Resources

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Wim Heemskerk will be available to answer any questions you may have live on this webinar. He is happy to answer any questions about challenges your Scrum team is facing, and has some deep expertise in facilitation and leadership in agile, specifically. Please bring your most pressing questions for this opportunity!

Completing an Agile Coaching certification doesn’t make you an Agile Coach. So where do you start and how do you chart your own journey?

A digital transformation presents a number of challenges. At the core of these challenges lies the organization's ability to create more responsibility at the individual and team level without losing their sense of control and governance. Addressing issues such as team maturity, psychological safety, and scaling have critical impact on success. Developing skills in these leadership areas is essential to encourage and support more flexible ways of working at all levels in an organization and form the foundation for scaling changes across many individuals and teams. Agile practices become more embedded in organizations of all sizes in every domain. This Webinar is an interactive conversation between experts in the field of Agile Leadership.

The terms "iterative" and "incremental" are used so frequently and naturally in the context of agile that their meaning is no longer challenged.

On November 22nd, 2019, I gave the closing keynote at Scrum Deutschland, a talk called ‘The Four Things You Do To Prevent Value Delivery.’ In this keynote, I discussed the trends I found during my research at multiple organizations. 

Part I of this Evidence-Based Management (EBM) blog post series covered a general introduction to show how evidence-based management can be a powerful instrument when being used in agile transformations.

In this episode of The Agile Wire Podcast, Professional Scrum Trainer Pawel Mysliwiec joins fellow PSTs Jeff Bubolz and Jeff Maleski to talk about Agile leadership. (1:06:57 Hours)

The agile movement really has changed the way we lead our people. Giving them more freedom and autonomy to do their job often improves the quality, productivity and happiness of the people.

A while ago we started working on a movie to illustrate the essence of agile leadership. What is it about? Are leaders still needed in an agile environment?

Scrum.org, the Home of Scrum, today announced that it now offers a comprehensive series of Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO)™ certification assessments with fundamental, advanced and distinguished levels.

This article talks about agile leaderships and Kurt Bittner adds some commentary.

In this article, Ben Linders from InfoQ interviews Professional Scrum Trainer Peter Koning about his new book - Agile Leadership Toolkit.

This webinar focuses on the key areas in the new book, Agile Leadership Toolkit- Learning to Thrive with Self-Managing Teams. Peter Koning, Professional Scrum Trainer and author of the book, provides practical, concrete tools and examples to give you the ability to create an environment in which your teams will thrive.

Becoming an agile organization requires changing the environment in which teams operate. In this Whitepaper by Professional Scrum Trainer Krystian Kaczor, he talks about how creating an agile environment requires a different approach to leadership and decision making.

In this episode of the Agile.fm podcast, Professional Scrum Trainer (PST) Joe Krebs speaks with fellow PST Peter Koning who wrote the book Agile Leadership Toolkit which was released in September 2019. (22:07)

End of September we went to Stockholm with 15 agile leaders. We wanted to visit several companies in and around Stockholm to see how they created a thriving environment for agile teams.

If you lead in organizations that have adopted agile methods, you know it’s crucial to create the right environment for your agile teams. Traditional tools such as Gantt charts, detailed plans, and internal KPIs aren’t adequate for complex and fast-changing markets, but merely trusting employees and teams to self-manage is insufficient as well.

Last year, I ran a (non-representative) survey on how Scrum Masters are allocating their time when working with a single Scrum Team. Much to the surprise of many readers, the direct Scrum Master engagement with a single Scrum Team of average size and a typical 2-week Sprint turned out to be about 12 hours per week.

Many Scrum Teams are not very familiar with the Scrum Values as described in the Scrum Guide, and if, they have their own interpretation of it. We have also met many teams that were able to name the values, but not many live by them.

Defining Agile/Scrum for Marketing Scrum.org joined the discussion around Agile Marketing recently. This is an area close to my heart.

The core responsibility of the agile leader is creating the right context for the agile teams so they can thrive and self-manage. One of the characteristics of this context is all about ownership. In my book ‘Agile Leadership Toolkit’ I dedicate a whole part to this important topic.

How common misunderstandings about the Scrum Roles prevent Scrum Teams to become effective

In this blog, Professional Scrum Trainer Peter Koning talks about his book, Agile Leadership Toolkit - Learning to Thrive with Self Managing Teams.

I recently started aggregating my notes, links, and references related to agile leadership to understand better what it — in the context of an agile transition — may look like.

Many Scrum teams have a regular meeting scheduled on everyone’s calendar, even though it is not an official Scrum event.

For executives and for change agents who deal with executives in large contexts ...

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.

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.

This is the first part of a 2-part blog post series about dealing with very large Product Backlog items. Part 1 intends to focus on the Scrum Team, Part 2 will be released shortly after our Webinar on April 29th and will focus on the “Epic” challenges agile leaders are facing.

Through my professional experience, while serving my customers, working with Scrum Teams and training people in Professional Scrum, I have observed that some Scrum Masters only work to serve the Development Team and the Product Owner.

One of the regular listeners, Daniel Lachmann-Nishibane, appeared on www.agile.fm after he has participated in one of my recent Professional Agile Leadership (PAL-E) certification courses in Munich Germany.

What exactly is “agile” or even an agile leader? This is one of the biggest problems our industry faces. Ask a room full of people to answer and you may get as many answers. Common ones include “it’s a mindset” or “it’s a software methodology” etc…

An Agile mindset is crucial in management roles for organizations that are moving towards Agility.

As a Global Vice President at a major financial institution, I spend two days a week teaching Product Ownership, Agile Leadership, Scrum, and Kanban to 25 employees per week. As a Professional Scrum Trainer, I’ve taught over 1500 people through the years. This experience has made me a better leader.

Questions about agile certifications (especially those from Scrum.org) are an integral part of my routine. People always come to me saying that they are going to act as a Scrum Master / Product Owner / Developer on an agile project and they want to know what to study and what's the best first certification.

This short video provides an overview of the Professional Agile Leadership Essentials (PAL-E) course, course stewards and Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainers (PSTs) Ryan Ripley and Ron Eringa give you insight into the structure of the class and what you will learn over the 2 days. (3:05 Minutes)

I’ve had this ongoing discussion with a few of my colleagues who says that the term “agile leader” is an oxymoron - that the ideal organization is a bunch of Scrum Teams and not much else.

This is the last in a series of 3 blogs presenting the result of an interesting research study from Sam Walker.  Walker discovered that the most successful sports teams that ever existed all shared one single element: They all had a team captain with 7 overlapping traits that made them extremely successful.

What can a Scrum team learn from the World’s Greatest Sports Teams? In this the second of 3 blogs I'm sharing the character traits of an Elite Team Captain.

What can a Scrum team learn from the World’s Greatest Sports Teams? This is the first in 3 blogs that will share a number of Leadership lessons that can be used to build high performing Scrum teams.

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

“Most executives, many scientists, and almost all business school graduates believe that if you analyze data, this will give you new ideas. Unfortunately, this belief is totally wrong.

What can you do as a Leader to help your Scrum Teams to become mature? Discover a 5-level maturity pattern that you can use as a reference.

Chris is a true example of an new type of leader. Not because he is a great speaker, nor because he has a big vision or has world changing ideas. Just because of one seemingly simple skill. A skill which is very hard to master. He recognizes the defining moments when he has to live the ambition. He knows when he has to lead his people by entering the 'battle' first. Let me tell you why.

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.

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.

In this blog post I'll share my view on the Scrum Master as the Change Leader. I'll briefly describe the common misunderstandings and the preferred stances of the Scrum Master. The services a Scrum Master provides for the Development Team, Product Owner and organisation, and the 3 levels that can be considered as a growth path for the Scrum Master. Want to know why the Scrum Master should be a Change Leader? Check out this article.

Over the past years I have been looking for a metric that could indicate the agility of an organization. After a study of the more common metrics used for products and management reports, I couldn’t really find a metric that indicates the level of agility.

Learn more about the Professional Agile Leadership Essentials course

Find the books written by our Professional Scrum Trainers to help you learn more about Scrum and Agile.