Resources

As an agile coach and trainer, I have had the opportunity to reach thousands of students that are just beginning their journey into the Scrum and agile world.

The Development Team is both self-organizing and cross-functional and by the end of each Sprint provides an increment that is ‘done’ and releasable. The team defines how to organize work in a Sprint.

Many Agile coaches and Scrum Masters believe they know best. They believe teams must follow a certain set of steps and do things a certain way, and if they do, those teams will be more productive, happy, and successful than ever.

Hello great people of the world. It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post here. This time I want to share my experience working with Development Teams and a Product Owner at iPrice group who upgraded the way they ran their Sprint Planning.

At one point or another in our lives we have all experienced a long queue, stuck in a car on the motorway, sat on a train waiting for an open platform. My favorite memories stretch back to that line for the lunch at primary school where it was cake and custard day!

In this video, Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainer and Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) course steward Yuval Yeret talks about the PSK course, helping viewers to understand more about the structure of the class and what they will learn when attending. 

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe™) is one of the most popular approaches to applying agile at scale out there. SAFe's perspective is that "Nothing beats an Agile Team" and it doesn't try to reinvent the wheel or even innovate too much when it comes to the Team level

One of the key Kanban practices we discuss in the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams is Limiting Work in Process. 

This article discusses the growth of agility for customer-facing products with 3+ teams, probably tens of teams with Nexus and/or LeSS.

If you’re a veteran of the software industry, you probably remember those days where we released to production/GA every couple of months. Heck, many of the companies I meet these days still work that way.

In this post, we’ll explain the Liberating Structure ‘15% Solutions‘ and how we've used it. It’s a wonderful structure that can ignite big change by starting with small, individual contributions.

Don’t say this too loudly around agile conferences, but when it comes to the day-to-day work, Scrum and Kanban teams are very similar.

In this video, watch Dave West and Professional Scrum Trainer Yuval Yeret present on Scrum, Kanban and DevOps at Agile New England. 

Dear friends, I want to share an unusual view of Scrum with you. Perhaps you've never thought about such a point of view before. I hope it will be useful.

Bottom line - Toyota Improvement and Coaching Kata is the perfect partner for flow-based retrospectives.

"An Agile Coach know more than just Scrum", said one consultant in a boardroom meeting, "he/she knows organisation dynamics, executive coaching and other Agile practices like Kanban and DevOps", he continued.

Bottom line - PSK improves the performance of Scrum teams, but WiP must be optimized for flow and work in progress should not relatively age compared with other in progress items

Bottom line - WiP limits must be applied to improve flow of the delivery of value. It's a key lever to improve the performance of Professional Scrum Teams, and it's required by the Kanban Guide for Scrum.

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 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.

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

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.

In this session, we provide an overview of the Scrum framework, discuss how Scrum enables agility and ways that empiricism can empower the teams that use it.

Hello great people of the world. Welcome back to Professional Software Delivery with Scrum (PSD) blog series with yours truly. This time we're going talk about how to use Scrum And DevOps. I am interested to discuss this topic because it's quite common I get a question from someone in the agile community, "Should I use Scrum or DevOps?".

In February this year, Scrum.org published the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams and announced a new course - Scrum with Kanban Course, aimed at Scrum practitioners who wish to improve their processes by introducing certain Kanban concepts and elements. In this article, Vivify Scrum interviews Dave West about the new class and content.

We regularly work with teams that see the daily scrum as irrelevant, disruptive, and boring. They are often right. Here are three common anti-patterns and three potential solutions.

It’s been so exciting to hear so much positive feedback and interest in the new Scrum.org Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams and the accompa

Work is complex, and to honour the empirical approach is harder. It requires trust, in order to be transparent. To enable the responsiveness that agile promises there needs to be discipline and rigour.

In this episode of Agile.FM, host Jochen Krebs talks with Steve Porter who is a Professional Scrum Trainer on staff, working closely with the PST community at Scrum.org where he is also responsible for the curriculum.

Scrum.org has announced its new Scrum with Kanban course to teach individuals and teams how to use Scrum with Kanban practices, without changing Scrum. Scrum.org has collaborated with Daniel Vacanti to create the course.

Is it possible to use Scrum with Kanban? After a year of exploring the idea and working out the details, our answer is yes. Get ready to make your team stronger and more effective.

New Class Demonstrates How Scrum Can Be Complemented with Kanban Practices to Improve Effectiveness and Efficiency

Today we announced a new class Professional Scrum With Kanban. This class helps teams practicing Scrum to apply the practices of Kanban without breaking Scrum. It shows how visualization and flow are great partners in delivering Done software and how Scrum with Kanban helps teams become more professional.

In this class, students will learn how their Scrum Teams can introduce complementary practices from Kanban while continuing the way they are already working with Scrum, all without changing Scrum.

The Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams is the result of a collaboration between members of the Scrum.org community and leaders of the Kanban community. Together, they stand behind The Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams. It is their shared belief that professional software practitioners can benefit from the application of Kanban together with Scrum. (April 2018 version)

There is nothing in the Scrum Guide that says that you can't have workflow across the Sprint boundary. I'm going to suggest that not only can you, but you should as long as you don't endanger the Sprint Goal.

The intention of this blog post is to test the content of an upcoming book that I am writing on Leanpub called 

The intention of this blog post is to test the content of an upcoming book that I am writing on Leanpub called So You Want To Be A Hero: Soft skills at the core of Agile leadership. While I agree that Agile is eating the world, I believe we have to revisit our understanding of leadership to support Agile. To quote Denning in his article, "this kind of leadership is beyond the capabilities of the lumbering industrial giants of the 20th Century."

In this article we'll bust one of the more radical myths in Scrum; the belief that plans and planning have no place in Scrum.

"See it all. See it fairly. Be truthful, be sensible and be careful with language" - Henry Grunwald

In this blog post we’ll bust the myth that “The Scrum Master is a junior Agile Coach”. Effective change is driven from “the inside-out”. The Scrum Master - being part of the Scrum Team  - is in a better position to facilitate this change than an (external) Agile Coach.

There is no need to choose between Scrum and Kanban, but certain myths have led some to believe this is the case. It’s time to debunk them once and for all.

 

System optimization: Upgrading Team Competencies When developing complex innovative products, the Development Team will have different a workload for each one of their members.

"Perfection has to do with the end product, but excellence has to do with the process." - Jerry Moran

In this post we'll discuss the myth that Scrum Teams at best release working software at the end of a sprint, constraining teams that are capable of releasing faster.