Resources

When a lot of organizations are transitioning from the way they used to work to a more cross-functional, agile squad way of working, they usually look for scaling frameworks to help them do it.

In the previous video, I spoke about the creative reframing technique, that coaches could use as a facilitation or professional coaching tool.

This whitepaper explores Evidence-Based Portfolio Management, an approach that applies lean and agile principles to the challenge of deciding where to invest to derive the greatest business benefit by using rapid delivery of small increments of value to gather information and adapt investment decisions based on evidence from the market. It enables organizations to quickly test ideas by actually building and validating the smallest solution that will deliver a single outcome to a single set of customers or users.

In this post I'd like to discuss "Empathy - why it is important in teams and what you can do if you struggle with it". First, we all know what the role of the Scrum Master is, right?

Sanjay Saini, owner of Agile WOW("Agile Ways of Working"), kindly invited me, as an independent Scrum Caretaker, to open and close the event. I hope many Scrum practitioners register at scrumdayindia.org and join the event. In the end, only eager attendants can turn events into insightful experiences!

Creative reframing is an excellent facilitation and professional coaching technique that allows you to explore problems from various, sometimes unusual and unexpected angles.

Saying no is an integral part of any Product Owner's job. In this short video, I explore the reasons why we might be saying yes when no is a more appropriate answer (these reasons are from a great book by Dominica DeGrandis Make Work Visible) and how to say No when you need to.

In this case study, we explore how Avanade uses Scrum and formed a Nexus+ in their organization to drive their digital and business transformation, while driving progress toward becoming an agile enterprise. 

My mother was the first person who showed me unconditional love. My mother gave me direction and supported me along whatever journey or passion I was chasing. She picked me up when I fell. Celebrated with me in all my accomplishments.

Changing the way we work is extremely difficult — we all know this. It requires us to find novel solutions to wicked challenges, to deal with cultural baggage (‘the way we do things here’) and to bring along the people needed to make a change successful.

It was 8:59 am on Monday. It was another week which I thought was going to be amazing. Last week our company just closed another round of investment. The company is currently strategizing to scale agility throughout the company.

Overcome common transformation mistakes and enhance your agility.

Companies who build hardware often ask if it’s possible to benefit from Scrum. In order to answer this question, I need to first introduce you to my friend Risk.

It is not against the rules of Scrum Framework for a person taking the Scrum Master role also be a member of the Development Team. I've been there. In this post I intend to highlight some of the challenges in form of conflicts of interests that prevents a Scrum Master to coach effectively while being a Development Team member.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Reggie Gardner answers Scrum questions from the audience.

When organizations begin their journey toward agility, they think the business outcomes will become instantaneous. They expect the initial decision to lead to immediate success.

The Scrum Master is often expected to facilitate and animate every Scrum events. But, according to the Scrum Guide, the role of the Scrum Master regarding the different events is to ensure that the event takes place and that attendants understand its purpose.

This article provides five examples of how Liberating Structures are valuable for Scrum Masters.

A Sprint Goal is an objective set for the Sprint that can be met through the implementation of Product Backlog (cit. Scrum Guide). Have you clearly defined a Sprint Goal at the end of your Sprint Planning? Is this Sprint Goal understandable and transparent to everyone? Is it defined in a way that provides guidance and flexibility to the Development Team? The aim of this article is to raise awareness on the importance of having a Sprint Goal defined and to provide some suggestions on how to create one.

A paradox is something that is seemlingly absurd but really true. When I experience complexity and uncertainty, I find comfort and power in paradox. It opens up creativity, possibility, and collaboration. Let's take a look at 4 paradoxes we need to navigate in the agile world and beyond.

Scrum Masters are often understood mostly as “team coaches”. Yet, their role is vastly more important. The Scrum Guide emphasizes that Scrum Masters are responsible for leading and coaching organizations in the adoption of Scrum and causing change that increases the productivity of the Scrum Team.

A couple of years ago I blogged on Innovation Accounting in Scrum, and the bringing of empiricism to Product Ownership. On Tuesday I gave a presentation on this topic to the Agile Northants UK meetup. There was a pretty good Q&A afterwards.

I collected lots of feedback from different students around Europe that attended my Professional Scrum Developer Training. Here some photos to give you an idea...

Na edição de Abril teremos os PSTs Alexandre Macfadden, Andre Coelho e André Gomes respondendo ao vivo suas perguntas mais difíceis e complexas sobre o uso do Scrum, então, venham preparados.

Many organizations struggle in their implementation of Agile and/or their evolution of agile once they start their journey. They use practices, people, and technology to find a way to overcome their disability of delivering value to market too slowly.

Today’s reveal is a very important for us as we have facilitated Open Space events for more than 10 years with clients and in our annual conferences for example in Munich or Amsterdam and New York City.

In your organization, some problems seem to recur, they are difficult to fix using the tools, tricks and practices you developed over the years as a manager. Maybe this problem is different and the perspective of an expert-outsider might help?

In this article I will stress again the utmost importance of understanding the context of the organization as a strategy to achieve a possible, evolutionary and deep application of Scrum within organizations.

In this short Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Jasper Alblas talks about what a Scrum Master does and doesn't do. (1:37 Minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma describes a Sprint Retrospective in Scrum, giving tips for ways to make them valuable and how he has improved them over time. (6:02 Minutes)

I always assume that the people I work with are professionals - and not children. This is why I don’t like maturity models in whatever shape or form. And we’ve got a lot of those in our industry.

Ever wonder what a Scrum Master does all day? If you’re new to the role of a Scrum Master, you might think you have to facilitate all the events, take notes and schedule outlook meetings. Turns out you don’t have to do any of that!

Quite a few teams in organizations implementing Scrum depict their frustration in statements like “Scrum is driving us crazy!”, “It’s too chaotic!”

Last week, I had a long discussion with my friends about how to scale up the Scrum Team from the startup product. That was an interesting topic and we had many things to discuss. Some of my friends raised some interesting questions.

Leadership means having the responsibility to enable an environment that harnesses the full intellectual talent of an organization. We hire a bunch of top diverse talent but limit them by unintentionally having them work only within their part or silo of a large organization.

As enterprises strive to digitize their organizations, whether it’s digitally transforming aspects of sales and marketing, customer interactions or supply chain, they’re undergoing a wholesale revamp of traditional businesses into digital business models.

In this podcast, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods at InfoQ, spoke to Dave West, CEO and Product Owner at Scrum.org about the current state of Scrum and the latest initiatives by Scrum.org.

In this presentation from Agile India 2019, Professional Scrum Trainer Mia Horrigan discusses Evidence-Based Management and how this empirical process can help agile transformations measure and manage the value derived from their transformation initiative. (38:33 Minutes)

This is a video recording of Professional Scrum Trainer Mia Horrigan's presentation at Agile India titled,"Accelerate Improvements Through Retrospectives," where she discusses some Retrospective patterns that she has found useful. (41:13 Minutes)

One of the biggest misconceptions of agile is that it focuses on speed. How fast can we deliver? How fast can we deliver on this project/product?

In this webinar, UX experts and co-authors of Lean UX, Jeff Gothelf and Joshua Seiden, along with PSU Course Steward Gary Pedretti, discuss the focuses of PSU and share tips and techniques on how Scrum Teams can integrate UX practices into their work.

The comparison between Kanban and Scrum obviously comes up often when we're talking to teams, especially in the context of Professional Scrum with Kanban. While they are more similar than many practitioners realize, one key difference is the perspective on Teams. 

Agile frameworks facilitate an iterative and incremental approach to achieving progress for defined goals, for example, streamlining the review process for digital content. Agile methods utilize time-boxed periods called Sprints to complete a set amount of work. Each planned Sprint is assigned a unique list of deliverables.

In the first episode of the Game of Frameworks series on the Agile Uprising podcast, join Patricia Kong and Kurt Bittner from Scrum.Org as they discuss the Nexus scaling framework.

Teams are becoming the fundamental organizational entity, individual responsibility is being replaced by that of the team. But responsibility does not come about all by itself.

I was working with various groups over the last year and noticed some commonalities in the problems they faced. In this blog I want to share some common collaboration problems and solutions I experimented with.

From my experience, nothing is more important for Teamwork than trust. If having the secondary importance, it’s TRUST as well. You can't build a good team while they lack of trust.

For many years, enterprises have been in a race to digitally transform how they work through the digitization of all areas of their business, to reduce costs and business frictions through creating efficiencies and delivering increased value to their customers. While many organizations have attempted a transformation, few have been successful.

This is the start of a series of articles about the Scrum.org PSM II class. It will address the most common questions asked. This article is focused on the difference between the PSM and PSM II class.

Flow of work and, most importantly, value is paramount. There are times when you keep looking at the process and don’t understand what is going on, what is wrong, and why stuff is not getting to done. Read to learn how flow can help while limiting work in progress.