Why perfect is the enemy of good - using lean change to apply agile in context

Use the do-it-yourself workshops to improve how your Scrum Team uses Product- and Sprint Goals.

Garbage in, garbage out: Learn more on how a piece of paper and a pencil can turn around the perception of your Scrum Team among stakeholders and customers.

Like a job ad for a Scrum Master position, the equivalent for the Product Owner position also reveals excellent insight into an organization’s progress on becoming agile.

I sat, as an observing consultant, in my third Retrospective of the day. I noticed high energy and openness as the room's buzz showed me signs that this team was genuinely collaborative...

This blog post describes some lessons that I learned from facilitating a retrospective in a real prison for a group of my cellmates, political prisoners.

My teams want to use Agile/Scrum - is that aligned with the fact that we’re using EOS® in the organization? My teams use Agile/Scrum, can we use EOS®?

I've been asked several times now about Nexus and SAFe - what are the similarities, differences, etc. If you’re not familiar with either Nexus or SAFe I recommend taking a look at the Nexus Guide and the SAFe whitepaper first.

When I made the transition from traditional project management to agility and Scrum, I was excited to step out of the chaos and feel more purpose in my daily work.

While the new Scrum Guide is less prescriptive and more inclusive, it also ties loose ends by including elements better, namely the previously free-floating Sprint Goal and the Definition of Done with the creation of Scrum commitments. This inclusion works remarkably well in the former’s case; regar...

Many organisations wrestle with the seeming incompatibility between agile and release management, and they struggle with release planning and predictable delivery.

In my last post about Professional software teams creating working software David Corbin made a good point. How do you determining what “Free from fault or defect” means? Since that is different for each Product and may change over time you need to focus on Quality and reflecting that quality in a D...

There is a better way than staggered iterations for delivery that will keep you on the path to agility. Staggered iterations lead to more technical debt and lower quality software.

As 2020 comes to an end, you are probably considering how to further your career as a Scrum Master or Product Owner in 2021.

Together with my colleagues Uwe Schirmer and Kurt Bittner, I have compiled a book that contains many of our own stories and those we experienced while working with customers and students: The Professional Scrum Team. Maybe they provide value to you. 

It's totally okay that you spent, the weekend eating, drinking and making merry. That's what festivals are for. But don't undermine the power of jumping right back on track.

TL;DR: The Scrum Product Owner in 58 Theses The following 58 Product Owner theses describe the PO role from a holistic product creation perspective. They cover the concept of the Product Owner role, product discovery, how to deal with external and internal stakeholders, product portfolio and p...

The 2020 version of Scrum Guide was released recently and everyone is talking about the changes been made in it and how it is going to impact their current ways of working as compared to its previous version.

If you are looking to fill a position for a Product Owner in your organization, you may find the following 71 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate.

In this post, we describe one tiny experiment that can create big shifts in how teams experience the Scrum Events and the decisions they make during them.

On November 18, 2020, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland released an updated version of the Scrum Guide. In this blog post, I will share what you need to know about the 2020 Scrum Guide. I will start with the most important things you need to know, and then I’ll get into a little more nuance for the S...

Sprint Retrospective is the last Scrum event within a Sprint. During this event entire Scrum Team- Scrum Master, Product Owner & Development Team inspects the Sprint and decides how to improve the next Sprint.

Scrum is described as a framework, not a methodology. The Scrum Guide provides just enough prescription to allow Scrum to work and encourages its ‘users’ to be smart, adding practices and other things specific to them on top of the framework as needed to form their process.

A reflection on four key changes in the 2020 Scrum Guide, why they were made, and why that is a big deal

TL; DR: The Scrum Guide 2020-The Scrum Guide 2020 is available now: Change is coming to make Scrum more accessible and inclusive beyond software development.

Découvrez le Guide Scrum 2020 : plus concis, plus clair et regorgeant de surprises pour les 25 ans de Scrum. Plongeons dans les améliorations et nouveautés qui font que Scrum est encore plus Scrum.

A Sprint Planning checklist? How dare you: Agile is a mindset, not a methodology. It is a journey, not a destination. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, and what else could you possibly cover with a checklist, the mother of all standardized processes?

From Scrum Master to Development Team members, this set of questions addresses the foundations of a Scrum Team capability to build valuable products: technical excellence and what it takes to achieve this proficiency level.

Ideas on how to use Powerful Questions virtually and help teams find their own solutions to persistent problems.

TL; DR: The Cargo Cult Agile Checklist for Download You want to know the state of agility in your organization? Here we go: Download the checklist, distribute it generously among your colleagues, and run a quick poll.

Une Sprint Rétrospective est une opportunité, pour l'équipe Scrum, d'inspecter le déroulement du Sprint et créer un plan d'amélioration à adopter lors du prochain Sprint.

Me gustaria compartir un plan para pasar el PSM I en 10 días. Recuerda que lo puedes comprar por libre en Scrum.org sin necesidad de tomar el curso. 

Last week, someone on Reddit asked whether there would be any other profession that requires attending a 2-day training class and would then pay as well as a Scrum Master job.

During my interactions with my students/ colleagues who play the role of Scrum Master, they tell me that they see gaps in how things are implemented compared to the rules of the Scrum Guide.

TL; DR: 70 Scrum Master Theses The following 70 Scrum Master theses describe the role of from a holistic product creation perspective.

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.