In March 2021, I was conversing with a CTO of a Product based company. He asked me a question that if it was worth employing a Scrum Master. We discussed the topic by exchanging opinions, and I explained my viewpoint.

There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone.

I interviewed a Scrum Master candidate last week. This blog is inspired by him.

Desde hace 16 meses he recibido incontables preguntas relacionadas con el trabajo remoto en equipos.

One of my favorite sayings is “Inspection without adaptation is waste”. For continuous improvement it is important not only to identify things that did not go so well but to also change something in the way you are working. If you change nothing, the inspection did not have an impact at all and is a waste of time and energy.

Does the role of the Scrum Master go away with time? For addressing the doubt, first, understand the role of a Scrum Master clearly. 

Every company has customer focus in its vision or mission statement, but is it really? As an employee of a development team, how do I know if this is the case?

 

When we introduce Scrum to an organization, many people are skeptical of the monetary benefits and ROI of the Scrum Master position. The question I am often asked is - "How do you justify the salary of the Scrum Master?"

Can a Scrum Team simply decide to abandon Scrum? After all, the Scrum team is self-managing, according to the Scrum manual, also known as the Scrum Guide. So, let’s explore this question at the very heart of team autonomy.

A Scrum team consists of three clear accountabilities: one Scrum Master, one Product Owner, and Developers.  Often, when working with a Scrum team struggling with excessive conflict or a lack of trust, I find the culprit is a lack of clarity around each of these accountabilities.  Even with the best intentions, the Product Owner can become too focused on the upcoming Sprint and not focused enough on the bigger picture.  The Scrum Master can become overly protective of the team, and the Developers - wishing only to please - can take on too much work, jeopardizing the Sprint Goal.     

In this blog post, I share 10 success factors that emerged from a community meetup. These factors helped Scrum practitioners prevent or fix Zombie Scrum in their team and organization.

In the past few months I have heard several of my clients said that Scrum does not work and ask me to fix it.

TL; DR: Linking Strategy to Everyday Work w/ John Cutler — ACB21 In this highly engaging speaker session from the Agile Camp Berlin 2021, John Cutler delves into the advantages of linking strategy to everyday work: Motivation, inspiration, se

On today’s episode of YOUR DAILY SCRUM:  Is the Scrum Master Role an Entry Level Job?

I am often asked how to create better goals. This comes up at the team level, and it also comes up for the wider organization. When we are dealing with complexity, there is no one right way, no perfect template, and no best practice. And I find it helpful to look at the goals people are using today, explore the benefits those goals are giving them, and identify if there are unintended consequences of how they are using goals. In this post, I will share some common patterns I have noticed that lead to using goals poorly.

He sido un defensor del marco de gestión basada en evidencias (Evidence Based Management, EBM) de Scrum.org durante algunos años.

Professional Agile Leadership – Evidence-Based Management (PAL-EBM) is the newest course in the Scrum.org portfolio. To prepare the launch and our trainer community for this one-day workshop, we ran several train-the-trainer events. I enjoyed participating in one of those, and I am glad to share my experience with you.

When I’m describing the Key Value Areas (KVAs) of Evidence-Based Management, I find Time to Market is often misunderstood to mean “just go faster.” We need to scrub off the scent of “we know what we need to do, we just need to do it faster.” In complexity, goals and execution have a lot of unknowns, and things emerge as we do the work. So, we will be unsuccessful if we choose to follow a plan, even if we do it faster.

The role of an agile leader is to create and foster an environment where empiricism thrives to support the delivery of value. Evidence Based Management supports this, by providing a framework to link goals and objective measures to provide insights in to how effectively the organisation is working.

Today, Scrum.org launches the new Professional Agile Leadership - Evidence Based Management ™  (EBM) training course.

Discover how EBM solves many challenges for Product Owners.

EBM provides organizations with an opportunity to use empiricism to improve customer outcomes by delivering greater value. It helps to improve collaboration by elevating conversations from opinion-based discussions to evidence-based discussions and decisions. EBM may feel awkward at first, but it will be rewarding. The seeds of learning and changing are there.

We have now launched a new Scrum.org course – Professional Agile Leadership – Evidence-Based Management (EBM), and it is an exceptional occasion to share my experience with implementing the framework.

Previously, I have described some challenges with the Evidence-Based Management implementation. There are plenty of challenges regarding the process of applying Evidence-Based Management, there are also great results.

One personality trait we look for in managers is confidence. And rightfully so: It is needed to be able to make decisions and stand by them in adverse circumstances.

In industries ranging from financial services to consulting and defense, we can find countless examples of how organizations employed incentive plans that produced behavior not aligned to the organization's desired strategic goals.

Sprint Planning is an important event that has a significant impact on the team’s effectiveness and productivity during the Sprint.

La Gestión basada en evidencia de Scrum.org es un marco de trabajo que provee un enfoque empírico para mejorar continuamente el valor entregado a los clientes, las capacidades organizacionales para entregar ese valor y los resultados de negocio en un entorno de alta incertidumbre.

More than 10 years of helping organizations travel on the path to Agility have taught me some hard lessons about what differentiates the organizations that practice self-defeating pseudo agility from those who practice authentic, evidence based agility.

A contratação de profissionais da área de Tecnologia da Informação está cada vez mais difícil. De acordo com dados da Associação Brasileira das Empresas de Tecnologia da Informação e Comunicação (Brasscom), até o ano de 2024, o Brasil precisará de 420 mil profissionais de Tecnologia da Informação (TI). A Brasscom alerta ainda que o país forma, aproximadamente, 46 mil profissionais por ano.

TL; DR: Ignoring Self-Management — Undermining Scrum from the Start There are plenty of failure possibilities with Scrum. Given that Scrum is a framework with a reasonable yet short “manual,” this effect should not surprise anyone.

How should leaders ensure that they and their teams execute against what they know? Check out this blog post for some key ideas

There is one frequent question that I encounter in my workshops. There is a piece of information that is missing in the Scrum Guide. Interestingly, It is regarding the managers. Where is the role of Manager in Scrum?

Ha salido el ’15th Annual State of Agile’. Cómo sabes es un reporte sobre la agilidad en el mundo.  Te dejamos el link de nuestro análisis del 2020 para que puedas comparar.

There are loads of blog posts, articles and podcasts about agile - what it should be, what it should do, how it should look? The problem is that a lot of what’s out there is hypothetical and not based on field experience.

Hey. What's happening awesome people? I hope you are having an awesome week. Ever since the Scrum Guide was updated in November 2020 and the Product Goal has been introduced, I have worked with several Scrum teams in early 2021 to connect their Objective Key Results with the Product Goal.

TL; DR: Sustainable Agility at the Enterprise Level w/ Jorgen Hesselberg — ACB21 In this highly engaging speaker session on sustainable agility from the Agile Camp Berlin 2021, Jorgen Hesselberg delves into the root cause of failing agile tra

When scaling Scrum, we balance cost and effort with benefits and advantages. Costs and effort come from adding teams. Benefits and advantages come from delivering more value in the same amount of time. 

A scientific investigation of ~1.200 Scrum teams to identify core factors and offer evidence-based guidance on how  to support and diagnose Scrum teams

As you walk this path, remember that just like Scaled Professional Scrum is Scrum, Co-Active Scrum Coaching is Co-Active Coaching. All the cornerstones, contexts, principles and practices of Co-Active Coaching must be upheld in Co-Actives Scrum Coaching.

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

If someone can give you the answer easily for: What is Agile Transformation? And how do we do? I bet that they don’t completely understand the question or don’t have enough experience. Transformation or change in a group or organization is always a challenge. It is complex work and needs a lot of effort.

Reflections and findings triggered by the experience interview with Jimmy Janlén.

The purpose of the Sprint is to deliver a ‘Done’ increment which meets the Sprint Goal.  At the Sprint Planning event, the Product Owner and the Scrum Team collaborate together to create a Sprint Goal - which describes why the Sprint is valuable - after which the Development team selects Product Backlog Items which describe what will be delivered and creates a plan for how to deliver them.  

El mundo está cambiando más rápido que nunca y cada dia nos hace más falta la agilidad de negocio.

Follow these six coaching tips and notice the change you can bring to your organisation.

I might have had an epiphany as I was teaching one of my recent classes. OK, maybe two.