When it comes to Scrum Teams delivering value effectively, collaboration is key within the team and also externally. Scrum Teams should work closely with their stakeholders and engage and collaborate with them closely during the Sprint to gain valuable insights proactively. This enables them to insp...

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.

Each of the Scrum Artifacts is inspected in one or more Scrum Events to detect undesired variances. So is the Product Backlog. Go check it out!

A good Scrum Master is like a Swiss army knife, able to adapt to any situation and provide the team with the tools it needs to succeed. 

The phrase 'accountable but blameless' is my new favorite phrase because it captures so much about positive team culture in Scrum.

The Top Ten Business Reasons to Trust Your Teams

Agile development is all about building a collaborative, empowered team that delivers value to the customer. However, upper management may prioritise traditional metrics like deadlines and budgets in some organisations over team dynamics. As a Scrum Master, balancing these priorities and ensuring th...

Scrum is the most popular Agile framework. According to Digita.ai’s 16th annual report, 87% of organizations using an Agile framework use Scrum. That’s up from 58% of Agile teams using Scrum, as documented in the 14th annual State of Agile report. 

Learn more about how an acceptable project management tool turns into a bureaucratic nightmare, what the reasons for this might be, and what we can do about it.

Mindful Scrum Mastery is applying mindfulness principles and techniques to Scrum. Mindfulness involves paying attention to your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. Mindfulness has improved focus, reduced stress, enhanced creativity, and fostered a positive mindset.

​​​​​​​Agile coaches have long recognized that busyness does not necessarily equal success. Checking off a to-do list does not mean you are adding value.  You might accomplish many organizational tasks, but the activity likely has little benefit if these tasks don’t contribute to the company’s goals...

Professional Scrum Trainer, Matt Dominici's "grumpiest take" on Scrum: focusing on the negative effects of clapping during Sprint Reviews.

This is part 2 of the Series ' Effective Stakeholder Engagement. In this, we have covered How to understand stakeholders better and also how to group them so that we can engage them better.

Some tips on how Product Owners can stay focused on their product goal by effectively saying "No"

In today's fast-paced and highly competitive business environment, a team's success depends on many factors. One of the most important factors is psychological safety.

Why create a team working agreement? A team working agreement provides an agreed upon set of guidelines for a Scrum Team to follow, so everyone understands what is expected as they work together in pursuit of delivering value. A team can use a working agreement to help them work toward self-manag...

The Scrum values help create a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement, guiding the team toward better results and a more satisfying work experience. I’ve written and talked a lot about the Scrum values over my consulting and coaching career because I’ve seen how they can galvanize teams...

Learn how to use ChatGPT to create workshops for agile practitioners such as Scrum Masters

Who are the Quality Assurance (QA) experts in the Scrum Team and what do they have to do with guardian angels? Who is responsible for the quality of your product? What practices can you use to positively impact collaboration within the Scrum Team and the quality of solutions created? You will find i...

Effective Stakeholder Engagement is key to the success of the product and one of the essential skills all product people should have. This article is part 1 of the Effective Stakeholder Engagement series. In this we will learn effective ways to identify stakeholders.

The individuals involved in these and other Scrum Events must face complex challenges and ask and respond to difficult questions. We can make the process easier with a positive mindset.

ChatGPT is remarkably capable when fed decent prompts. So consider investing your time accordingly.

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.

How Liberating Structures and servant leadership create an environment for Scrum Masters to find support, offer help, and draw inspiration

Facilitators can use many techniques, but this does guarantee that the outcome will be reached. Ultimately linking the facilitation pattern to the objective of the interaction, makes the event more effective and helps contribute to team success in achieving their goals.

When to use Facilitation, Coaching, Mentoring or Teaching We often use the words “coaching,” “mentoring,” “teaching,” and “facilitating” informally. We may say that we're being coached on how to become a better golfer, or that the person managing the agenda in a meeting is the meeting's facilitat...

In this article, we will analyze the famous “Tribes and Squads” model (also known as a “Spotify model”) in terms of where it fits on the archetype map.

A dogmatic approach to Scrum tends to close down discussion and inhibit collaboration. If it’s in the Scrum framework described in the Scrum Guide, it’s there for a reason. But if it is not outlined in the framework, Scrum teams can innovate how to apply Scrum in their unique environment.

Could the first principles of “Agile” have been defined by “Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BCE?”

3 Practices to Break out of Cruise Control and Drive Change

The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute event for the Developers of the Scrum Team. To reduce complexity, it is held at the same time and place every working day of the Sprint. If the Product Owner or Scrum Master are actively working on items in the Sprint Backlog, they participate as Developers.

It is important to remember that a Developer is not necessarily a software developer. They can focus on any type of product work whether software or not and any aspect of helping to design, build, test or ship the product. The specific skills needed by the Developers are often broad and will vary ba...

The Scrum Master is accountable for establishing Scrum. They do this by helping everyone understand Scrum theory and practice, both within the Scrum Team and the organization while serving the Scrum Team as well as the larger organization. 

Take your Daily Scrum from a reporting session to true teamwork and consider why answering the obsolete 3 Daily Scrum questions negatively impacts that ambition.

What transparency can the Scrum Master bring to the Scrum Team and the stakeholders of your product? Transparency, being one of the core underlying concepts of the Scrum framework, we can expect the Scrum Master to actively work on this.

Success is measured by the value it provides to the end user rather than the delivery of a feature.

Circle of Influence and Control ActivityHighly effective teams focus and are proactive on spending energy on the things that they can make a timely impact. By doing so, they not only enable themselves to change things for the better, they also create positive energy and widen their influence over th...

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

Understanding stakeholders is really important for Scrum Teams to be able to engage them in the right manner. I have found Stakeholder Persona Canvas as a lightweight tool that helps a lot in understanding them better.

Read on and learn what ChatGPT considers to be a Scrum Master’s typical workload, excluding the removal of impediments.

Facilitating the dynamics and interactions of Scrum Events is essential towards guiding the scrum team collectively to a shared objective. These five facilitation principles work hand in hand to ensure that your scrum events will become more focused, productive and effective.

What transparency can the Developers bring to the Scrum Team and the stakeholders of your product? Transparency, being one of the core underlying concepts of the Scrum framework, we can expect the Developers to actively work on this.

Will You Compete for a Position w/ an LLM Soon? — I took a few questions from the Hiring: 82 Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions guide and ran a ChatGPT Product Owner job interview.

What transparency can the Product Owner bring to the Scrum Team and the stakeholders of your product? Transparency, being one of the core underlying concepts of the Scrum framework, we can expect the Product Owner to actively work on this.

Traditional management models consider the work of people and team development to be the job of the team’s manager. Scrum puts specific responsibility on Scrum Masters to support and guide Scrum Team members (as well as other members of the organization). However, team development is not only th...

Many of us find it difficult to ask for help at work, which is a problem if you are part of a Scrum Team. Interdependence and collaboration are central to Scrum, but these practices don’t always come naturally to those new to the framework. In this post, we explore the incorrect assumptions tied up ...

Scrum is a popular Agile project management framework that has been adopted by organizations worldwide. A Scrum Master is a critical member of a Scrum Team, responsible for facilitating the process and ensuring the team follows Scrum practices. In this comprehensive guide, we’ll cover everything you...

Scrum is a tool that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions to complex problems. If Scrum is a source of frustration (because, for example, "the Scrum Master keeps on distracting us"), it's a sign that it is not Professional Scrum but the team is just going t...