Often I hear people say that Scrum does not take care of risk: there is no risk log, risk is not on the agenda of the Sprint Review or Retrospective as a standard agenda-item. The Developers need to be accountable for the quality of the product and how it's made. And ultimately each role in Scrum h...

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

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

The purpose of Scrum is to deliver Increments of releasable functionality. So at each Sprint Review, a “Done” Increment is required to make transparent the progress made by the team.

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 world is becoming more technologically complex, interdependent, and culturally  diverse, which makes the building of relationships more and more necessary to get things accomplished and, at the same time, more difficult.

A common question I hear in Scrum training courses and in coaching sessions is, “how much Product Backlog refinement should we do and how much detail should be in the Product Backlog?”

In this post, we bust a myth that is at the heart of why refinement feels like a chore to many Scrum Teams: the belief that ‘Product Backlog refinement’ should be done as one or more required ‘meetings’ that must be attended by everyone in the team. We also offer some alternative approaches that fit...

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 v...

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.

Improve and Accelerate Software Delivery for Large, Distributed, Complex Projects: The Nexus Framework is the simplest, most effective approach to applying Scrum at scale across multiple teams, sites, and time zones. Created by Scrum.org–the pioneering Scrum training and certification organization f...

As a servant-leader, the Scrum Master sometimes has to make very difficult decisions. This might even include removing someone from the Scrum Team. Obviously, this a difficult decision that should not be taken light-hearted. In this post, we'll share some perspectives on the kinds of situations wher...

The questions we ask from ourselves, and the team asks from themselves are critical to influence our behavior and decisions. In this episode we explore 5 different aspects for a successful Scrum Master, and what Professional Scrum Trainer Lucas Smith has learned about them. Featured Retrospective...

In this blog post we've shared our ideas on "Your Scrum Master Journey" and the first steps we've made at a Dutch customer.This week Christiaan Verwijs and I facilitated a workshop at a Dutch customer in which Scrum Masters could provide a pitch for participating in "Your Scrum Master Journey".

Teams with high diversity are more innovative. They have more perspectives that create a higher rate of idea flow. More new ideas are generated that lead to new products and innovations than in homogeneous teams. What is innovation? Innovations are the steps that lead to improved products. ...

In the "Scrum from the trenches" blog post series I like to address topics that I encounter in practicing Scrum in the real world, with real Scrum Teams. Sharing where theory comes into practice, what challenges teams encounter along the way and ways to help Scrum practitioners use the power of empi...

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 comm...

In this blog post we’ll share the string of Liberating Structures we used at a Retrospective for a rapidly growing startup.

One of the most common questions I am asked in my Professional Scrum Master (PSM) courses and in coaching engagements is: How do we build trust? This is a complex topic. And there are no simple or quick processes or techniques that will guarantee an outcome. Nor can you know how long it w...

When coaching for organizations, I am often met at the doors of the cathedral by exasperated management.  Frustrated for how Scrum is transformed to meet personal agendas and bias. 

“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. The mind can only see what it is prepared to see.” - Edward de Bono If you are ever hired as an agile coach,...

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.

I would like to discuss Scrum and XP because I often get a question "When should I use Scrum or XP?" from people in the community.

I’m lucky enough to work with different teams on a regular basis. In some cases, these teams have been doing scrum for years. These teams have become highly proficient when it comes to the events in Scrum. They always have Done software to be inspected at the Sprint Review. They have excellent, deep...

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Andrzej Zińczuk discusses his experience working with a Scrum Team that was questioning their need to conduct Sprint Retrospectives each Sprint. He used a football analogy to help them understand the importance of a Sprint Retrospe...

As an Agile Coach, you frequently encounter situations which demand quick thinking to get things moving in the right direction. Over time I have found few techniques which come out handy and always keep these in my playbook in case need arise. This is first part in the series of tools that I have fo...

TRIZ is a facilitation technique to stop counterproductive activities and make space for innovation.

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 profess...

I have recently been helping a new Scrum team get started with the framework and helping them to set themselves up with the best chance of being successful with Scrum. After a two week sprint in which they did deliver an increment and learned a lot about the product that they would be work on, it...

In this post, we address the myth that the Sprint Review is primarily an opportunity to ‘demo’ the increment to stakeholders. Although a demo certainly can be part of a Sprint Review, it fails to capture what the Sprint Review is actually about...

A friend sent me an e-mail, asking me to summarize Nexus and the Scaled Professional Scrum class. Here's the gist of what I sent in return. Why Nexus? If you know Scrum, you already know the basic principles and most important things needed to scale Scrum: inspect and adapt cycles, and the imp...

Improve your Scrum events with the Liberating Structure “1-2-4-All”. Unfold open conversations and sift ideas and solutions in rapid fashion. Your Scrum events (and other meetings, events, workshops) will never be the same!

Stop the traditional introduction rounds and start using Impromptu Networking. A facilitating technique to rapidly share challenges and expectations and build new connections.

Back in the early days of Scrum, the Scrum Master role was exciting. The days of the pigs & chickens, the days when being a Scrum Master was considered dangerous. In those times there was the saying a dead Scrum Master is a useless Scrum Master  And even today I still use that when selecting a...

The Sprint is one of the five Scrum events.  In my Professional Scrum Courses, this is the event that people often forget about because it is a container event, not necessarily something you distinctly schedule on the calendar.

This document provides an overview of the changes made to the Nexus Guide over time.

According to Forrester Research, 90% of Agile teams use Scrum.[1] One reason for this popularity is that Scrum is a simple framework that promotes transparency and empiricism. It is based on a set of principles and values, and consists of three roles (Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development Tea...

In August 2015, Ken Schwaber and Scrum.org introduced the Nexus framework to the public via the Nexus Guide, the definitive guide to scaling Scrum. Today, on January 17, 2018, we release the first update to the Nexus Guide.

“I designed a defined framework for using many Scrum Teams on a single product or problem. The result is Nexus, an exoskeleton that rests on top of many Scrum Teams. Nexus provides information and management information for guiding their working together.” - Ken Schwaber

An online version of The Definitive Guide to Nexus

In this article we’ll bust the myth that in Scrum too much time is spend in meetings. We’ll not only describe how time-consuming the Scrum events factually are, but also clarify the purpose and importance. After explaining the origins of this myth, we’ll offer some practical tips to prevent or resol...

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.

In this post, we’ll explain the Liberating Structure "Troika Consulting" and how we apply this facilitation technique within our Scrum training and coaching engagements.

People in the Agile community must have heard or have came across this white paper multiple times. We have been preaching about it in our training classes but I am not sure how many of Agile community members have actually read it thoroughly. The paper was published in Jan 1986 issue of HBR and is v...

Product Backlog Management As a Product Owner, you are responsible for Product Backlog Management, in order to maximize the value of the Product. The Product Backlog is the single source of truth which contains all the work to be done on the Product. As a Product Owner, you will have to make some c...

Today we bust the myth that it is the responsibility of the Scrum Master to resolve all problems that are hindering the Development Team.

The Scrum Framework The Scrum Framework is a lightweight framework that defines three Roles, three Artifacts and five Events, which is used to develop and maintain complex Products in complex environments. Scrum doesn't prescribe a lot of things you must do, the Scrum Framework doesn't include exte...

As a Product Owner, you are responsible for stakeholder management. It's important that you know your stakeholders, their interests, what they need from you and your Product and how they may be able to help you out as well!