Resources

Use "Shift & Share and Caravan" as facilitation pattern in Scrum for Sprint Reviews, brainstorms and involving stakeholders. Spread novel ideas across groups of any size with "Shift & Share" and rapidly receive feedback with "Caravan".

How to Teach a Scrum Team to Split Stories  

In this post I will review what's a Proxy Product Owner, why you can find so often this role in organizations embracing Scrum, and some proposals to avoid this role and achieve a true Product Owner.

As a Product Owner, you are responsible for Product Backlog management, stakeholder management and forecasting. Therefore, you will probably use a variety of tools and techniques to track progress, manage expectations and keep people informed.

Release Planning

Product Backlog Management

And after reading Jeff Gothelf’s and Josh Seiden’s book “Sense and Respond: How Successful Organizations Listen to Customers and Create New Products Continuously”, I realized that the world is full of complex problems. This got me thinking about the relationship between Scrum and modern organizations as they pivot toward becoming able to ‘sense and respond’. So, I decided to ask Jeff Gothelf… Here is a condensed version of our conversation.

In this Agile for Humans podcast, Dave West (@davidjwest) joined Ryan Ripley (@ryanripley) to discuss the latest updates to the Scrum Guide.

Today we bust the myth that it is the responsibility of the Scrum Master to resolve all problems that are hindering the Development Team.

The Scrum Framework

Nice review of the 2017 release of the Scrum Guide and especially why it is called a Daily Scrum and how the Daily Scrum is intended to focus on the Sprint Goal.

Appreciative Interviews (AI) is a Liberating Structure that helps identify enablers for success in less than one hour. By starting from what goes well - instead of what doesn’t. In this post we'll share examples of how we've applied this structures within our Scrum training and coaching engagements.

As a Product Owner, you are responsible for stakeholder management. It's important that you know your stakeholders, their interests, what they need from you and your Product and how they may be able to help you out as well!

Value comes in many different forms, value is context dependent and the definition of value in a certain context may change over time! What? Yes, that's right! What 'value' is, or what it means, is firstly context dependent.

Greg Gomel is an Agile consultant and a veteran of the Coast Guard Reserve. So when he and fellow Agile consultant Ravi Verma were brainstorming earlier this year about what they could do to help military veterans it wasn’t surprising their minds turned to Agile software development.

The Product vision describes the purpose of a Product, the intention with which the Product is being created and what it aims to achieve for customers and users. The Product vision describes a future state of the Product and what problems it tries to resolve or what ambitions it tries to fulfill.

I have created a little exercise that I like to use to help focus the on things we can change, or at least situations to seek out or avoid, to help focus change efforts. The essence of it is summarized in a picture. I call this the agile affinity model, and the dimensions the key drivers of empiricism.

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer John Gillespie discusses his experience working with a Scrum Team that was having morale issues. By helping them to learn and adopt the Scrum Values the team saw significant improvements in overall morale and their ability to deliver. 2:40 Minutes

In this post, we'll bust the myth that the Product Owner is a proxy for stakeholders. The bottom-line is that Scrum Teams become significantly less Agile when only the Product Owner communicates with stakeholders. Instead of framing the Product Owner as a proxy, we instead prefer to explain the Product Owner as the person responsible for including stakeholders in the conversation.

The Product Owner role is totally different from traditional roles that are know in most organizations. Some people think that the Product Owner is a kind of 'Agile project manager' or that the Product Owner is sort of a 'business analyst'. This is not true!

There is no need to choose between Scrum and Kanban, but certain myths have led some to believe this is the case. It’s time to debunk them once and for all.

 

In this blog, we'll cover some tips and tools for starting Product Owners, to help you in your new role.

Here I am sitting in my hotel room while looking at my half-empty wine glass and the stars outside while preparing for my last Professional Scrum Master (PSM) class for the year 2017 and pondering about all of the classes I have facilitated over this year. PSM has been a transformational course for me because it has changed me by seeing how it has changed the life of many of my students. 

Scrum is a framework that thrives on self-organizing teams.  It gives you boundaries (e.g. time-box of a Sprint), clear accountabilities (e.g. Product Owner optimizes value), and goals (e.g. “Done” Increment).

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Lucas Smith discusses ways that organizations and managers have looked to increase team capacity with a view of what may work and what may not. 4:39 Minutes

System optimization: Upgrading Team Competencies When developing complex innovative products, the Development Team will have different a workload for each one of their members.

LEAN is an excellent way for companies to start optimizing their way of working and make sure the production of waste is kept to a minimum. Scrum itself is based on those very principles.

Looking to hire a Scrum Master? You may go through this job description that talks about what is a role of Scrum Master? and what to expect from a Scrum Master.  

At a recent course, one of my students asked me to share what Scrum “looked like” for me at TheScrumMaster.co.uk. This post is my response to that question. This describes my current process which has evolved via inspection and adaptation over 5 years.

In this post, we'll the myth that the Product Backlog is ‘prioritized’. Although a seemingly trivial change of wording, the Product Backlog is ‘an ordered list’ instead.

The latest release of the Scrum Guide is all about addressing common Scrum misunderstandings. In this blog post I will present the top 5 misconceptions that are set straight in this latest release of the Scrum Guide.

Bringing values down to earth Values and principles can often seem lofty and intangible so many agile practitioners prefer to focus on tools and practices. That's understandable but unfortunate.

‘25/10 Crowd Sourcing’ is a structure that allows you to rapidly generate and sift through a group’s boldest actionable ideas in less than 30 minutes. In this article we'll explain how to use this structure to spice up your Scrum Events.

"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

I once worked for an organization with many opportunities for improvement. To be honest, it was a mess.

In this post, we’ll bust the myth that a Product Backlog has to consist entirely out of User Stories. By describing the purpose and characteristics of the Product Backlog, we'll also busted the related myth; that User Stories are an inherent, necessary part of Scrum.

The Intent of Scrum Scrum allows development organisations to invest a little time at regular intervals to allow teams with autonomy over their work to identify and enact frequent, small improvements to the process and the plan.

One of the most common critiques about Scrum that I've heard from smart software engineers are "Scrum does not care about technical practices, Scrum is for wimps". I've also heard managers down the hallway say that "Scrum is for wreckless developers because its main concern is only about fast delivery".

There are a number of things that you have to think about when selecting a modern source control system. Some of that is purely about code, but modern source control systems are about way more than code.

Scrum is a mindset, an approach to turning complex, chaotic problems into something that can be used. eff Sutherland and I based it on these pillars: Small, self-organizing, self-managing teams; Lean principles; and, Empiricism, using frequent inspection and adaptation to guide the work of the teams to the most successful outcome possible.

Open Space is one of the methods that allows organizations to make inspirational meetings and events. I was lucky enough to use Open Space in various contexts, with Scrum Teams. The concept has always worked.

Tune to 6:24 of this radio broadcast to hear Scrum.org Vice President of Marketing, Eric Naiburg talk about the 2017 Scrum Guide update, how Scrum can be used beyond just software development and his view on the future of Scrum. Note that the show is in Dutch other than this part.

"Perfection has to do with the end product, but excellence has to do with the process." - Jerry Moran

This article from ITWeb discusses how Scrum co-creators Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland have made updates to the Scrum Guide, to promote flexibility and clarity within the Scrum framework.

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.

The new updates to the Scrum guide were announced and discussed in a webinar with Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, authors of the Scrum Guide, and co-creators of Scrum. InfoQ interviewed them.

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.

Scrum is defined completely in the Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, the originators of Scrum.  The Scrum Guide is maintained independently of any company or vendor and therefore lives on a brand neutral site.  The Scrum Guide is translated and available in over 30 languages.

Scrum co-creators Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland are making new updates to The Scrum Guide to promote flexibility and clarity within the Scrum framework. The updated guide will now clear up common Scrum miscommunications about the framework, and provide a better understanding of Scrum inspection and adaptation.