As part of the Scrum.org webinar “Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer - Martin Hinshelwood - Answering Your Most Pressing Scrum Questions” I was asked a number of questions.

In organizations in which agile transitions take place, the ancient English proverb Blood is thicker than water is frequently appropriate. It is decided to adopt agile working, there is talk of Scrum, self-organizing teams, Sprints, standing meetings, sticky notes on the wall, etc. etc.

It's been a while since I wrote a blog, here is some good news, this is part 1 of a 3 part blog series, inspired by the writings of John C. Maxwell, “The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth: Live Them and Reach Your Potential.”

While teaching and consulting, I’ve had many existing Scrum Masters pull me aside looking tired, frustrated, and worn out.

People always have questions and concerns about Risk management and Autonomy in the Scrum Team...

In my Professional Scrum classes, I always get asked about best practices.  It may be about facilitating events, Product Backlog refinement, defining value, forming Scrum Teams, or creating good Sprint Goals.

Hello awesome people. It's me again with a new learning from within a Scrum Team. The Development Team I was working with around 3 months ago challenged the Product Owner about the User Story she brought into the Sprint Planning.

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma introduces the idea of ethics in software development. Ravi discusses why thinking about ethics when it comes to software development is important and shows examples of what a software development ethical code of conduct may look like...

Your Sprint is over. Your increment is “Done”, you have coded cleanly, your unit tests and integration tests are bright green, you are proud of your work. The Sprint Review is running smoothly. The Sprint Retrospective allows the team to find 1 or 2 areas of improvement without revolutionizing the w...

Teams often run through the motions of Scrum and get very hung up on story points, velocity, committed percentages and as a result struggle to deliver value. But what I’ll share today is what unlocks the value of Scrum;

End of September we went to Stockholm with 15 agile leaders. We wanted to visit several companies in and around Stockholm to see how they created a thriving environment for agile teams.

A few years ago, I was part of a team that was starting to work together under very difficult circumstances: We had to finish a showcase in the Industry 4.0 area within just six weeks.

As part of the Scrum.org webinar “Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer - Martin Hinshelwood - Answering Your Most Pressing Scrum Questions” I was asked a number of questions. Since not only was I on the spot and live, I thought that I should answer each question that was asked again here, as well as tho...

I'd like to share another story with you... Thank you Paul and Charlie for sharing your story. It moved me and left me with huge smile on my face. 

A few weeks ago we considered the Agile Manifesto from a lean perspective. We saw that it is possible to map the 12 agile principles to the 7 canonical “Lean Wastes” in terms of a mitigation approach.

Hello awesome people. I want to share with you my recent experience and discussion with a senior manager who needs advice on how to measure his organisation agility. His company already invested quite a lot of money to send people to trainings and get them certified, purchased tools and processes fr...

There are four key words in the first value of the Agile Manifesto: “Individuals and their interactions over processes and tools” Most of us can spend countless hours debating the value of focusing on people and the dangers related to focusing on processes and tools. Interestingly, in o...

Imagine you’re a Scrum Master and the line manager of your team believes that the best sign for a successful agile transformation is a steady increase in the Scrum Team’s velocity.

In the world of tech, many industry giants such as Google choose to use a management framework known as Objectives and Key Results (OKR).

The legendary Steve Trapps has been talking to me for months about featuring in an interview. So here we are, I finally agreed and we spent 25 minutes talking about me; obviously mainly avoiding being narcissistic.

As part of the Scrum.org webinar “Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer - Martin Hinshelwood - Answering Your Most Pressing Scrum Questions” I was asked a number of questions. Since not only was I on the spot and live, I thought that I should answer each question that was asked again here, as well as tho...

This video by Professional Scrum Trainer Joshua Partogi covers the Professional Scrum Developer training class by Scrum.org. (2:38 Minutes)

In this short Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma provides examples of how self-organizing teams hold themselves accountable as a team through peer-to-peer transparency.  Ravi goes on to talk about how Selective Self Organization without Personal or Peer Accountability can cause...

Warning - this post is not about Scrum. It is about Technical Debt in my home!!! Please do not judge me!!

If you want your organization to become agile, adding more whiteboards to the workspace will not suffice. You have to abandon the idea that the workspace is an assembly line for white-collar workers. You need to let go Taylorism. We are now in the age of the creative worker.

This case study talks about how LogMeIn used Nexus to scale in order to launch their new product - GoToConnect.

In this Scrum Pulse webinar, Professional Scrum Trainer David Sabine examines self-organization in teams and explores examples of self-organization in the workplace. David’s premise is simple: Scrum Teams are self-organizing. He asserts that is not a statement of preference or intention; rather, i...

As part of the Scrum.org webinar “Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer - Martin Hinshelwood - Answering Your Most Pressing Scrum Questions” I was asked a number of questions. Since not only was I on the spot and live, I thought that I should answer each question that was asked again here, as well as tho...

Does your firm exceed your customer's expectations regularly? Is just meeting expectations good enough in your market? Businesses pursuing an improved ability to deliver customer value using Scrum face numerous challenges.

Sprint Goals are one of the more elusive parts of the Scrum Framework. Most teams know they are important, but few use them - for a variety of reasons. In this post, Barry Overeem and I bust the myth that Sprint Goals are optional in Scrum. And we make an effort to show what makes them so vital in t...

The Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams aims to help Scrum Teams leverage the ideas and practices of Flow and Kanban in a way that is coherent with Scrum as defined by the Scrum Guide.

If you lead in organizations that have adopted agile methods, you know it’s crucial to create the right environment for your agile teams. Traditional tools such as Gantt charts, detailed plans, and internal KPIs aren’t adequate for complex and fast-changing markets, but merely trusting employees and...

A Practitioner's Guide to Overcoming Challenges and Maximizing the Benefits of Agility: Mastering Professional Scrum is for anyone who wants to deliver increased value by using Scrum more effectively. Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainers and leading Scrum practitioners Stephanie Ockerman and Simon ...

Last year, I ran a (non-representative) survey on how Scrum Masters are allocating their time when working with a single Scrum Team. Much to the surprise of many readers, the direct Scrum Master engagement with a single Scrum Team of average size and a typical 2-week Sprint turned out to be about 12...

This case study follows the journey LRN took with Scrum to deliver more value to its organization with its "Scrum Loaded" Initiative. Through educating their teams on Scrum and becoming consistent with the Scrum Guide they were able to drive success and cross-collaboration within their organization.

Listen to Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainer and Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) course co-creator Yuval Yeret as he discuss the class, intended audience and things that you will learn when coming to the class. Yuval is joined by Scrum.org VP of Marketing and Operations Eric Naiburg. (7:55 M...

Professional Scrum Trainer Chuck Suscheck is joined by Scrum.org Marketing Communications Manager Lindsay Velecina in this short Scrum Tapas video. Chuck discusses why it is important to have the Product Owner available throughout the Sprint and how that doesn't negate the need for and value of the...

When Professional Scrum Trainer Jim Sammons is working with new Scrum Masters, one of the things that he suggests is that they need to keep improving. Of course the next question that they ask is how. In this short Scrum Tapas video, Jim discusses some of what he suggests to these Scrum Masters an...

I have my own biases,  having seen co-located teams work very well and having struggled with “dislocated” teams, I often recommend my clients to reconsider “dislocated” teams. 

The software development organization at TRUMPF was practicing Scrum, but in an inconsistent way. They turned to Professional Scrum Trainer Thomas Schissler to help them practice Scrum correctly and they underwent the Professional Scrum Developer training class to help train their teams. This was a ...

As part of the Scrum.org webinar “Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer - Martin Hinshelwood - Answering Your Most Pressing Scrum Questions” I was asked a number of questions. Since not only was I on the spot and live, I thought that I should answer each question that was asked again here, as well as tho...

Evidence-Based Management is a framework organizations can use to help measure, manage, and increase the value they derive from their product delivery. EBM focuses on improving outcomes, reducing risks, and optimizing investments.

There are many benefits to optimizing the flow of work in Scrum by leveraging Kanban practices and this guide is designed to enhance and expand the practices of Scrum and assumes the reader is operating a process using the Scrum framework.

Product Owners have a tough job. I was in a Sprint Review recently where the Scrum Team had some stakeholders talking about an idea they thought was excellent. So, like any studious Product Owner, they immediately typed up the idea and added it to their Product Backlog.

At a recent training class one of the delegates spoke about their present company, about how it was the most “Agile” place he had ever worked.

I share my thoughts in this video about the practices and activities the Scrum Master should be doing to increase his/her awesomeness. Hopefully it will help you to find the gap towards awesomeness.

In this episode the the Management 3.0 podcast, the fabulous David Dame is back after his Ted Talk about what it takes to see the world through a different lens. Born with Cerebral Palsy David has used his every day challenges to learn how to be an effective and agile leader. (24:41 Minutes)

Every year I like to deliberately go somewhere far from the crowd to take a break and reflect. You can say that it's similar to a retrospectives. Often times I may not realised whether as a Scrum Master my service to the organisation is already effective or not.

A customer I was working with asked me to help out with the intake process for recruiting a new Scrum Master and a new Product Owner. I asked them what they had so far. They provided a clear job description describing what they wanted to see from the candidates.

Software developers are mostly guys, happy to work by themselves at night in dark rooms. And they turn coffee, cola and pizza into code. Right? My experience so far To be honest, the longer I have worked in software development the more wrong this stereotype feels to me. True, when I learned t...