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...

After many years of relative stability, the company found itself struggling with sudden and huge changes in their market. In no more than a few years, competition increased tremendously along with the emergence of new technologies. Having been a dominant player for several decades, the company f...

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

In this story, I describe and debrief a difficult moment I experienced as a coach. In addition to this writeup being my personal reflection, it might serve as a source of learning for you.

Shu-Ha-Ri has been a frequent topic within Agile communities for years to capture the essence, the progress of the journey we embark on as we grow and learn better ways of working.

An introduction of the 4 symptoms, with the symptom ‘No desire for contact with the outside world’ explained in detail.

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.

*Covid is a fictional character based on my imagination that represents the strain of CoronaVirus that is causing the disease Covid-19. This is just a very simple and sincere attempt to put my knowledge and understanding about Covid-19 to test in this article and I tried making the connection with S...

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.

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.

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”. 

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...

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

In every Sprint, Sprint Retrospective is an excellent chance to inspect and adapt the way of working.

While working remotely might feel good right now, we are up for trouble. Anxiety-invoked behavior and stress are likely to happen very soon. Let's discuss what is coming at us.

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. Pure Perfection Making your retrospectives as short as possible is not a good id...

Interesting times have come. Due to danger of coronavirus spread many organizations decided to switch to the remote work model. Besides the influence on Scrum implementation, this might be a new situation for you personally.

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...

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’.

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

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.

This blog post talks about using the Fish! philosophy for Sprint Reviews.

This article goes into detail how anti-patterns can evolve and possibly create other issues for the Scrum Team.

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. Urgent items There might be urgent changes popping up during the Sprint. How do we d...

One the questions I get asked during almost every Scrum Master training course is "How do I get the team to engage in the Sprint Retrospectives?".

Let's look at the bigger picture, leaving out the details. What we all mostly want is better health, better fitness and better movement quality.

Choosing how you will walk through your day, having fun with your colleagues and clients, actively listen and participating in collaborations, and ensuring others also have a great day...

In this post I‘d like to share an exercise for Scrum Masters to help their Scrum Teams and stakeholders build a deeper understanding of the importance of the Scrum Values and how directly the Scrum Values impact work and value.

For those of you who are big fans of Marvel Cinematic Universe comics or who have watched the latest Avengers: End Game movie might know that Thanos (supervillain) wanted to possess all 6 infinity stones so that he would be unstoppable and could gain control over the entire universe.

Bringing transparency by inspecting the Product Backlog and adaptation (building) the Sprint Goal, a forecast, and the Sprint Backlog.

In this blog, we’ll dive deeper into the topic: “Scrum Master vs Project Manager”. If you’re having a similar question about the Product Owner vs the Project Manager.

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

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

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. 

Choosing how you will walk through your day, having fun with your colleagues and clients, actively listen and participating in collaborations, and ensuring others also have a great day. I have written a short story a while ago about the basics of the Fish! Philosophy for being an outstanding team me...

If you are working as a Product Owner, there is—very likely—room for improvement. This list of some of the most common Product Owner anti-patterns might be a starting point.

This post is an excerpt from the book that we’re writing, the ‘Zombie Scrum Survival Guide’. It’s our way of delivering small increments and involving our stakeholders: you, the reader. So we’d love to hear your feedback, encouragements and wild ideas.

A while ago, I received an interesting scientific article from Gunther Verheyen titled “Getting Things Done: The Science Behind Stress-Free Productivity” (Heylighen & Vidal, 2007). The article discusses possible scientific explanations for the success of a personal productivity approach called “Gett...

One of the teams I worked with suggested dropping the Sprint Retrospective and the Sprint Review from the Sprint and only do them every other Sprint.  

How to use the Liberating Structure 'Mad Tea' with Scrum.

Sprint Planning is a core event, defining how your customers’ lives will improve with the next Product Increment. Learn more on how to improve its effectiveness by avoiding 20 common Sprint Planning anti-patterns.

Scrum, in its more general definition, is a simple framework to help us address complex challenges. Product development is the subset of complex problem domains where Scrum took root first...

I call myself a Scrum Caretaker. I aspire inspiring people using Scrum. I prefer sharing positive experiences and cases that demonstrate how amazing working with Scrum can be, what problems can be tackled and how, the level of excellence we can build into our products, how Scrum can engage people.