Skip to main content
Blog Post

Product Backlog Refinement explained (1/3)

March 14, 2016
One of the most challenging activities in Scrum is Product Backlog Refinement. During training courses I get many questions on this activity. What do you do during Product Backlog refinement? How do you prevent discussions going off track or in too much detail? Who should be there? When do you estimate? In this blog series, you will get some good practices and guidelines for having better, more effective and more vivid Product Backlog refinement.
Blog Post

(WHY) WILL AGILE WORK THIS TIME?

March 1, 2016
Last year, I was facilitating a workshop on Agile and began the conversation, as usual with introductions. I asked each attendee what was the most important burning question that brought them to the workshop. One of the attendees replied
Blog Post

The 5 Most Common Pitfalls of the Scrum Events

February 29, 2016
This week I facilitated a Scrum Master training in which we gathered the most common pitfalls of the Scrum events. It resulted in a nice overview with lots of recognizable pitfalls. In this blog post I'll share the results with you, completed with some ideas of my own. As you will see, it's only a brief description of the pitfalls.
Blog Post

The 18 Characteristics of a Great Product Owner

January 19, 2016
During a recent Product Owner training I gave the participants the assignment to complete the sentence "A great Product Owner..." The result was a nice overview of characteristics, skills and conditions necessary to fulfill this role in a great manner. In this blog post I'll share the result, completed with a short explanation and some more ideas of my own.
Blog Post

The #1 Characteristic of Agile DNA

January 10, 2016
Last week I attended a workshop provided by Patrick Verheij, who is a board member of the Agile Consortium. Patrick explained the foundation of Agile and shared a characteristic of "Agile DNA" within organizations
Blog Post

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

January 1, 2016
Recently I had a discussion with a developer about the amount of meetings we're having nowadays within organisations. Part of it was related to Scrum, "Since the introduction of Scrum all I do is attend meetings". And part of it wasn't, "Every week I need to discuss how to improve the productivity of my department... cancelling these type of meetings might be a good start..."
Blog Post

Base donnes Agile - Dbuter le voyage !

December 18, 2015
Comme on l'a vu durant la présentation, l'Agilité a des impacts à tous les niveaux et touche même les bases de données. Pour être capable de travailler efficacement dans un contexte Agile, le DBA doit ajuster sa manière de travailler autant en conception, que durant la réalisation ainsi qu'au moment de déployer l'application
Blog Post

Team Culture over Project Culture

November 24, 2015
Recently I read the book 'The People's Scrum' by Tobias Mayer. In this book he spends a chapter on describing the differences between project culture and team culture. To me, the given examples of both types of culture are highly recognizable and I can easily extend and complement the list of examples with my own experiences.
Blog Post

Commitment versus Forecast

November 13, 2015
​​​​​​​In my previous blog post 'The 9 Smells of an Organization' I described the difference between the terms commitment and forecast. This resulted in an intriguing discussion that triggered me to elaborate some more on this topic and share the highlights of this conversation.
Blog Post

The 9 Smells of an Organization

November 6, 2015
A few months ago I first saw the brilliant speech 'The Smell of the Place' by Prof. Sumantra Ghoshal. It's about corporate environments and the faults of management in creating a positive work place.
Blog Post

Is Scrum an Asperger's Friend or Foe?

October 22, 2015
The subject of this blog post might seem unusual. But having worked with multiple development teams, I've gained some experience with team members having (symptoms) of Asperger's. I mostly contributed to the team as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach.
Blog Post

Daily Scrum - Tips & Tactics

September 26, 2015
Although the Daily Scrum seems to be a simple and straightforward event, I still encounter a lot of teams struggling with it. In this blog post, I'll share my tips & tactics.