Most organizations are using Scrum, however, many of them feel like the agility of their organization has degraded, and they might be right! Often, using Scrum starts out as a way to improve development efforts coordinated within an IT division or department, but that is not the most effective organ...

Does a Scrum Master really need technical business knowledge? If you’re trying to break in the world of Scrum, you might be asking yourself: Does a Scrum Master really need technical knowledge? Do they need business knowledge? I’m here to set the record straight.

Servant-leaders must create a strong foundation that helps people feel empowered to take action, enables them to move forward in a common direction despite uncertainty, and to feel inspired and resourceful during challenging times.  The 4 V’s can help you establish this strong foundation:  Vision, V...

William Davis shares his experiences about becoming an advanced Professional Scrum Master (PSM II). William took a course with me (Joe Krebs) in the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area in November 2018 and shortly after passed the PSM II exam.

Many Agile coaches and Scrum Masters believe they know best. They believe teams must follow a certain set of steps and do things a certain way, and if they do, those teams will be more productive, happy, and successful than ever.

Hello great people of the world. It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post here. This time I want to share my experience working with Development Teams and a Product Owner at iPrice group who upgraded the way they ran their Sprint Planning.

When I work with my clients on Scrum in a Marketing context the discussion about the Marketing Backlog and how to move from a big bang marketing campaign to a more iterative approach via smaller slices of stories is naturally a key area we focus on. 

A short story illustrating how fear cripples estimating and how empathy can come to the rescue.

Scrum is based on self-managed teams. Self-managed teams are able to evolve and adapt quicker in today’s highly complex working environments than traditional command-and-control management structures.

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Simon Bourk was live and answered the audience's questions about Scrum.

At one point or another in our lives we have all experienced a long queue, stuck in a car on the motorway, sat on a train waiting for an open platform. My favorite memories stretch back to that line for the lunch at primary school where it was cake and custard day!

In Scrum, “Done” doesn’t support adjectives like “nearly”, “pretty much” or “almost”. Work is “Done” or it isn’t . And there is a very powerful, compelling reason behind this: the Scrum Framework only helps to reduce the risk of wasting money and effort when you deliver “Done” software every Sprint;...

Photography may sound simple but is actually a problem of complex domain. There are many variables - light, subject, motion, distance, composition, framing - that come into play while capturing an image. Although, with current range of cameras equipped with highly adaptable sensors (empiricism) man...

I’ve been in a situation a few times where I’ve interviewed a candidate for a role. I’ve matched their CV to a well-prepared job specification...

Autonomy is a critically important concept in agile culture, however ignore its counterbalance -accountability - at your peril.

Everyone has a story to tell. Some write their stories in books, some in blogs, and some confine them in their hearts. I feel I have a beautiful story that is meant to be shared with the world.

Recently, I connected with Evan Cook, the founder of Head Down Heart Up (HDHU), a fitness and nutrition organization that has “The Perfect Fitness Framework,” which is a program based on Scrum, designed to simplify food and fitness.

Why do I think team coaching is a bad idea? Don't get me wrong, I believe team coaching can have a great amount of added value. It’s just that I often find that teams receive coaching while they should not even be a team.

In this video, Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainer and Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) course steward Yuval Yeret talks about the PSK course, helping viewers to understand more about the structure of the class and what they will learn when attending. 

This short video provides an overview of the Professional Agile Leadership Essentials (PAL-E) course, course stewards and Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainers (PSTs) Ryan Ripley and Ron Eringa give you insight into the structure of the class and what you will learn over the 2 days. (3:05 Minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Andreas Ebbert-Karroum talks about Scrum Retrospective events and a tool that he has used to help improve their success rate and communication across the team.

Woohoo! Last week marked the official announcement from Scrum.org that I’m finally a Professional Scrum Trainer. I’m excited, amazed and incredibly humbled to join this community of professionals. In this post, I would like to share this journey. Perhaps it will inspire you towards a similar journey...

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ralph Jocham explores the difference between the definition of "Done" and acceptance criteria. Ralph compares and contrasts the two, discussing the importance "Done" and how to best leverage them. (4:14 Minutes)

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Dominik Maximini looks at how Scrum Masters start in their role and evolve over time based on new knowledge and experience. Dominik discusses impediments that Scrum Masters run into with their Scrum Teams and how to overcome them as they learn. ...

Ahhh... the never-ending debate. What's the value of (Scrum) certifications? Is there any value? Why should you get certified? Is it even necessary? In this blog, Chee Hong gives his opinion about the value of certifications and the reasoning behind getting certified.

In the webinar, Kacper Mazek - Principal Consultant at Radically, Edwin Dando - Director at Radically and Professional Scrum Trainer, and Leona Cheffins - HR Business Partner at Vodafone, discuss how they used different tools, models and frameworks that helped Vodafone's business teams with Agile de...

This article on Product Backlog refinement shows that Refinement is more than just a meeting where the whole Scrum Team is having a discussion. It requires and involves everyone with shared and special responsibilities.

DevOps is all over the place nowadays. The toolset is exploding. Companies are offering a large variety of products to suit the needs of customers. Looking at Google Trends, the keyword devops has doubled in popularity in the last two years. Acting as an Agile coach, I’ve been steadily working w...

In this webcast, Professional Scrum Trainer Venkatesh Rajamani fields Scrum questions from the participants.

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe™) is one of the most popular approaches to applying agile at scale out there. SAFe's perspective is that "Nothing beats an Agile Team" and it doesn't try to reinvent the wheel or even innovate too much when it comes to the Team level

The Product Owner role is implemented in organizations in various different ways. The responsibilities and authorities of Product Owners vary across organizations, departments, teams and Product Owners. This can be explained to some extend, because it is a role that people need to grow into. The rol...

One of the key Kanban practices we discuss in the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams is Limiting Work in Process. But how do we actually lower work in process in the real world? Here are some patterns you might find useful.

Over the years I've heard my share of these kinds of statements from various levels of executives...

As a trainer, I often get asked for real world examples of Scrum implementations. You can't get any more real world than how Francis and Sally live their lives through Scrum, as they look for a way to help with ADHD.

I’ve had this ongoing discussion with a few of my colleagues who says that the term “agile leader” is an oxymoron - that the ideal organization is a bunch of Scrum Teams and not much else. Even in an ideal world, I disagree, and here’s why in a nutshell: I’ve never seen, and have not even heard of, ...

This article discusses the growth of agility for customer-facing products with 3+ teams, probably tens of teams with Nexus and/or LeSS.

Cuando se trata de representar Scrum en muchas ocasiones se usan algunas imágenes que muestran los roles, eventos y artefactos para definir Scrum. Si solo se usan estos elementos o se define Scrum en base a estos elementos se puede estar fomentando un enfoque mecánico de Scrum o un Scrum flácido que...

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Boris Steiner looks at several anti-patterns that he has observed over the years participating in Sprint Reviews and ways he has found to overcome them.  (4:40 Minutes)

“The important thing is to remember what most impressed you and to put it on canvas as fast as possible.” - Pierre Bonnard

If you've been at an Agile conference, been a Scrum Master for quite some time and joined an Agile meetup group (here in The Netherlands there are several), then you probably found that games can be very quick ways to energize any meeting and to drive learning through fun.

Scrum.org has a diversity council that has been researching the topic from an agile perspective. How can Scrum Teams embrace diversity and what will be the gift from doing so?

This week, we are building our new website with a Scrum Team. Practicing what we preach, we are doing this in the most Agile, iterative way we can. So yes, we're making all the expected mistakes. In this post, we share what we learned about flow and releasing more often - with examples that are as r...

In 2014, Pieter Elbers became the CEO of KLM. A new ambition customer-centric: to become the most customer-centric, innovative and efficient European network carrier.

In every Scrum.org Professional Scrum Development class, we touch upon both technical and collaboration practices to help improve the development teams explore new options.

You’re likely to have been asked the question: “we need to go faster, how many more people do we need?” Most people naturally understand that just adding a random number of people isn’t likely to make us any faster in the short run.

In this video, Professional Scrum Trainer Dave Dame is interviewed by Global News - The Morning Show about about living a life of looking for ways to be uncomfortable and his talk at TEDx Toronto.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainers Todd Miller and Ryan Ripley discuss what it means to be a Professional Scrum Master. They look at behaviors, qualities and a big focus on the Scrum Values. (9:16 Minutes)

Special Spanish Edition of Scrum Tapas by Professional Scrum Trainer Alex Ballarin.  Los Daily Scrum son eventos muy importantes en Scrum para conseguir la gestión de procesos empírica. Si el equipo Scrum no es capaz de establecer una meta efectiva para el Sprint o los desarrolladores usan este even...

I live many lives – in one of them, I am happily residing in the world of software development where I am also a Professional Scrum Trainer. In another, lesser known one – I am Band Manager (and former band member/musician myself) to a highly-regarded and awarded independent/underground musical act....

In this live webinar, Eric Naiburg, Director of Marketing and Operations for Scrum.org, describes how organizations can overcome these impediments by growing their Agile practices through empiricism, protecting Agile values, and changing the organization organically, team by team, product by product...