Resources

In this talk Dave West, CEO and Product Owner of Scrum.org talks about the roles of Scrum and how the three roles relate to your existing job titles. He describes the future of work in the context of an agile delivery model and what the implications are to job descriptions and career progression.

A description of the Liberating Structure "User Experience Fishbowl and how we've used it within Scrum.

People who attend the PSM course or the Professional Scrum Foundations (PSF) course are given two attempts at passing the Professional Scrum Master I assessment.

The fundamental result of Little’s Law is that for a given process, in general, the more things that you work on at any given time (on average) the longer it is going to take for each of those things to finish (on average). As a case in point, managers who are ignorant of this law panic when they see that their Cycle Times are too long and perform the exact opposite intervention of what they should do: they start more work. After all, they reason, if things take so long, then they need to start new items as soon as possible so that those items finish on time—regardless of what is currently in progress.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Rich Visotcky describes the Product Backlog and the need to ensure that it is transparent to the entire Scrum Team. Rich talks about why everyone on the Scrum Team needs to understand what it is comprised of, the order or priority of Product Backlog Items and how they fit into the product vision. 2:39 Minutes

This article on BusinessNewsDaily.com reviews the Professional Scrum certifications provided by Scrum.org.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Mark Noneman describes empiricism, how it is used and why it is so critical when practicing Scrum. 3:36 Minutes

In this blog article, we provide a quick overview of the most viewed blog articles over the past 18 months, giving readers insight into what they mind valuable to read.

Agile Metrics are meant to serve certain purpose(s) and can be very useful if leveraged appropriately. In this series, I want to share my experiences of how metrics may be used, abused and effectively become focal point of failure of Agile adoption in an organization.

I recently finished writing a book with fellow Professional Scrum Trainer, Don McGreal, titled,  "The Professional Product Owner: Leveraging Scrum as a Competitive Advantage." I learned a lot from this experience and wanted to share it here. 

In this session, Valerie Pearce, Senior Software Architect and Nic Easton, Nexus Scrum Master and Software Engineer III from Net Health, and Patricia Kong, Scrum.org Product Owner of Enterprise Solutions, walk through how Net Health scaled Scrum by implementing the Nexus framework in their product development organization.

When many organizations wanted to incorporate Scrum, it was a big disappointment. The leaders saw it as a failed experiment that did not yield the positive impact one would hope for. Nevertheless, I have witnessed the transformational results and great rewards an organization reaps when it truly embraces Scrum values.

Vor kurzem haben die beiden Autoren des Artikels sich einmal mehr mit der Frage beschäftigt, wie sich erfolgreiche und weniger erfolgreiche Teams unterscheiden und was die Erfolgsfaktoren für erfolgreiche Teams sind.

One of the new concepts we introduce in the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams is the Service Level Expectation, defined as: An SLE forecasts how long it should take a given item to flow from start to finish within your workflow.

One of the key Kanban practices is Limiting Work in Progress. If you want to be pedantic, actually what this practice aims for is Reducing and stabilizing Work in Progress. This improves flow, provides predictability, and is actually even more important for creating a pull-based Kanban system than visualizing your workflow using a Kanban board. I worked with several clients that limited their WIP but didn't use Kanban boards. One could argue that maybe this practice deserves to be first in the list of Kanban practices, ahead of Visualization.

In the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams and the Professional Scrum with Kanban workshop, we introduce 4 key flow metrics that we believe Scrum teams can use to improve their flow.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainers Ravi Verma and Ernst Perpignand discuss the importance of the Scrum Value of Respect, how teams can gain a common understanding of what Respect is and how they can work together in being respectful. 3:43 Minutes

By now, CIOs should be aware of the many benefits of the agile methodology. But there's a few persistent misconceptions that could be getting in the way of even greater outcomes. In this article in CIO, Dave West comments on the most common misconceptions he sees organizations falling prey to when it comes to agile practices.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainers Stacy Martin and Ty Crockett take a detailed look at Communities of Practice from how they have started them, to funding them, getting greater participation and much more. 7:35 Minutes

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Victor Oliveira discusses the importance of the Scrum Value of Commitment, how it can be used and achieved. He provides some brief stories about commitment can be viewed. 2:10 Minutes

Nobody gets credit for solving problems that never happened is a paper that explores why the tools that are the reason for success in some companies are ineffective in other companies. And when that happens, people in those organizations have the tendency to work even harder. But is that enough?

As a servant-leader, the Scrum Master sometimes has to make very difficult decisions. This might even include removing someone from the Scrum Team. Obviously, this a difficult decision that should not be taken light-hearted. In this post, we'll share some perspectives on the kinds of situations where removal is a viable option and some tips to do help you do so in the best way possible.

In this article on TechGenYZ, Steve Porter talks about how to build a bridge between Scrum and Kanban.

In this article in SDTimes, Eric Naiburg talks about how security should not be overlooked when using the Scrum.

In this episode Professional Scrum Trainer Lucas Smith discusses a step-by-step approach that Lucas took to help him navigate change in an organization where he worked.

Getting a team to learn and practice Scrum is not enough. There’s a critical aspect to a team’s own success and further development: feeling ownership over the product they are developing.

It is beyond debate I'm afraid; business projects are prone to failure – particularly large and complex projects. There is some irony in that, no? The more you hope to achieve, the more likely you are to be unsuccessful. Learn how the tech industry uses the Scrum Framework to curb failure and deliver customer value.

Professional Scrum Trainer Lucas Smith has an extreme case of that message for us. Listen in to learn how being yelled at by users can totally change your perspective on what is value, and make you want to change the product development process.

I often use innovative games as a useful addition for Sprint Reviews. They help clients better understand and thus improve the product. One of my favourite games is the Speed Boat. The Speed Boat game explores user’s pains and jobs.

Do your team members have a tendency to pick up the next task to work on in case they get stuck with current task because they are measured for ‘utilization’? Such multitasking isn’t just bad, but also has harmful effects and causes stress on the person as proven by a study at Stanford University.

Over a wet weekend in the UK, my 12 year old daughter was looking for something to do and decided to draw a poster to while away some time. My daughter decided that she would help me by making a poster about Scrum ( honestly!, I am not making this up. I didn't realise how much I talk about a scrum at home.)

I recently wrote an article for Entrepreneur on why Tech Companies need a code of ethics which got me thinking more broadly about the role of ethics, values and professionalism and why the agile community have been thinking about it more than most.

In this talk, Dave West Product Owner and CEO of Scrum.org and Mik Kersten CEO of Tasktop discuss the challenges of introducing value streams to a Scrum world and how you can balance flexibility with the structure to enable better flow and deliver more value to customers. They discuss how to avoid Value-Waterfall-Stream to make sure your stream doesn't become a waterfall and provide a list of potential warning signs for when the process of value streams has become a way of re-introducing traditional waterfall thinking to your product delivery process.

Vor kurzem habe ich mit einem Team die interessante Frage aufgeworfen, ob Softwareentwickler Leidenschaft für das Produkt das sie entwickeln benötigen oder ob Leidenschaft für Technologie wichtiger ist.

In this interview on ProjectManagement.com's Scrumptious Blog, Dave West, talks about where Scrum is heading, how it applies to non-software domains, and how to overcome management resistance to the use of Scrum in the organization.

In this series, I have been  Introducing some helpful tips for Scrum Masters on “Systems Thinking” - a diagnostic Tool and a disciplined approach for examining problems more completely and accurately before acting.  Lights on! Camera! 

In this Entrepreneur article, Dave West, CEO and Product Owner, Scrum.org talk about how the Scrum Values can serve as a basis for developing a code of ethics for software development.

A market leading international manufacturer of HVAC equipment in Germany was challenged with redesigning their online presence. Their more than 80 websites needed to be consolidated, redesigned, and implemented on a new content management system.

I remember going on a PRINCE2 course a few years ago, and trying to determine how this celebrated stage-gated framework might be applied to an agile mode of delivery. I was employed in the UK public sector at the time, and I had come to know how instrumental "PRINCE2 compliance" can be to the striking of a defensive organizational posture. When all eventually fails you must be able to show that you followed appropriate procedure.

In this blog, PSTs Sjoerd Kranendonk and Wilbert Seele explain how to achieve more and risk less by being a less visible Product Owner. In the Scrum Guide the following is written about the role of the PO: "The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the Development Team."

One of the reasons Scrum allows opportunistic discovery is due to its short and fast feedback loops. With the aim to build a high-performing Team and to get the best potential out of each individual and to help them be successful, Agile Coach needs to provide straight feedback to them. But giving straight feedback is a daunting task especially since we are dealing with human emotions. In general, just the utterance of the statement, “I would like to give you feedback” sends the heart racing for a lot of people.

If you give a developer a verbal warning for surfing social media all day, you are crushing their autonomy. Insisting on core hours of 10am-4pm violates self-organisation. Personal development plans are so PRINCE II. Right? Well, maybe. On the other hand, having someone relatively experienced and influential on your side, to help shape your career and keep you off the annual redundancies list might actually be quite useful.

Schoonover says Smash Dev Shop partnered with Improving — a Dallas-based software and IT services firm that contracts for training, consulting, recruiting, and project services, according to its website — to bring a scrum master training course to Wichita May 8-9.

In this blog post we've shared our ideas on "Your Scrum Master Journey" and the first steps we've made at a Dutch customer.This week Christiaan Verwijs and I facilitated a workshop at a Dutch customer in which Scrum Masters could provide a pitch for participating in "Your Scrum Master Journey".

Suggested reading for anyone who is taking the Professional Agile Leadership certification assessment or just looking to learn more about being an Agile Leader.