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”. 

Many teams are finding that they need to adjust to a new reality amid the covid-19 pandemic. Strategic plans lie in tatters, urgent unplanned work fills the board, stakeholders are hammering teams with requests, and routine has gone out of the window. This is a time for a Scrum Master to be pragmati...

This fourth article now addresses basic remote agile anti-patterns — the pitfalls any distributed team wants to avoid to become successful.

In every Sprint, Sprint Retrospective is an excellent chance to inspect and adapt the way of working.

While working remotely might feel good right now, we are up for trouble. Anxiety-invoked behavior and stress are likely to happen very soon. Let's discuss what is coming at us.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum. Pure Perfection Making your retrospectives as short as possible is not a good id...

Interesting times have come. Due to danger of coronavirus spread many organizations decided to switch to the remote work model. Besides the influence on Scrum implementation, this might be a new situation for you personally.

Agile has always been about colocation, about direct communication, physical boards, and all the other haptic and analog moments to create value in the digital realm...

One of the topics that often is unclear when starting with Scrum. You can teach ‘what’ it is. Sometimes it helps to point north to ‘why’ we do refinement. Good facilitation skills definitely help during refinement as well as a toolbox of structures and techniques will help with the ‘how’.

After covering the Scrum Master and the Product Owner, this article addresses Development Team anti-patterns, covering all Scrum Events as well as the Product Backlog artifact. Learn more about what to look out for if you want to support your fellow teammates.

The Scrum Team gathers around their team desk to hold the Daily Scrum.

In this blog post, we explain the Liberating Structure ‘Simple Ethnography’. We clarify its purpose, the steps to facilitate it, our findings, and examples of using it with Scrum.

The emergence of the Kanban Guide for Scrum teams has given new metrics and practices to Development Teams on how they can augment their Sprint Backlog to manage their work.

Learn how individual incentives and outdated organizational structures — fostering personal agendas and local optimization efforts — manifest themselves in Scrum stakeholder anti-patterns which easily can impede any agile transition.

This blog post talks about using the Fish! philosophy for Sprint Reviews.

This article goes into detail how anti-patterns can evolve and possibly create other issues for the Scrum Team.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum. Urgent items There might be urgent changes popping up during the Sprint. How do we d...

One the questions I get asked during almost every Scrum Master training course is "How do I get the team to engage in the Sprint Retrospectives?".

Let's look at the bigger picture, leaving out the details. What we all mostly want is better health, better fitness and better movement quality.

Choosing how you will walk through your day, having fun with your colleagues and clients, actively listen and participating in collaborations, and ensuring others also have a great day...

In this post I‘d like to share an exercise for Scrum Masters to help their Scrum Teams and stakeholders build a deeper understanding of the importance of the Scrum Values and how directly the Scrum Values impact work and value.

For those of you who are big fans of Marvel Cinematic Universe comics or who have watched the latest Avengers: End Game movie might know that Thanos (supervillain) wanted to possess all 6 infinity stones so that he would be unstoppable and could gain control over the entire universe.

Bringing transparency by inspecting the Product Backlog and adaptation (building) the Sprint Goal, a forecast, and the Sprint Backlog.

In this blog, we’ll dive deeper into the topic: “Scrum Master vs Project Manager”. If you’re having a similar question about the Product Owner vs the Project Manager.