Many folks on LinkedIn these days, seems to have a renewed interest in firing the Scrum Master. I have been asked quiet a few times personally as to what will the scrum master do now that we are heading to a ‘New Normal’.

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.

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

"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 - LinkedIn Connection: Hi Sumeet, I came across your profile on LinkedIn when looking for help with PSPO-I certification. Me: Sure, how can I help you? LinkedIn C...

Difference between Project Manager and Scrum Master.

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

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...

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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...

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.

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. Una distorsión muy frecuente es no entender el propósito de los eventos de Scrum y su impacto...

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!

Like many Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Agile Managers, I am beginning to understand organizations are complex adaptive systems.

In this episode, I will try to show how understanding mental models can significantly improve the abilities of leaders like Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Managers. This is because Mental Models are at the core of knowledge and learning.

This sixth article now dives into organizing a remote Sprint Planning with a distributed team: practices, virtual Liberating Structures, and lessons learned.

As promised, here is the part two of the two part series "how to lead live virtual class like a pro" where I'd be emphasising on the execution part- facilitating the class effectively.

Large numbers of Product Owners begin their work by creating requirements. In some situations, these scopes are dictated by others. Their work mainly consists of describing demands, thus apparently appearing as a scribe in their role.

The Scrum Master encourages the Scrum Team to improve, within the Scrum process framework, its development process and practices to make it more effective and enjoyable for the next Sprint.

In this blog post I explain why the Sprint Goal is key for an effective implementation of Scrum and how it is widely present in the Scrum framework by exploring its “lifecycle”. 

Scrum is intended as a simple, yet sufficient framework for complex product delivery.

Having a Sprint Goal in some cases is not easy. Having a good Sprint Goal is even more difficult.

Many teams are finding that they need to adjust to a new reality amid the covid-19 pandemic. Strategic plans lie in tatters, urgent unplanned work fills the board, stakeholders are hammering teams with requests, and routine has gone out of the window. This is a time for a Scrum Master to be pragmati...

Watch the Replay of the Remote Agile Practices & Tools Live Virtual Class At the end of March, we ran a Remote Agile Practices & Tools class with about 30 participants from all over Europe, the Eastern Seaboard, and Canada. The participants agreed on recording it and make it available to ...

Scrum.org has created Professional Scrum Competencies to help guide an individual’s personal development with Scrum. Building proficiency with Scrum starts with the fundamentals, Understanding and Applying the Scrum Framework, and it is the foundation for personal growth. The competencies and underl...

Every Sprint starts with a Sprint Planning event. It is very crucial to ensure that the Scrum Team comes to a shared understanding of what and how are they going to deliver a “Done” increment that creates maximum business impact. Although, like other events Sprint Planning also is often marred with ...

In this third post of the Remote Agile series, we address the tool at the heart of working with a distributed team as a Scrum Master, Agile Coach, or Product Owner: Zoom.

In this webinar, Professional Scrum Trainers Ryan Ripley and Todd Miller walk through some content in their new book, Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems, and talk about how experienced Scrum Masters balance the demands of these three levels of servant leadership, while ...

In today's vlog, I discuss about the differences between the Scrum Master and the Product Owner role.

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?

On November 22nd, 2019, I gave the closing keynote at Scrum Deutschland, a talk called ‘The Four Things You Do To Prevent Value Delivery.’

Agile has always been about colocation, about direct communication, physical boards, and all the other haptic and analog moments to create value in the digital realm...

The Old Farmer’s Almanac is the oldest continuously published periodical in North America. It was first published in 1792 by Robert B. Thomas who wanted an almanac “to be useful with a pleasant degree of humor. Many long-time Almanac followers claim that its forecasts are 80% to 85% accurate. 

The article explores the primary causes of zombified interaction between Scrum Teams and stakeholders.

One of the topics that often is unclear when starting with Scrum. You can teach ‘what’ it is. Sometimes it helps to point north to ‘why’ we do refinement. Good facilitation skills definitely help during refinement as well as a toolbox of structures and techniques will help with the ‘how’.

What is a Product Owner? What are the differences between a Product Owner and Project Manager? Isn’t a Product Owner some kind of an Agile Project Manager? These are some of the questions we often get from people in our Scrum.org classes.

After covering the Scrum Master and the Product Owner, this article addresses Development Team anti-patterns, covering all Scrum Events as well as the Product Backlog artifact. Learn more about what to look out for if you want to support your fellow teammates.

The Sprint Goal is mentioned numerous times in the Scrum Guide, however it can be over looked by many teams or seen as an "oh yeah" moment when teams are finishing Sprint Planning.

The Scrum Team gathers around their team desk to hold the Daily Scrum.

In this article, we shall investigate why the learning and development of multi-functional specialists in Scrum is the core of organizational Agility and value optimization. Many Development Teams are not collaborating as real teams, but as a collection of narrow specialists focused on "their" tasks...

Not all Agile Training Courses are created equal and some are more effective then others. So what's the difference that makes the difference? And how can we get more from our training?

In this blog post, we explain the Liberating Structure ‘Simple Ethnography’. We clarify its purpose, the steps to facilitate it, our findings, and examples of using it with Scrum.

The emergence of the Kanban Guide for Scrum teams has given new metrics and practices to Development Teams on how they can augment their Sprint Backlog to manage their work.

Learn how individual incentives and outdated organizational structures — fostering personal agendas and local optimization efforts — manifest themselves in Scrum stakeholder anti-patterns which easily can impede any agile transition.