Resources

Scrum is a straightforward framework to develop complex software products in a complex environment but hard to practice.

As a coach, I’ve gotten many inquiries from colleagues and students asking for advice. How do I support my team during a time when we have and are still experiencing so much change and high levels of uncertainty?

It is a time of unprecedented challenge. Firms are experiencing extraordinary disruption.  Productivity is impacted. Delivery has stalled. Leaders worry about survival, remaining profitable and/or competitive in a distributed environment.

Scrum Master's role is unique, and comparing with any traditional roles will limit our thinking and exploring a beautiful journey of servant leadership.

am bracing myself to hear, “Sorry, we have not updated our [insert product] [insert service] for accessibility under new health guidelines” or “Sorry for the inconvenience, please check back to see when we have updated to accommodate accessibility.” Sorry is not inclusive.

During this virtual event, Louis-Philippe explained the Kanban metrics for Agile or DevOps teams. Although the Kanban delivery strategy is highly recommended in DevOps mode, unfortunately, its metrics are hardly used in our profession. Louis-Philippe therefore wishes to share its value with participants. Back at their workplace, Louis-Philippe hopes that participants will have new tools to answer the client's famous question "When will it be done?" (61 Minutes)

What is agile – I asked everyone what it means to them. Got responses like “being flexible,” “respond faster,” “move quickly,” and “adapt to change,”

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma explores the question that he is often asked during initial meetings with clients around agile transformations: "When will the transformation be complete" Ravi provides questions to ask in return, analogies on why such a prediction right out of the gate is likely impossible and ways to better think about anticipated results. (6:46 Minutes)

In this article, they collected the best practices and tips for remote Agile teams from certified Agile instructors, published authors, and practice leaders including Scrum.org CEO, Dave West. Included on this page, you’ll find expert tips for Agile remote teams and the pros of working remotely on an Agile team, and learn how to easily overcome common challenges. Plus, gain best practices for remote leaders, teams, and individuals.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Stephanie Ockerman looks at many aspects that define a product and its goals. She addresses some of the questions around what value means and how value is critical to deciding on what to deliver for the product and when. (8:04 Minutes)

I struggled in the past when people were asking me to explain Scrum quickly and without putting metaphor and success stories.

There has been no shortage of articles on how to work remotely recently, including our series on Remote Agile.

"What is worry about our product is keeping you up at night? What can we build or test this Sprint to make you sleep a bit better?". In this post we share this and 9 other Powerful Questions to help your team find better Sprint Goals. And what to do when these questions don't help you at all.

Like other PSTs, I was recently approached by few agilists to help them with PSPO-I certification. Here is one such conversation -

During a 20/20 vision on my writings, I discovered clusters of knowledge that are essential to Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches: Genuine coaching techniques, knowledge of psychological principles and above all, understanding and developing “Self” awareness.

Difference between Project Manager and Scrum Master.

Treacherous bottlenecks can nullify all your hard work, no matter how industrious you are.

The Scrum values help build the foundation of Trust. Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation, the three pillars to embrace empiricism flourish on the foundation of Trust.

As organizations adopt a more product-oriented mindset, the product owner is becoming more important. In Scrum, product owners work to maximize the value of a product by working with the development team. But, in order to do this there must be trust between the development team and the product owner. In this podcast, CEO of Scrum.org Dave West talks about the role of product owners and how they can successfully work with the development team and business.

Can a Development Team member work on more than one team at a time? Here is what is not written in the Scrum Guide.

Inspiration for fulfilling the stances of a Scrum Master, remotely.

Sally Waters’ husband Francis has ADHD, and even with medication he was struggling to cope with adult life. Most productivity systems lasted less than a week. It was only after Sally found out about Scrum and implemented it at home that he was able to move forward. This webinar recording explores, through a variety of personal anecdotes, how well Scrum can work at home for both couples and families struggling with these issues.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma provides several ideas about how Scrum Masters leveraging their servant leadership skills can help their teams become more effective. (6:41 Minutes)

Covid19 turned our lives upside down in scrambling to find new ways of how to socialize, shop for groceries, and change the way we work. However, this gives us a new opportunity to re-imagine the way we work as we shift from the ‘workplace’ to the ‘workspace’.

This eighth article now looks into supporting a distributed Development Team organizing a remote Daily Scrum.

This blog is part of a series of peek previews from my upcoming book Coaching Agile Organisations

*Covid is a fictional character based on my imagination that represents the strain of CoronaVirus that is causing the disease Covid-19. This is just a very simple and sincere attempt to put my knowledge and understanding about Covid-19 to test in this article and I tried making the connection with Scrum. I hope you enjoy it.

Good Scrum Masters are passionate. Great Scrum Masters are dispassionate.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

In my 100th episode of Agile.FM,  I had the opportunity to speak with Jim Benson, the co-creator of Lean Coffee.

This blog post uses a metaphor to illustrate the potential impact of having more than one product owner per product.

The COVID19 pandemic gives us plenty of opportunities to think about uncertainty, complexity, and how to deal with those using Empiricism.

Emotions are part of the human experience. Emotions are essentially energy in motion (e-motion).  When our emotions are flowing freely, they can bring us energy and provide the fuel for us to transform and grow.

This case study takes a look at how Penta Technologies, a construction software company realized that they needed to make a change in order to help their customers be successful.  Moving from a siloed environment to one with greater agility.

In the seventh episode of Mik + One, the official Project to Product podcast, Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop is joined by guest is Dave West, CEO and Product Owner of Scrum.org.

A few weeks ago, I had a wonderful conversation with Diana Larsen on Agile FM, and it did not come as a surprise, that the topic of retrospectives came up. Diana is the co-author of the book Agile Retrospectives , which has been very influential in many agile careers, including mine. 

A number of weeks ago I was chatting to Jeff Gothelf the co-author of Lean-UX and co-creator of our Professional Scrum with User Experience class. He described a project that he is working on which sparked my interest and is something I believe to be relevant to our Scrum community. I wanted to share some of this discussion with you.

Have you always wondered about the difference between agile and Scrum? You’re not alone, these words are commonly interchanged for one another but they are not the same thing at all.

This seventh article now looks into organizing a remote Sprint Review with a distributed team: How to practice the review with virtual Liberating Structures, including and giving a voice to team members, stakeholders, and customers.

Although most people see the value of Sprint Goals, how to create them is a huge source of confusion and frustration. Is the Spring Goal there before the Sprint Backlog? How do you create a Sprint Goal out of the unrelated set of items at the top of your Product Backlog? And should everything on the Sprint Backlog be related to the Sprint Goal? In this post I work from examples of a real product, and the Sprint Goals we used there, to answer those questions.

Working overtime in stressful situations is not a viable long-term remedy and should not be seen as a professional solution, but as a warning signal to be heard courageously.

From my experience and observations, my concern is weak understanding that the Evidence-Based Management (EBM) framework is empirical. It requires transparency, frequent inspection, and adaptation.

Contesté a la pe

En Scrum la planificación no es una etapa o un evento único, es una actividad continua durante todo el Sprint.  La Adaptación continua no es sinónimo de desorden o improvisación.

Scrum es un marco flexible que ofrece muchas ventajas para el desarrollo de productos complejos, pero puede ser fácilmente mal interpretado. Justamente esa libertad puede llevar a distorsiones en su uso.

In this whitepaper written by Professional Scrum Trainer Venkatesh Rajamani, he shares his journey as a Scrum Master based on interviews with other Scrum Masters and his own experience. Venkatesh couples that experience with practical examples throughout the paper to create a set of stages that one often goes through.

In this session, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma and Jack J. Phillips from the ROI Institute explore how most Agile training courses typically unfold – starting with the pre-sales process to class-delivery and post-class experience. We start by looking at the cast of characters we typically find in these journeys and potential hurdles that can get in the way of your learning and application of that learning after the course. We propose simple, actionable steps you can follow to get the most out of your training courses. Finally, they introduce the underlying principles, framework and practices created by the ROI Institute that provide the foundations for this approach and suggest resources you can use to learn more.

Are scrum and personal effectiveness compatible? In recent weeks I have experienced using Scrum for my personal organization.

As an active agile Scrum Consultant and Professional Scrum Trainer, I am constantly helping a large number of agile teams. Unsurprisingly all the teams I am supporting are experimenting with different ways to make remote working, work!