In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Jay Rahman will be available answers questions on leadership, Product Ownership, Scrum Mastery and more! (58:14 Minutes)

Is your organization having trouble instilling self-management? Then this is the article for you!

I gotta say, refining work items is usually, by far, the Scrum Team’s least popular activity.  No one gets up in the morning saying, “I can’t wait to refine the Product Backlog!” In this article, we will discuss five reasons why refining your Product Backlog is worth the time.

Done is a fundamental part of bringing transparency. How does this relate to the Product Owner? Check it out! Back to the foundations of the Scrum framework (75)

Understanding the “why” behind the Scrum framework can help Scrum teams improve their ability to deliver value to the organization.  We previously discussed the purpose behind each Scrum event and the purpose behind each Scrum accountability.  In this article, we’ll take a deep dive into the purpose of each Scrum artifact. 

​​​​​​​Scrum Teams that understand the “why” behind the Scrum framework can better increase value delivery to the organization. Internalizing the purpose behind the events, artifacts and accountabilities of Scrum allows the team to get the most benefit from them.  In this article, we will discuss the purpose of each of the three accountabilities in Scrum.

Suppose you are looking to fill a position for a Scrum Master (or agile coach) in your organization. In that case, you may find the following 73 interview questions helpful in identifying the right candidate.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer Yuval Yeret answers the audience's pressing Scrum questions focused around leadership, how leadership and Scrum Mastery are intertwined, and how leaders can engage with Scrum. Yuval is co-author of the Scrum Guide Companion for Leaders.

Garbage in, garbage out: Learn about 14 first principles to help your team succeed with an actionable Product Backlog.

10 simple principles of a critical scrum success factor to improve your team’s effectiveness, team spirit, and reputation.

I think of the three accountabilities in the Scrum framework as creating a balance of power.  But what happens when an individual fulfilling one (or more!) of the accountabilities in Scrum gets a bit — um — power hungry?  In this article, we will discuss a few examples of how people fulfilling each of the three accountabilities can overstep their bounds. 

Epics and features are complementary Scrum practices that some Product Owners use to organize their Product Backlog. Like a folder structure, they are a convenient way to group PBIs into meaningful groups.

Many people using Scrum today have no formal training or are new to agile frameworks. It’s the perfect environment for myths and misconceptions to spread.

A cross-functional team is a fundamental part of effectivity. How does this relate to Sprint Planning? Check it out!

Erfahren Sie mehr darüber, worauf Sie achten sollten, wenn Sie Ihre Teamkollegen, die das Produktinkrement erstellen, auf dem Pfad der kontinuierlichen Weiterentwicklung unterstützen wollen.

Scrum Guide 2020 mentions Sprint Goal and Product Goal because Scrum teams must have a Share Goal. The Share Goal is always essential, even though the Scrum Guide didn't say it before. Basically, the Common Goal helps the Scrum Team become consciously Autonomous. Because Autonomy will lead to chaos if the group doesn't have a Share Goal. (See picture below) In this article, I would like to share the problems the Scrum Team usually faces when setting their goals and making plans not to be unified or linked to achieving a Common Goal. Thereby, I share with everyone a compact tool that makes it easier for you to define the valuable Share Goals.

Learn more about what to look out for if you want to support your teammates who build the Increment.

Liberate your Sprint Review from being just a demo. There is much more to it than that! I'm sharing eight things you should do in the Sprint Review

The work of solving a complex problem (for example, a feature) with interdependent tasks rarely distributes evenly among the people in a cross-functional team. The solution is a team of multi-skilled specialists. A team of multi-talented people experience fewer bottlenecks as they can help overloaded team members, and therefore reduce the time to solve a complex problem end-to-end. The team develops multi-skilled members by working in three preferred modes: pairing, mob-programming, and swarming continuously. Some other techniques are: StarMap, visualizing the flow of work, and Slack Time.

In this blog post, I explain the difference between the attitude of a programmer and a product developer, why it matters, and some tips to make the shift.

Fourth blog, in a blog series about the upcoming book: Creating Agile Organizations - A Systemic Approach, by Cesario Ramos & Ilia Pavlichenko.

In this blog post, Sander Dur explains technical debt vs undone work...

Das Sprint Planning ist ein zentrales Scrum-Ereignis, welches entscheidet, wie sich das Leben Ihrer Kunden mit dem nächsten Inkrement verbessern wird. Erfahren Sie mehr darüber, wie Sie Ihren Kunden durch die Vermeidung von 20 gängigen Sprint Planning Anti-Patterns helfen können.

The Scrum Guide doesn't provide a complete list of the skills required for any of the accountabilities on a Scrum Team. For example, it doesn't specify that Developers must use Java or C# code. The Scrum Guide simply states that Developers need all of the skills to deliver a Done increment of product each Sprint. We intuitively know that the skills required depend on the product. 

TL; DR: Scrum Master Anti-Patterns The Sprint Planning is a core event that defines how your customers’ lives will improve with the following Product Increment.

The reasons Scrum Masters violate the spirit of the Scrum Guide are multi-faceted. Typical Scrum Master anti-patterns run from ill-suited personal traits to complacency to pursuing individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.

Scrum is a tactical framework to build products, provided you identify what is worth making in advance. But even after a successful product discovery phase, you may struggle to create the right thing in the right way if your Product Backlog is not up to the job—garbage in, garbage out.

Recently I was asked to answer some questions for a journalist on how to structure IT organizations. The questions were interesting and I wanted to share my responses here.

The Scrum Guide defines Sprint Goal as the single objective for the Sprint, is a commitment by the Developers, and is part of the Sprint Backlog.

Scrum Values make the use of Scrum successful. How can these values bring more Transparency to your Increment? Check it out!

TL; DR: Scrum Master Success — My Top-Nine Indicators How would you know that your Scrum Master is competent? What are indicators for Scrum Master success?

With the rapid increase in the adoption of Scrum and other Agile frameworks over the past several years, I’m not surprised that a few misconceptions and myths about Scrum have surfaced.  While many more organizations embrace Scrum, many individual practitioners have not undertaken formal training.  It’s the perfect environment for misinformation and confusion.

Misconceptions about Refinement—the process of adding detail, order and size to individual Product Backlog items can be highly detrimental to a team's ability to deliver value to the business frequently. In this article, we will discuss some of the most common myths about Refinement in Scrum.

The Scrum framework comes with its own guardrails and values, but it is worth taking a moment to consider the base upon which Scrum is founded by examining the principles and values of the Agile Manifesto.  The Agile Manifesto includes four values and 12 principles that describe a better way to approach complex work.  In this article, we will discuss each of the 12 principles and what they mean in the real world.

The 2020 Scrum Guide includes five values that are important to every successful implementation of Scrum.  These values are courage, commitment, focus, openness and respect. These values don’t get much attention, but the longer I practice Scrum and coach teams, the more important I find them.  This article will outline each value and provide examples of how they play out in the real world.

TL; DR: Scrum 2022 — Getting You Started as Scrum Master or Product Owner Probably, you are considering how to further your Scrum Master career or Product Owner career in 2022.

Surprising insights from scientific studies into when and why code smells are introduced, and practical recommendations for how to write better code

​​​​​​​As a Professional Scrum Trainer, I love working from home, but engaging with others in a remote environment can be challenging. If you’re using Scrum remotely and need stakeholder feedback to order your Product Backlog, here are a few ideas for how to gather it virtually.

​​​​​​​The Sprint Review meeting is one of the Product Owner’s most important events.  But even the most important events can become a little stale over time.  Here are five ideas to spice up your Sprint Review meeting. 

Being a Scrum Master can be tough. You are accountable for helping organisations change the way they approach complex work. If you upset enough of the wrong people you may end up “changing” yourself out of a job.

TL; DR: My Top Ten Worst Scrum Anti-Patterns I recently was invited to a Scrum.org Webinar, and I picked a topic close to my heart: the worst Scrum anti-patterns.

TL; DR: The Obsession with Commitment Matching Velocity Despite decades-long efforts of the whole agile community—books, blogs, conferences, webinars, videos, meetups; you name it—we are still confronted in many supposedly agile organizations

What drives you to achieve? Money? Promotion? Skill mastery? Whatever it is that motivates you, that’s okay — be thankful that you are motivated to move forwards. Without motivation in any form, you can personally and professionally stagnate to a point where you become a detractor in a team environment. This blog will explore how to avoid falling into that trap and some of the common dysfunctions it causes.

If you are looking to fill a position for a Scrum Master (or agile coach) in your organization, you may find the following 54 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate.

On June the 8th Scrum.org hosted a webinar on the subject of using Scrum in Biotech research. The blog addresses unanswered questions from the session

When I first started practicing Scrum, I thought that delivering a done, usable increment each Sprint was the least important part of the framework (spoiler alert: delivering a done, usable increment at least once per Sprint is critically important for reducing risk, enabling faster delivery of business value, reducing the accumulation of technical debt, and facilitating empiricism.)  At the time, I was the Scrum Master for a team that was building an online application, and the Product Owner did not intend to release the new application to production until it was complete.  What did it matter how we sliced up the work when a certain amount of work had to get done either way? How wrong I was.

We've all had challenges with various stakeholders coming to us with a whole bunch of different information and wanting a whole bunch of different things. Who do I listen to? What’s most important?

Scrum Master Interview: Demand Creates Supply and the Job Market for Agile Practitioners is No Exception

What has served me well over the years is a combination of observation and asking questions. Congratulations on your new Scrum Master position! Now what?

If you’ve ever wondered whether Scrum can work for hard deadlines, the answer is – yes!  Not only can Scrum work in these situations, but in my experience, using this agile framework increases the probability of meeting challenging  deadlines.