“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,...

When your product gets really big and you need to work with teams at scale, what options do Product Owners have? In this episode, Scrum.org CEO, Dave West joins the show to discuss the Nexus framework and what PO’s need to know in order to work in this type of scaled environment. We cover some of th...

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 in handy and always keep these in my playbook in case needs arise. This is the third part in the series of tools that I hav...

An organization with a diversity of gender, race, sexuality, and disability make fuller products and services.

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.

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Charles Bradley looks that the Scrum Value of Focus and ways to help improve and maintain it. He uses an excellent example about how the Sprint Goal helps individuals and the Scrum Team stay focused throughout the Sprint. 3:18 Minu...

This short video provides an overview of the Professional Scrum Foundations (PSF) course. Course stewards and Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainers (PSTs) Jill Graves and Rich Visotcky give you insight into the structure of the class and what you will learn. 1:59 Minutes

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 accompanying Professional Scrum with Kanban class. Creating the class and guide together with Daniel (Vacanti) & Steve (Porter) and then working on getting it to market ...

Working as a Scrum Master I asked myself... "How do I know if my team are demonstrating the Scrum Values? What can I use to show their current state?" Remembering an exercise I did some years ago whist at my local Agile group - Agile Yorkshire, I thought I could use a "Spider Web" to visua...

In this series, I want to Introduce some helpful tips for Scrum Masters on “Systems Thinking” - a diagnostic Tool and a disciplined approach for examining problems more completely and accurately before acting. Lights on! Camera ! Read the Scripts, Role Play , Post me back the experimentati...

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...

This is second part in the series of tools that I have found useful in my role as Agile Coach – Timeboxing.

You’ve implemented Agile into your organization and hired professionals with Agile experience on their résumé to back it up. Yet, something is still not right. The gains that Agile promised don’t seem to be coming to fruition. Delivery times aren’t faster than they were before.

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.

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Chris Lukassen talks about how he used Scrum when working with a group of children to build a bee house and how this experience can apply to any team looking to deliver a product using Scrum. (4:20 minutes)

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Evelien Roos discusses why having a Scrum Master also hold other roles on the Scrum Team is not a good idea and how it can cause conflicts of interest resulting in negative team impact. (2:21 Minutes)

This short video provides an overview of the Scaled Professional Scrum with Nexus (SPS). In this video, course stewards and Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainers (PSTs) Ravi Verma and Fredrik Wendt give you insight into the structure of the class and what you will learn over the 2 days. (

This short video provides an overview of the Professional Scrum Master (PSM) course created by Scrum co-creator and our founder Ken Schwaber. Course stewards and Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainers (PSTs) Stephanie Ockerman and Simon Reindl give you insight into the structure of the class and wha...

Kurt Bittner, VP of Enterprise Solutions presented "5 Things You Need to Know About Digital Transformation" at Agile 2018.

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Pawel Mysliwiec talks about why it is important for a Scrum Master to be patient.  He gives examples of his experience as a Scrum Master and trying to deal with issues too quickly and without thinking of the bigger picture. He looks...

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...

In this presentation from Scrum Day India, Professional Scrum Trainer Venkatesh Rajamani discusses how self-organization is not about eliminating leaders, but rethinking their role in a more balanced way. (51:32 minutes)

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Ralph Jocham discusses the evolution of mindset from a project to product point of view. He looks at some of the differences and benefits of thinking about a product rather than a project. (5:05 minutes)

Simon Sinek in his book „Start With Why“ talks about the importance of knowing why we are doing things before we think about what and how to do it. I think it is a good idea for Scrum Teams also to start with why for their product development. An important point for Simon is „people don’t buy wha...

In this webinar, we provide an overview of Nexus, describe how it is being used around the world to help organizations scale their Agile efforts with Scrum. Our presenters then demonstrate how these real-world scenarios using Nexus can be applied within the VersionOne Lifecycle solution. 

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Punit Doshi discusses the difference between having your entire schedule driven by plans that are created at the beginning of a project vs defining the plans on a Sprint by Sprint basis to help ensure that you are always focused on ...

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...

Try organizing a party in a “Yes, but…” atmosphere. The result is probably a zillion obstacles identified, but no party.

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

Professor Dr. Sabine Jaritz teaches a course within the Project Management major at the university called Project Controlling. This 14-week course looks at traditional vs. Agile project and portfolio management. Jaritz came to the realization that with Agile becoming more prominent, she needed to le...

In everything we do there should be some value - some importance in what we do. If not, then why do it? Without any worth, the thing that you're doing becomes a chore or you can easily drift on to something else. So we need to see the value in what we're doing. However, as a team we don't alwa...

"The most important metrics are: did we execute the way in which we said we would, and did we deliver the value to the business that we had promised?" - Jamie S. Miller In an earlier post we took a critical look at metrics and at how easily they can be abused. Pretty much anything can be meas...

Chris is a true example of an new type of leader. Not because he is a great speaker, nor because he has a big vision or has world changing ideas. Just because of one seemingly simple skill. A skill which is very hard to master. He recognizes the defining moments when he has to live the ambition. He ...

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.

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.

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...

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.

Scaling is a popular strategy these days: scaling innovation, scaling agile, scaling whole organizations. But scaling can easily undermine agile principles like focus and minimal viable product, and the abilities to deliver, learn quickly, and pivot decisively when required.

The Scrum Master role is a new one and is often misunderstood by teams and organizations implementing Scrum. When I work with organizations, often I see Scrum Masters role is not taken very seriously, A frequent response is to make the “leftover people” the Scrum Masters. They might be nice peop...

This is the German audio version of the Nexus Guide.

This is the audio version of the Nexus Guide.

Net Health first adopted Scrum in 2014 to aid in the completion of two large software development projects and remove the burden of an exhaustive initial requirements phase, thanks to the iterative nature of Scrum.

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...

These slides accompany the webinar What is Nexus? An Introduction to the Framework for Scaling Scrum

In this webinar, Patricia Kong, Scrum.org Product Owner of Enterprise Solutions and co-creator of Nexus provides an overview to the Nexus Framework, its principles and the thinking behind it. She will discuss how Nexus, like Scrum, promotes bottom-up intelligence to discover and emerge what works be...

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...

Steve Porter joined Agile for Humans host Ryan Ripley to discuss a wide variety of deep Scrum topics and approaches.

“Agile” has become a buzzword in the software development industry as well as the wider business landscape. And for good reason – several organizations have cited Agile principles as the influence behind results such as better financial performance, project success, customer satisfaction and employe...