In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my experiences via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

There is one product, one Product Owner, one Product Backlog — a simple rule. How is that supposed to scale, you might ask, isn’t that approach turning...

In a series of blog posts, I want to share how you can use Systems Thinking to resolve complex problems.

When Scrum Teams discuss too many problems during the Retrospective they may lose focus.

The agile movement really has changed the way we lead our people. Giving them more freedom and autonomy to do their job often improves the quality, productivity and happiness of the people.

Although I am going to use the term technical debt in this discussion. I am actively forming the opinion that this is the wrong term to be used both in how various assessments assess understanding and by practitioners in the agile community.

A while ago we started working on a movie to illustrate the essence of agile leadership. What is it about? Are leaders still needed in an agile environment?

This is a series on how to create more engaging and interactive Scrum Events with Liberating Structures and recover from Zombie Scrum.

The Scrum Guide provides no reference or guidance on how to get started with Scrum. That's because Scrum is a lightweight, minimal framework to encourage self-organization. I have heard it stated that Scrum is intentionally incomplete.

Welcome to the Agile Movers & Shakers interview series. Today’s guest is Ben Linders.

In my earlier article, I explained what Scrum Patterns are and why they could be useful for you in your transformation. In this blog, I discuss how to select and use the Scrum Patterns from the Pattern Languages.

How to start an Agile transformation? What are the initial steps? In this article I explain how transformations could be planned using Scrum Patterns and systems thinking.

Within the Scrum process, there are eleven basic elements that make up the framework. 3 roles, 3 artifacts, and 5 events. Practitioners need to learn to apply and understand the principles behind these in order to obtain the full benefits of the Scrum process.

Hey awesome people. I hope you are starting the new year with excitement. One of the most popular questions I got in my Professional Scrum Master (PSM) class from the past years is: "What are the differences between Project Manager and Scrum Master?"

You have a big heart and a lot of determination, and you want to create a better world. That may mean empowering and supporting your team.

For me, 2019 was all about purpose. This means aligning all my effort in things that matter: professionally, social causes, community, and connecting with family and friends.

Fighting organizational impediments as a Product Owner? Combine powers and utilize the Product Owner and Scrum Master symbiosis. And create more focus at the same time.

It’s that time again. The end of the year, where many of us take a step back to reflect on the year that will almost be over soon and create another new year resolution. Like many of you, I do the same. On my last year life retrospectives, I wrote about servant leadership.

In a series of blog posts, I want to share how you can use Systems Thinking to resolve complex problems such as software teams not delivering the right software fast enough.

This post is an excerpt from the book that we’re writing, the ‘Zombie Scrum Survival Guide’. It’s our way of delivering small increments and involving our stakeholders. So we’d love to hear your feedback, encouragements and wild ideas.

Technical debt is a plague on software development in companies big and small. But what is it? What problems does it cause? How can we remove it? Watch this video blog from Robert Pieper, CEO of Responsive Advisors to find out.

Announcing our upcoming book with Scrum.org and Addison-Wesley.

Hey awesome people. I hope you are having a great time with your friends and families in this holiday season.

In 2017, I was talking to the head of the Agile Coach Group of a large bank. She asked me to come over to work with her and help to roll out their standard way of working across all branches in Europe.

While Diana Larsen continues her coaching, mentoring, and consulting practice in a limited way, she has shifted more toward involvement as a co-founder of the Agile Fluency Project, a startup...

The Professional Scrum Master (PSM) workshop has a module that talks about the Definition of "Done" (DoD) and Technical Debt.

If there is one trend that has surpassed Agile in our profession over the last five years, I would say DevOps would be a good culprit. As we’ve seen an explosion of tools to implement CI/CD in our Scrum teams, we’ve also seen some of our Agile practices being challenged by this new reality.

The other day I had a conversation with a colleague. He was looking for an opener for a talk - something catchy to illustrate to his audience (mostly finance and banking) that there could well be a need to change their current ways of working.

Recently I ran into a beautiful piece of text, written by Rachel Naomi Remin. In this text I read the following phrase: "Perhaps the secret of living well is not in having all the answers, but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company."

Not all companies need to be agile companies. What does it really mean to be an agile organization and how do you know if you need to be one? Watch this short 4 minute episode of Responsive Advisors Agile B-Sides video blog to find out!

Software and online-services companies are undergoing quick implementation of the Scrum framework in their Products. Scrum is a process framework that enables deliver complex products iteratively and incrementally while controlling the risk.

This blog post gives you an overview of the paper "Liberating Structures - an Antidote to Zombie Scrum". It describes what Zombie Scrum is about and offers tangible examples of how to recognize, treat, and prevent Zombie Scrum by using Liberating Structures.

On November 22nd, 2019, I gave the closing keynote at Scrum Deutschland, a talk called 'The Four Things You Do To Prevent Value Delivery'. In this keynote, I discussed the trends I found during my research at multiple organizations.

Outcome mapping enhances Product Backlog transparency by making transparent the relationships between goals, stakeholders, outcomes and outputs created by a Scrum Team

I’ve been teaching the class Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) for the last year now and I strongly believe parts of its content will send some of our current practices and books to the Agile museum.

Last week, about 30 members of the Hands-on Agile community in Berlin came together to identify opportunities for personal and professional growth for the coming year, using Liberating Structures’ Ecocycle Planning in the process, to further your Scrum Master career 2020.

Can anyone be a Product Owner (PO)? What’s the best position in the company to fill that role? With Scrum you have one and only one Product Owner for a given product...

Hello awesome people. Today I want to share with you my personal guidelines that I have been using to recruit/hire Scrum Masters from the job market.

What baffles me each time I look at the numbers with regards to Scrum certifications, is the low amount of PSD Certified Software Developers in relation to the certified Product Owners and Scrum Masters out there.

Some people just happen to learn more from short movie clips. And they can be a great way to bring some humor in. Also available as a Youtube Playlist.

Scrum Master anti-patterns: The reasons why Scrum Masters violate the spirit of the Scrum Guide are multi-faceted. They run from ill-suited personal traits and the pursuit of individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.

Sir Isaac Newton, Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, Albert Einstein, and Nikola Tesla; this woman and these gentlemen are considered to be some of the greatest scientists of all time.

Nearly every conversation I have with people who are trying to bring agility to their organizations eventually comes around to the challenge of changing the culture of the organization.

In this blog, Professional Scrum Trainer Magdalena Firlit talks about some of the differences in words between English and the Slavic languages with helpful tips for translations when it comes to Professional Scrum certification assessments.

The Clerk is your personal waiter for all your user story serving. Gathering all the wishes, user stories and demands is what The Clerk does.

If Scrum were to be reduced to one purpose and one only, it would be the creation of a "Done" increment. Although the DoD serves as a crucial part of Scrum, it is also often neglected by many Scrum teams. Try out the DoD EvoCycle, a simple technique to effectively manage your Definition of Done.

Hello awesome people. How was your week so far? I hope you are having an awesome week. In this vlog, I will be sharing a light introduction about coaching mainly within the context of Scrum framework.

Some of the most famous and influential leaders of all times include people like Mohandas K. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln.

What event could better embody Scrum’s principle of empiricism than the Sprint Retrospective? I assume all peers agree that even the simplest retrospective—if only held regularly—is far more useful than having a fancy one once in a while, not to mention having none at all.

The Manager is concerned with the wellbeing of the Scrum Team. The Manager loves to see happy, engaged and motivated people. (S)he loves it when people are developing themselves, learning new skills, obtaining new knowledge and making mistakes.