The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring Scrum is understood and enacted. Scrum Masters do this by ensuring that the Scrum Team adheres to Scrum theory, practices, and rules.

After downloading and studying the Nexus guide, you have questions about how the Nexus Integration Team actually works, so here are some keys to understand the role and its fit within the Nexus. It’s all about solving dependencies Nexus is focused is solving the primary source of issues and ...

Within companies that use Scrum properly, the organization is built around fixed, cross-functional, self-organizing teams who are given the freedom and responsibility to think of a strategy they believe will result in the best product. Everyone around the Development Team is focused on supporti...

PST Simon Reindl discusses how he has guided organizations through lasting change, what makes it complex and how to overcome the complexity.

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.

A lot of people talk about scaling Agile. It’s all the rage nowadays. Everyone wants to scale Agile. But what does that actually mean? What does it imply? What are the underlying assumptions? Capital-A Agile When people refer to capital-A Agile, mostly they are referring to the value stateme...

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...

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. The combination of Scrum and Asperger's hereby always...

This blog post is about a little box. A little transparent box. The box contained only one sticky note. A sticky note with a milestone. The milestone belonged to a large project that concerned a comprehensive organizational change with multiple Scrum teams. This milestone was special, because it ...

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. You can use it as a checklist for your own Daily Scrum, and hopefully, it helps you ensure the event to become (or stay) ...

I notice how many people struggle when they try to improve their understanding of Scrum. I notice it in classes, on forums, at conferences, through mail. They look for detailed instructions. They ask universal questions that demand exact and precise answers. How long should Sprint Planning b...

This is the final post in a three part series. Please like, share,and/or comment. Please click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2. Suppose you have a persistent group in your organization who has been completing its job the same way for a significant period of time. They refuse to change despite...

The role of a Scrum Master is one of many stances and diversity. A great Scrum Master is aware of them and knows when and how to apply them, depending on situation and context. Everything with the purpose of helping people understand and apply the Scrum framework better.

VersionOne does an annual "State of Agile Development" survey and publishes the results for the cost of your email address. Thanks VersionOne! I recently read through the 9th annual survey results for 2015, and there's lots of good, useful data there. For now I want to highlight the top five reas...

Professional Scrum Trainer Gunther Verheyen looks at how numerous organizations worldwide have adopted Scrum to become more agile. Many of them have engaged in endeavors to scale their product development done through Scrum. None of these efforts are easy, and each effort faces specific challenges.

If you have seen the TV documentary series Hoarders which depicted the real-life struggles of people who suffer from compulsive hoarding. Some victims suffered so severely that they were often drowning within their own filth. The disorder is immediately obvious to family and friends. Similarly, o...

Is there a way to help organizations move from a Change Transformations mindset to a Continuous Change mind set? Traditionally, organizations implement large scale change events within their organization by spontaneously have an epiphany and transform every few years. The frequency of these tr...

Scaled Professional Scrum is based on unit of development called a Nexus. The Nexus consists of up to 10 Scrum teams, the number depending on how well the code and design are structured, the domains understood, and the people organized. The Nexus consists of practices, roles, events, and artifacts t...

In today's rapidly changing world of disruptive innovation organizations need to be nimble enough to support this. We are asking our workforce to do this by becoming 'agile'. We want the agility to quickly pivot and seize new opportunities. We want to deliver to market sooner. We want ou...

Do you hold the job title of Scrum Master in your organization? In most big companies today, this role is still misrepresented as a Project Manager, which is hindering the pursuit of organizational Agility and hurting the professionals who are genuinely attempting to make this challenging job change...

Watch a video version of this blog or scroll down to read a text version… I used to be passionate about Agile Coaching and Scrum. I have spent many years and a lot of money to get here. So it is strange that I am now writing about how all the investment made me a gambling addict. Writing t...

He could have wept tin tears, but that would not have been right. He looked at her and she looked at him, but neither spoke a word. (Hans Christian Andersen, The Brave Tin Soldier]). We raise our children and teach them to be "The Brave Tin Soldiers" that express only the “right” feelings, ha...

One of the key foundations of helping your business become Agile is the use of empiricism. Empiricism is the scientific approach based on evidence, where any idea must be tested against observations, rather than intuition. Empiricism is based on three pillars: transparency, inspection and adaptation...

Jeff Sutherland and I have helped hundreds of organizations scale their projects, enable their entire product development, and thread Scrum through their organizations. For sure, none of them were easy, and each had its own unique challenges. Each had its own structure, culture, goals and strategies...

There is a fundamental change in management happening under out feet that is challenging the very need for strategy. Small changes are happening every day and in ten years’ time we won’t recognise management as we have thought of it in the past. In his the landmark HBR article Moon Shots for Mana...

Many companies have started searching for self-organisation. That ideal or nirvana where teams can figure out how to work together effectively with limited or little direction to solve problems. Many, including some of my colleagues, believe that this search for self-organisation is ultimate...

As a Agile coach, I refer to a few tools to help me think about where my Scrum teams should go next on their path to Agility. One of these tools is the Agile subway map, a list of Agile practices grouped in different categories. It helps me think how a specific practice could help a team solve its a...

A month has passed since the FIFA World Cup finals! With that, a number of less successful football coaches are probably looking for new jobs... But as the disappointed countries ditch their old coaches, they will most probably hire a new one right away. It seems that for elite...

Collaboration is the key to successful agile product development. A community of practice is a technique that helps us achieve this. Inspired by the Agile Conference in Orlando in July I visited the Kennedy Space Center close to Cape Canaveral to marvel at good old Space Shuttle Atlantis. Watchin...

I did a coaching and training session with a company recently. They're a small, early-stage company in the Greater Boston-area. I got a call from the owner (let's call him Mike) looking for help solving their problems with Team Foundation Server version control. Mike was complained that they were re...

When organizations consider or start adopting Scrum, a frequently raised concern is how ‘to scale Scrum’. It is worthwhile investigating this desire, and start exploring the scalability of Scrum. It seems that many organizations have grown into very complicated and extremely interdependent intern...

‘Evidence-Based Management’ for software organizations promotes evidence-based decision-making in the managerial domain to create a more sustainable business through improved services in turbulent markets and businesses. Scrum.org, which has Scrum as its DNA and empiricism as guiding principle, p...

For reasons of competitiveness the delivery of IT services of Amir Arooni's department (CIO of the Solution Delivery Center for Channels at ING NL) needed fundamental improvements. Amir Arooni, Gunther Verheyen take a look at how this was achieved.

Any Product Manager that has successfully delivered a product to a customer knows how incredibly important Release Planning is. Despite its importance, the 2011 Scrum Guide, published in July by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, removes any discussion about Release Planning and the related Release B...

The 2011 Scrum Guide, published earlier this month by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, makes some bold changes regarding the definition and structure of a Sprint Backlog. Professional Scrum Trainer David Starr explains these changes with help from Professional Scrum Trainer Ryan Cromwell.