Today I facilitated the workshop "The Scrum Master as a Manager" at the conference "Agile Spain 2017" in Sevilla. In this blog post I'll share the outline of the workshop "The Scrum Master as a Manager". This gives you the opportunity to facilitate the workshop within your own organisation as well.

Let the coaching experiment continue! Welcome back to part two of our curiosity filled coaching questions! As mentioned last time in part one, coaching as a management practice has become a major part of my working life. I am lucky to be surrounded by a great bunch of agile minded folks h...

In this post we'll discuss the myth that Scrum Teams at best release working software at the end of a sprint, constraining teams that are capable of releasing faster.

Last time I talked about the Ghana Police Service (GPS) I was talking about Professional Organisational Change and the approach the Inspector General of Police (IGP) is taking; using Scrum to incrementally make changes to the organisation. While Nana Abban and the IGP have been focusing on the big p...

The question remains as to why managers continue to plan projects based on sequential assumptions.

The Ghana Police Service is in trouble. Over the last few last few decades, each new Police organisation and government has tried in various ways to carry out some change but most changes have been ad-hoc, temporary, not robust enough or strategic. The old problems return to haunt new administration...

As a travelling Scrum and DevOps consultant I’m constantly asked “should our team use Scrum”? Now you might think that being a Professional Scrum Trainer – and serious Scrum fanboy – I would always answer “Yes!”. Well, you would be wrong. I frequently talk people out of Scrum – for the right reasons...

This short video provides an overview of the Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO). Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainers (PSTs) Don McGreal and Ralph Jocham give you insight into the structure of the class and what you will learn. 1:46 Minutes

This short video provides an overview of the Professional Scrum Developer (PSD) course. Professional Scrum Trainers (PSTs) Thomas Schissler and Peter Goetz, are joined by Richard Hundhausen who worked closely with Ken to architect and create the course give you insight into the structure of the cla...

In this blog post I've shared the idea of doing a free Retrospective after every training we provide. The goal of this session is to inspect the progress that has been made and define actionable and committed improvements for the upcoming period.

As the saying goes, it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. The same could be said about DevOps and its implementation in an organization. Yes, the result is magic since it aims to deliver daily business value, but the journey is even more interesting. This journey is full of organiz...

"It's weird when you get roles that coincide with your life" - Lily James Introduction Impressive-sounding job titles are a recurring joke in large organizations. They often bear little relationship to the devil's brew of chaos and drudgery which is a daily reality for most. Cynics may hol...

In Scrum, the Product Owner is an entrepreneur and the mini-CEO of a product, who is able to make fast decisions. The success of the Scrum Team and company as a whole depends on whether the Product Owner is real.

Comme dit le dicton ce n'est pas la destination, mais la route qui compte. On pourrait dire la même chose pour DevOps et de son implantation dans une organisation. Oui, le résultat est magique puisqu'il vise à nous faire livrer quotidiennement de la valeur d'affaires, mais le périple l'est d'autant ...

Most of the Agile transformations I have witnessed have started like this: First, a company raises a strategic initiative on so-called Agile implementation. A large budget is allocated and a tender is arranged to purchase Agile coaching services from companies on the market. Then employees are train...

Some companies develop 1 product with 10s to 100s of people using Scrum. And they do that without adding any roles, events or processes to Scrum. They can do this because they use an organisational design that optimises for the right goals. Design Goals An organisation has a design, just like ...

Check out this job advertisement: At Acme drainage system, we are building on our success by finding only the finest people and helping them achieve their full potential. The ideal candidate will be inspired to learn and grow, not to settle for good enough but demand excellence both of themselv...

Pour avoir un aperçu de la perception et compréhension des personnes de quelque chose, il suffit de regarder les réseaux sociaux.

To get an insight into people's perception and understanding of something, just look at the social networks. This message coming from a company looking for a lead DevOps makes me ask myself a big question about the perception and understanding of the market about DevOps. But is DevOps real...

Recently I attended training on Nexus at Scrum.org’s Boston headquarters. Nexus is based on the core principles and values of Scrum and allows companies to apply Scrum at scale while retaining the bottom-up intelligence of self-organisation.

Find the books written and co-authored by Ken Schwaber, our Professional Scrum Trainers and staff to help you learn more about Scrum and Agile.

If you believe the hype that all you need to do to become a next generation agile IT organization is adopt Scrum and DevOps. Scrum to empower your teams and provide a lightweight framework for getting work done, and DevOps to provide the automation, systems thinking and lean practices to deliver and...

"It's not always easy to be a good Scrum Master. Learn some common pitfalls of Scrum Masters, and to recover from them, or avoid them altogether." "Knowing my True North gives me the courage to focus my energy where I believe it should be, not according to what is popular or pleasing to others." ...

When talking about Scrum, people often imagine the picture above: framework and its roles, artifacts, and events. Scrum rules are fairly simple, and they are thoroughly described in the Scrum Guide.

How Much Software Inventory Do You Have? When I ask this question of people in IT departments, even among senior managers and finance people, I get a variety of responses.

Many times, clients ask Agile Coaches like me to come in and share our "expertise" with them. But sometimes they really don't want our "Expertise". What they really want is someone with lots of TLA's to come and tell them that there pre-existing opinions are correct.

"Few ideas work on the first try. Iteration is key to innovation.” - Sebastian Thrun The Agony and the Ecstasy Have you ever seen the 1965 film The Agony and the Ecstasy, where Charlton Heston plays Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel? Each day the Pope looks up and asks him “When w...

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, we take a peek into the second part of a conversation with Professional Scrum Trainers, Ravi Verma, Chad Beier, Charles Bradley and Victor Oliveira  as they discuss what it means to be a product. In this video, they look at how you should not define a product...

Today Scrum.org announced a partnership with the DevOps Institute to provide a foundation to building stronger working relationships between the Scrum and DevOps communities

Over the last weeks I've been working on a paper about the role of a Business Analysts within Large Scale Scrum, and I thought I'd write a little post on it too, here it goes. On the website of the IIBA you can find their definition of a Business Analyst. a liaison among stakeholders in order ...

I was talking to a company that is implementing the Spotify model and needed some help. They wanted to know the difference between LeSS and their Spotify model. We first discussed what LeSS is. I told them that LeSS is an organisational design that optimises for shortest lead time, flexibility and l...

Per a January 20th, 2017 article by Daniel Shapero, VP of Talent Solutions and Careers at LinkedIn, the role of Scrum Master is in high demand. It’s ranked number 10 on his list of most promising jobs of 2017. #10. Scrum Master Median Base Salary: $100,000 Job Openings (YoY Growth): 400+ (...

Ok... Let's make this a short one. I talked to lots of people about this statement and after lots of strange looks I got lots of comments about the behaviour. Especially about the "since it's crap". This is pretty obvious a very strong opinion about something. But hey! Maybe the code works, p...

When Scrum is introduced in a company, most of the time, the development team embraces it with lots of enthusiasm. Scrum embodies self-organizing, autonomous, multidisciplinary teams that acknowledge individual qualities and reinforces the strengths of the team as a whole. Who doesn't want to be par...

What were you doing on Oct 19th 1995? According to the internet, not much with most of the news reminding us of Black Monday that had happened 9 years before. But for what is now over 11 million people who practice Scrum on a daily basis, it was a big day. That was the day that Scrum was offic...

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at how organizations are using DevOps to improve their software delivery cycle time, their ability to innovate, and their ability to improve quality. I’ve heard some people go so far as to say that DevOps has replaced Agile, but I don’t think that’s true. If anything...

The Nexus Sprint Backlog is created during Nexus Sprint Planning. It is a visualization of the work across the Nexus that has dependencies. The purpose of Nexus Sprint Planning is to coordinate the activities of all Scrum Teams in a Nexus for a single Sprint. Read more to see what Professional Scru...

Throughout the Agile Alliance 2016 conference, I was struck by a recurring feeling that many people don’t understand what the Sprint Review is.

Suggested reading for anyone who is taking the Professional Scrum with User Experience assessment or just looking to learn more about Professional Scrum with User Experience.

Suggested reading for anyone who is taking the Professional Scrum Master level I certification test or just looking to learn more about being a Scrum Master.

Today I changed my Twitter and LinkedIn profile. I removed Agile Coach and replaced it with Scrum Master. 100% Scrum Master. Although it seems a small change, it raised quite some concern when I suggested the idea a couple of weeks ago... "You should stick with Agile Coach. As a freelancer, th...

This glossary represents an overview of terms specific to software development teams using Scrum and agile software development techniques.To learn more about the Scrum framework, we highly recommend that you reference the Scrum Guide™ and the Scrum Glossary.AA/B Testing: extends the idea of hypothe...

In this little blog I want to share a simple canvas that I use to kick-off agile adoption and answer the following questions: How to co-create an Agile adoption plan with clients? How to get started with an Agile adoption? How to ensure progress during the adoption? ...

Today we re-structure our Professional Scrum Master assessment (PSM) and certification products changing the focus of PSM II and introducing PSM III. In this blog I wanted to describe why we have done this and what it means to software delivery professionals. First a bit of history… Ken Schwab...

As described in this paper by Professional Scrum Trainer Gunther Verheyen, the ‘Scaled Professional Scrum’ framework, Nexus builds on the corner stones of Scrum, i.e. bottom-up knowledge creation, self-organization, empiricism. It is a foundational framework upon which a systematic, emergent, manage...

Martin Hinshelwood discusses why tools don't solve problems, but they can help reduce the friction of Scaling Professional Scrum.

Working with a range of people, it is interesting to observe how many are aiming to “Do Scrum” or “Get Agile”. The issue with this thinking is that people are focusing on the transport, not the destination.

Scaling Scrum. Agile at Scale. Enterprise Everything. Everyone is using the Scaled Agile Framework SAFe. Scaling, Scaling, Scaling. If you’re working in product development, you’ve probably had a few conversations on this topic. It seems to be all the rage right now. In this blog post I hope to len...

Question from a budding Scrum Master, who is transitioning from a background as a traditional project manager: “In order to promote team bonding and self-organization, from now on I am going to try something new with the team. In the sprint planning meeting, instead of me breaking down the tasks ...

I am sure it would not come as a surprise, but our website (www.scrum.org) needs a major refresh. The current implementation has become out of date and less and less supportive of our vision and mission. As a team, we quickly realized that we do not possess the resources needed to take on a full web...