Resources

Check out this webinar with Digital.ai and Scrum.org to learn about the practices, tools, and values that have allowed many agile teams to thrive while working remotely and the steps that your organization can take if you have teams or individuals who are struggling.

Last week, someone on Reddit asked whether there would be any other profession that requires attending a 2-day training class and would then pay as well as a Scrum Master job.

TL; DR: 70 Scrum Master Theses The following 70 Scrum Master theses describe the role of from a holistic product creation perspective.

TL; DR: 11 Proven Stakeholder Communication Tactics - Stakeholder communication: It is simply not enough for an agile product development organization to create great code and ship the resulting product like a clockwork...

Distributed teams are not new, but our global pandemic has made them the norm. Atlassian University and Scrum.org team up in this webinar to explore the myth that agile and Scrum Teams need to be colocated and walk through real-world examples of how products get delivered from distributed teams.

People in Belarus fight the dictatorial regime that purposefully removes all protest leaders. Under these circumstances, though, self-organization strives. Having a common bigger goal, people invent various kinds of protests and demonstrate unprecedented creativity and courage.

TL;DR: Creating an Agile Community of Practice Creating an agile community of practice helps winning hearts and minds within the organization as it provides authenticity to the agile transition — signaling that the effort is not merely anothe

TL; DR: Exploring a Virtual Ecocycle Planning with Mural — A Live Virtual Meetup on August 20, 2020 Let’s try our favorite Liberating Structure microstructure in a remote setting with 

On many occasions in the recent past, working with distributed agile teams has amplified existing organizational, technical, and cultural challenges in many organizations.

In this blog post, we share our experience, recommendations, and lessons learned by providing the online PSM II class.

TL; DR: Results of a Test of Using Unhangout to Host Virtual Barcamps Last week, 30-plus attendees of the 24th Hands-on Agile meetup ran a virtual Barcamp experiment w/ MIT’s Unhangout, an open-source platform for organizing attendee-driven v

Usually conversation between developers and Product Owner goes around acceptance criteria just to negotiate scope of requirements for one user story, but knowledge and context are not conveyed in the same structured way. User Story Canvas can help Scrum Team to fix these problems by focusing team to confirm more complex aspects.

Product Ownership is hard enough when your dedicated development team is around the corner from you. So how can you be as effective when your whole team is distributed? This practical session will cover a bunch of tools and techniques you can use as a remote Product Owner to continue communicating vision, maximizing value, and validating your product direction. We will demonstrate ways to collaborate on your Product Backlog, participate in Scrum events, setup other important team and stakeholder cadences, and ways to keep morale high in uncertain times. (58:28 Minutes)

For many years, many of us have had strong opinions about the importance of having teams that are co-located.

TL; DR: Remote Agile Transitions We are used to saying the Scrum is a perfect probe for organizations, as it will reliably discover all dysfunctionalities.

Last week, 30-plus participants in the 23rd Hands-on Agile meetup had a virtual strategy session where they explored Liberating Structures’ Critical Uncertainties microstructure. They identified robust and hedging strategies for Scrum Masters and agile coaches regarding the challenges of remote work and distributed agile teams.

The concept I describe below is tested, proven, and modeled after my virtual Professional Scrum training classes.

A physical build monitor - like a light that turns red when a build fails - is a great way to get fast feedback. Its also a fun & educational activity for Development Teams, as it gives them a product of their own they can apply their craft to. And it encourages a Developer Culture.

TL; DR: Quo Vadis, Scrum Master? — A Live Virtual Meetup on June 4, 2020 Freelancing Scrum Masters being let go, with no new projects on the horizon. Employed Scrum Masters being furloughed or fired.

The first insights are available from the Remote Agile Survey

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.

There has been no shortage of articles on how to work remotely recently, including our series on Remote Agile.

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.

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 Sprint Backlog be related to the Sprint Goal? In this post I work from examples of a real product, and the Sprint Goals we used there, to answer those questions.

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!

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

Nobody really saw COVID-19 coming. Most people thought it would be similar to previous virus outbreaks and peter out without any meaningful impact on our daily lives. As the situation unfolded, we struggled to fully grasp the exponential nature of it.

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.

This fourth article now addresses basic remote agile anti-patterns — the pitfalls any distributed team wants to avoid to become successful.

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.

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.

This follow-up post now delves into virtual Liberating Structures, answering the question of how we can make use of the powerful toolbox of inclusive and collaborative practices in a remote setting.

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?

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma uses some analogies and stories of how to deal with difficulties when working with distributed Scrum Teams. Ravi discusses why connecting with people on the team is so valuable and suggestions on how to connect with them. (9:22 Minutes)

The premise of Lean Coffee is relatively straight forwarded. Like-minded people that want to create or discuss something they care about use this tool to organize their conversations.

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...

How the Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master II exercise “Management in Scrum” can be used during a job interview with Scrum Masters.

This article is about how we improved on the Spotify inspired model in one tribe inside a Large Dutch Bank.

The Scrum Guide is quite clear on one important thing: for one product there is only one Product Owner and only one Product Backlog...

Welcome to the Agile Movers & Shakers interview series. Today’s guest is Ben Linders.

How to start an Agile transformation? What are the initial steps? In this article I explain how transformations could be planned using Scrum Patterns and systems thinking.

This blog post gives you an overview of the paper "Liberating Structures - an Antidote to Zombie Scrum". It describes what Zombie Scrum is about and offers tangible examples of how to recognize, treat, and prevent Zombie Scrum by using Liberating Structures.

What baffles me each time I look at the numbers with regards to Scrum certifications, is the low amount of PSD Certified Software Developers in relation to the certified Product Owners and Scrum Masters out there.

Scrum Master anti-patterns: The reasons why Scrum Masters violate the spirit of the Scrum Guide are multi-faceted. They run from ill-suited personal traits and the pursuit of individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.

What event could better embody Scrum’s principle of empiricism than the Sprint Retrospective? I assume all peers agree that even the simplest retrospective—if only held regularly—is far more useful than having a fancy one once in a while, not to mention having none at all.

The Gatekeeper is the single point of contact between the Scrum Team and the outside world. The Gatekeeper tends to block all connections between the Development Team and its stakeholders; all communication goes through him/her.

During this Liberating Structures strategy for Scrum meetup we addressed dealing with uncertainty — a particularly useful skill in highly competitive markets. Learn more about how to train and grow the resilience of your team when dealing with the unexpected.