outcomes may, quite simply, be driving in the wrong direction.

In this blog post I'll share my view on the question: Can you be a part-time Scrum Master?

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".

Like many old, boring people, my favorite radio channel in the car is National Public Radio. Since I live in Dallas, TX, my local channel is KERA. Of all the shows in KERA, my favorite is a show called Think With Krys Boyd. Almost each show I listen to leaves an imprint on my mind and modifies the w...

In 2016, a leading security products company adopted Scrum to support teams working in complex product development, in order to make the organization more adaptive and able to react faster to change. It began with one Scrum Team of IT developers focused on mobile applications.

The role of the Scrum Product Owner is probably the most misunderstood of the three Scrum Roles. As I look back at the different incarnations and interpretations I have seen of Product Ownership, I thought it was time to articulate the different stances I thought an Effective and Professional Scrum ...

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.

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 ...

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.