As per Scrum Guide – The Sprint Goal is an objective that will be met within the sprint by implementing the Product Backlog, and it guides the Development Team on why it is building the Increment.

20 ideas for using the new Scrum Mythbusters card deck in your organization

In this blog series I would like to address topics that relate to professional team coaching as well as Professional Scrum. In the course of becoming a Professional Team Coach, I noticed a lot of interesting topics for Scrum Masters who want to improve their coaching stance.

When I saw the book “Art of doing twice the work in the half time,” Dr. Jeff Sutherland wrote, my reaction was like how someone can claim that? What will be an effective measure to have such a comparison?

In this post, we explore how continuous improvement is the lifeblood of Scrum Teams.

I was hired by a bank to help them to get started with agile and Scrum...

TL; DR: 11 Proven Stakeholder Communication Tactics - Stakeholder communication: It is simply not enough for an agile product development organization to create great code and ship the resulting product like a clockwork...

McKinsey and Scrum.org presented a webinar on joint research about measuring business value. There were a number of questions unanswered. This blog answers those questions.

How to tell if Scrum fits your work and what to do when it doesn’t

Scrum has proven time and again to be the most popular framework for software development. Given that software is eating the world, a seasoned Scrum Master is nowadays in high demand.

So you have a couple of Scrum Teams working in adjacent areas, and you're starting to face some challenges in delivering value in a coordinated integrative way. What we haven't talked about much until now in the Scrum.org world is how Flow/Kanban can help organizations use Scrum at Scale more effect...

I was recently asked What should each role be doing during the Sprint? So, I took a copy of the latest Scrum Guide (November 2017), read it (again) and broke it down for them and now for you! The items below are taken directly from the Scrum Guide Novermber 2017 and so may see vague or...

Learn more about agile management anti-patterns the aspiring servant leader should avoid during the organization’s transition: From applying the Stage-Gate® approach...

Vielleicht habt ihr euch auch schon das ein- oder andere Mal über die Übersetzung mancher Wörter im Kontext von Scrum gewundert.

This experiment is about creating transparency around dependencies and the effect they have on your team’s ability to ship fast.

Values drive behaviour. Therein lies the importance of the Scrum Values, for different people and roles involved in Scrum.

Twenty questions for you — the new Scrum Master — that fit into a 60 minutes time-box.

An attendee of a course I delivered recently reached out to me post course to ask a question. [This is something that I always encourage, with new knowledge often comes new questions]

The Scrum Master tactics series are a series of articles in which I write about and explore contemporary techniques that will aid you in your journey as a Scrum Master.

Suitable agile metrics reflect either a team’s progress in becoming agile or your organization’s progress in becoming a learning organization.

Put your understanding of the Scrum Framework to the test, with these 52 challenging cases for Scrum practitioners.

What looked like a good idea back in the 1990ies—outsourcing software development as a non-essential business area—has meanwhile massively backfired for a lot of legacy organizations.

Facing a large number of risks while delivering products seems to be normal. And, it is. It is common and natural. What we need to do, is manage the risk.

Does your team struggle to get items to Done? Do they experience a high amount of spill-over into the next cycle because they are waiting on another team or another person? Do items sit in a blocked state and age out while waiting on other teams or people to complete work?

In this post, we describe one tiny experiment that creates transparency about lack of autonomy, and what happens because of it. It won’t create earth-shattering miracles, but I should start the right conversations.

We often try to make massive change once we realize something isn't right and this doesn't normally go so well. When it comes to making progress everyone wants to LEAP; take BIGGER steps.

TL;DR: Creating an Agile Community of Practice Creating an agile community of practice helps winning hearts and minds within the organization as it provides authenticity to the agile transition — signaling that the effort is not merely another management fad. Read more to learn how to get your...

In May 2019, I spoke at the Agile Manchester conference, where I presented my talk "The Product Owner's Toolbox".

Regularly, we find articles from developers detailing why ‘Agile’ in general and Scrum’s nature, in particular, deserve our collective disdain.

Do you need an emergency fund as a change agent—whether you are acting as Scrum Master, Product Owner or agile coach—

Habits first and then progress follows! There is a huge power in the little things.

TL; DR: Results of a Test of Using Unhangout to Host Virtual Barcamps Last week, 30-plus attendees of the 24th Hands-on Agile meetup ran a virtual Barcamp experiment w/ MIT’s Unhangout, an open-source platform for organizing attendee-driven virtual open space events. Read on and learn whether ...

Something very close to my heart is helping folks understand the origin of the practices that are commonly used in management today. I feel that only with an understanding of history can we figure out how to change the future. I often talk about this in my classes and help folks see why things are t...

Experiments, practices, and strategies that help Scrum Masters prove their value to the organization.

"Scrum and Organizational Design in practice" is my contribution to Gunther Verheyen book "97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know" published by O'Reilly Media and resumes my latest experience as Scrum Practitioner on how to make a company's transformation implicit rather than explicit. ...

Last week, 30-plus participants in the 23rd Hands-on Agile meetup had a virtual strategy session where they explored Liberating Structures’ Critical Uncertainties microstructure. They identified robust and hedging strategies for Scrum Masters and agile coaches regarding the challenges of remote work...

After many years of relative stability, the company found itself struggling with sudden and huge changes in their market. In no more than a few years, competition increased tremendously along with the emergence of new technologies. Having been a dominant player for several decades, the company f...

The concept I describe below is tested, proven, and modeled after my virtual Professional Scrum training classes.

In this story, I describe and debrief a difficult moment I experienced as a coach. In addition to this writeup being my personal reflection, it might serve as a source of learning for you.

Shu-Ha-Ri has been a frequent topic within Agile communities for years to capture the essence, the progress of the journey we embark on as we grow and learn better ways of working.

An introduction of the 4 symptoms, with the symptom ‘No desire for contact with the outside world’ explained in detail.

There has been no shortage of articles on how to work remotely recently, including our series on Remote Agile.

Inspiration for fulfilling the stances of a Scrum Master, remotely.

This eighth article now looks into supporting a distributed Development Team organizing a remote Daily Scrum.

*Covid is a fictional character based on my imagination that represents the strain of CoronaVirus that is causing the disease Covid-19. This is just a very simple and sincere attempt to put my knowledge and understanding about Covid-19 to test in this article and I tried making the connection with S...

This seventh article now looks into organizing a remote Sprint Review with a distributed team: How to practice the review with virtual Liberating Structures, including and giving a voice to team members, stakeholders, and customers.

As an active agile Scrum Consultant and Professional Scrum Trainer, I am constantly helping a large number of agile teams. Unsurprisingly all the teams I am supporting are experimenting with different ways to make remote working, work!

This sixth article now dives into organizing a remote Sprint Planning with a distributed team: practices, virtual Liberating Structures, and lessons learned.

The Scrum Master encourages the Scrum Team to improve, within the Scrum process framework, its development process and practices to make it more effective and enjoyable for the next Sprint.

In this blog post I explain why the Sprint Goal is key for an effective implementation of Scrum and how it is widely present in the Scrum framework by exploring its “lifecycle”.