As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Krystian Kaczor talks about how a Scrum Master must take on many personalities when working with their Scrum Teams and a few examples of the types of personalities they may take on. Those personalities may also evolve over time wit...

“Scrum begins with Done”. The assertion might seem counter-intuitive, as though we must start by defining the end.

If you believe the hype that all you need to do to become a next generation agile IT organization is adopt Scrum and DevOps. Scrum to empower your teams and provide a lightweight framework for getting work done, and DevOps to provide the automation, systems thinking and lean practices to deliver and...

"It's not always easy to be a good Scrum Master. Learn some common pitfalls of Scrum Masters, and to recover from them, or avoid them altogether." "Knowing my True North gives me the courage to focus my energy where I believe it should be, not according to what is popular or pleasing to others." ...

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Martin Hinshelwood talks about why DevOps and Continuous Delivery fit nicely with Scrum as complimentary practices and techniques. 3:17 Minutes

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Kate Terlecka discusses the 4 things you need to consider when looking to Scale Scrum. 3:39 Minutes

Muchas veces sucede que la comunicación no es clara cuando se quiere definir que es terminado. Por ejemplo, cuándo un usuario especifica que requiere un reporte con cuatro columnas y que la última columna tenga un total parece algo sencillo.

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Stephanie Ockerman demonstrates that planning in Scrum is important and does occur despite the myth that many have heard that agile does not use plans.  Stephanie discusses the several events where planning takes place and how they ...

We talk about coaching a lot in the agile world. However, what we are actually expected to do is not usually about coaching. We do other things. We teach. We facilitate. We advise. We solution. We manage. Sometimes we even help do the work. None of those things are bad. Often, th...

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Rich Visotcky discusses the impact of Capital Expenses and Operational Expenses when transitioning from Waterfall to Scrum.  Rich provides some advice, things to look out for and an overall explanation of the different methods.  Thi...

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, we take a peek into part 2 of a conversation about overcoming blocked agile adoptions. Professional Scrum Trainers,  Pradeepa Narayanaswamy, Robert Pieper, Chad Beier and Stacy Martin talk about why it is important to have the entire organization on board, ho...

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, we take a peek into part of a conversation with Professional Scrum Trainers,  Pradeepa Narayanaswamy, Robert Pieper, Chad Beier and Stacy Martin as they discuss some of their experience in dealing with stalled agile change within organizations, reasons that i...

We find this a common thread amongst our customer teams, which can be attributed to a lack of backlog refinement.

We would all agree that “happy teams create happy results”, but the big piece to the puzzle is how to create those happy and engaged teams…  In this edition of Scrum Pulse, Professional Scrum Trainer Nagesh Sharma discusses the psychological aspects of the human brain connects the dots with Scrum...

"It's not our fault! The Product Owner is responsible for backlog management, the PBIs aren't well defined." "It's not my fault! The Development Team owns the Sprint Backlog, moreover, the PBIs went through refinement and they have the same level of detailing as the others." "I'm working on th...

Hi everyone! In this article, I'd like to share my list of top 30 books for Scrum Masters. I've read all of these books and used them in my practice. They actually work! :) The books cover all eight areas of the Scrum Master competency model developed by the Agile Coaching Institute: ...

The previous weeks I've taken some time to re-write the white paper "The 8 Stances of a Scrum Master". Given my sessions at Scrum Day London, Scrum Day Warsaw and Scrum Day Europe I wanted to offer the participants a paper with my latest insights and lessons learned. In this blog post I'll share the...

This white paper contains Professional Scrum Trainer Barry Overeem's personal experiences acting as a Scrum Master and the 8 stances he's documented with an in-depth perspective: The Scrum Master as a Servant Leader, Facilitator, Coach, Manager, Mentor, Teacher, Impediment Remover, and Change Agent.

Recently I had the opportunity to give a guest lecture about "Agile Essentials" at a University of Applied Science. These students, the lecturer told me beforehand, would only be partly interested and engaged. Therefore I prepared for the worst... While I watched the class going through the firs...

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, we take a peek into the third part of a conversation with Professional Scrum Trainers, Ravi Verma, Chad Beier, Charles Bradley and Victor Oliveira  as they discuss what it means to be a product. In this video, they look the definition of a product and how the...

Does this headline make you cringe or cheer? Scrum.org’s Steve Porter and ActionableAgile’s Daniel Vacanti weigh in on whether we should blend these two approaches.

In one of my previous blog articles, I wrote about the Scrum Master journey through the different levels of influence to achieve greatness. In this blog, we will explore the number one skill I believe is needed for a Scrum Master (servant leader) to be effective in order to create change and impact ...

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Ian Mitchell takes a look at the Nexus Framework, the Spotify Model and Scrum.  He compares, contrasts and discusses ways to scale Scrum

Agility is important to an organization and the path to agility becomes more clear by understanding the purpose of pursuing agility. The product owner role is key in increasing the benefits an organization can gain in their path to agility.

Many organizations have achieved sufficient success at the single team level with Agile approaches like Scrum that they want to bring Agile to their entire enterprise.

Do you ever wonder what determines our actions? Most people think that what we do is the outcome of our personality, however, the truth is more straightforward. It’s our mindset that controls our behavior. In this blog, we will explore few practical coaching tactics that a Scrum Master can ap...

When talking about Scrum, people often imagine the picture above: framework and its roles, artifacts, and events. Scrum rules are fairly simple, and they are thoroughly described in the Scrum Guide.

“Do not accustom yourself to consider debt only as an inconvenience; you will find it a calamity” - Samuel Johnson A few weeks ago we looked at the problem of technical debt, and at the challenges a Development Team faces when managing it. Technical debt can be defined as the longer term cons...

"As remote teams become more and more common, Scrum Masters must find a way to effectively do Scrum while working with far flung team members." "We are not a software development company, what you are talking works only for software development. We operate in a very different business. That stuff...

Most of the organizational change initiatives focus on the "hard" aspects such as organizational design, process or tools. Although those are critical, often other "soft" aspects such as values, principles or culture are overlooked. As the iceberg metaphor: consider them or they may sink yout Scrum ...

How Much Software Inventory Do You Have? When I ask this question of people in IT departments, even among senior managers and finance people, I get a variety of responses.

There is generally no bigger organization that government and with government comes politics and hierarchy, yet most government agencies around the world are attempting to become “more agile”. To achieve the goal of agility, many agencies are adopting Scrum, but with self-organization and servant le...

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Stephanie Ockerman discusses the role that Scrum plays in creating higher levels of business agility. She takes a look at the ability to deliver value with a continuous feedback loop to ensure that the organization doesn't go too fa...

Leadership is developed, not discovered (I have found inspiration in John C. Maxwell's various books).  John defines leadership as influence, and a good Scrum Master has to climb the different levels of influence to achieve a good to great mindset.

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Ralph Jocham discusses what the role of a Product Owner looks like, traits that they should have and those that may get in the way.

Respect is essential in solving complex problems and growing high performing teams.  This likely seems obvious, so I am going to share some of the more subtle examples of the value of respect in Scrum.

I am sharing the learnings from my recently read books which helped me improve my listening skills. Inspired by one of the tools from the Book "People Tools" by Alan C Fox  here is the first Tool/Tactic for Scrum Masters.

Many times, clients ask Agile Coaches like me to come in and share our "expertise" with them. But sometimes they really don't want our "Expertise". What they really want is someone with lots of TLA's to come and tell them that there pre-existing opinions are correct.

Sometime back I read a short SciFi story in a book named People Tools, Story was about a spaceship conducting man’s third ten year expedition to the nearest star. The first two voyages didn’t succeed when the four member crew neared earth. Scientists were puzzled as there were no technical issues wi...

As Agile become mainstream increasingly organizations are looking to double down on the role of the Product Owner encouraging them to manage the intersection between technology and the business.

Traditional software organizations have diametrically different values and operation from an Agile, Scrum based organization. You cannot simply paste a new approach on top of a traditional organization. Ken Schwaber wrote this presentation on this problem and how to measure its impact on staff. 

"Few ideas work on the first try. Iteration is key to innovation.” - Sebastian Thrun The Agony and the Ecstasy Have you ever seen the 1965 film The Agony and the Ecstasy, where Charlton Heston plays Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel? Each day the Pope looks up and asks him “When w...

Commitment is essential in solving complex problems and growing high performing teams.  Commitment in Scrum is often misunderstood as a promise to deliver a set scope by a set date.  That was never the intention of the word commitment in the Scrum Guide.  I hope this post helps illuminate the value ...

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Ian Mitchell discusses what a servant leader is and some ideas on how to be a good one.

It was only about 30 minutes into the meeting when the senior developer uttered the dreaded words: “Rewrite”. That was the point where what should have been a simple 6-step upgrade turned into a 9 month nightmare upgrade/rewrite costing us millions with nothing new to show for it and left us with a ...

This presentation from by Professional Scrum Trainer Erwin Van Der Koogh from Agile India looks at scaling Agile. 

In this ScrumPulse Webcast, Professional Scrum Trainers Peter Gotz, Gary Pedretti, Fredrik Wendt and Rich Visotcky discuss how they address concerns about architecture when delivering software using Scrum.

"There are no shortcuts when it comes to getting out of debt" - Dave Ramsey Technical debt can be defined as the longer term consequences of poor design decisions. In a sense it’s like any other debt - there ought to be a clear understanding of why it is incurred, and how and when to pay it b...

Ken Schwaber, the co-creator of Scrum and founder of Scrum.org, created the Nexus framework and corresponding Nexus Guide to help organizations scale Scrum.  This datasheet provides a brief overview of Nexus and some ideas on next steps.

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, we take a peek into the second part of a conversation with Professional Scrum Trainers, Ravi Verma, Chad Beier, Charles Bradley and Victor Oliveira  as they discuss what it means to be a product. In this video, they look at how you should not define a product...