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. In a series of blog posts I...

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...

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. In a series of blog posts I...

Scrum is a framework for complex systems development. Scaled Scrum is any instance of Scrum involving more than one team creating and sustaining a product or system. Scaled Professional Scrum is any instance of scaled Scrum that thrives on Scrum’s formal rules and roles, complemented by software ...

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, or...

The Scrum Guide requires that the Product Owner ensure that "key stakeholders" attend the Scrum Sprint Review, but who are these "key stakeholders"? According to the Scrum Glossary, a stakeholder is "a person external to the Scrum Team with a specific interest in and knowledge of a product that is r...

The Scrum Master is an amazing and at the same time very challenging role. He needs to have different skills, and depending on the situation put on a teaching, training, facilitating or a coaching hat. Furthermore, each of those skills is very difficult to master. People may spend their entire pro...

Our topic is soccer, the 2013-2014 season’s Spanish Primary Division. Do you remember who finished the season first? Barcelona? Real Madrid? As of 2014, Barcelona is the second most valuable soccer team with its 22 wins in the Spanish Primary Division, 4 championships in the UEFA Champions League, ...

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 tra...

The Standish Group's "Chaos Report 2015" was recently published.  Standish gathers data from projects done across a variety of industries.  They present the data in buckets of "successful, challenged, or failed" projects.   I'd like to highlight my two key learnings after reading the 2015 Chaos R...

In Jeff Haden's recent post entitled "The One Attitude Every Successful Person Has", I was struck at how aligned this attitude is with the Agile Mindset. What do you think? An Agile Mindset... essential for healthy Scrum...is not reserved for specific people - rather, this is the attitude that anyon...

Featuring Martin Hinshelwood The proliferation of scaling frameworks shows there are real challenges in scaling agility, and the solutions don’t seem to involve inventing yet more frameworks or formal processes. So then, why is it so hard to find success in agility at scale? Large scale agility c...

Father's Day offered an annual moment for me to reflect on the journey of a humble and influential man whose life was tragically cut short in 2002 - my Dad. Although it has been a number of years since his passing, he continues to shape my mindset in meaningful and profound ways. I hope all of our ...

Recently discussing design and programming with an external programmer, he explained me his approach of defensive programming. But before going in detail of his explanations, Wikipedia help us to define the defensive programming: Defensive programming is a form of defensive design intended to ensur...

The Scrum Master role can easily be misunderstood as it is harder to grasp by reading the theory hence people often compare the Scrum Master role to Project Manager or Technical Leader. Scrum has been around for more than 20 years but yet people still found it challenging to understand the role o...

I was recently contacted by a senior executive of a mid-sized company that is evolving their product development to Scrum. He explained a situation he had been in and wanted my opinion. He accepted me to share his story here (with some abstractions, and calling him Jim) in an open-ended way, invitin...

Companies have two avenues for growth: acquisition, or organic growth.  Regardless of how they are growing their increasing size increases the difficulty of the company successfully responding to change.  Retaining as much as possible of advantage of that small company’s ability to rapidly pivot ...

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...

Scrum brings agility to and creates Agile organizations through the implementation of empirical process control, the process of frequent inspection and adaptation. The empiricism of Scrum serves discovering and taking advantage of opportunities and options, at all levels; people, technology, market....

I’ve been witness to the start of hundreds of teams and projects. There’s a point at which, during the launch of a new team even before the first Sprint, I can tell with fair certainty whether the team will be successful or not. I’ve been thinking about what the root causes of this are, and here’s m...

n this session, we examine some common and not- so-common metrics before introducing how we can use them as a guide for continuously measuring business goals, aligning them with software development efforts, and then deciding what to do next.

One of the challenge working as a Professional Scrum Trainer is reading what is in people's mind when they are silent. In a classroom setup, silence can mean many things and it depends on the local culture. In some culture, silence can be a form of respect to the person who is talking. Silence can...

HistoryIn 2012 in one of my Professional Scrum Master classes I met a true gentleman. Much older than the average IT specialist in Poland, jeans and button-up shirt, amazing manners, spotless language and a perfectly kept medium-length black beard with shining strings of white. The kind of a person ...

Making a purchase can feel great when you’ve developed a rapport with the salesperson. Regardless of the product; from a tasty treat at the farmer’s market to a major purchase like a new car; a sale is much more likely when the vendor not only cares deeply about their product but also takes time to ...

An analogy I can think of is... I want my dart to hit the dart board, and not necessarily the bull's eye.... as it calls for a lot of details which apparently is missing during estimation. However, if my dart doesn’t hit anywhere on the dart board... it's almost like shooting in the dark; a very dis...

In his book Good to Great, author Jim Collins asks the reader: Do you have a "to do" list? Do you also have a "stop doing" list? He goes on by saying: Those who built the good-to-great companies, however, made as much use of "stop doing" lists as "to do" lists. They displayed a remarkable disciplin...

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 our empl...

“To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.” - Doug Conant, CEO of Campbell’s Soup To create Organizational Agility you need to find the harmony between People, Process, and Tools.  Agile speaks of putting people first, however from my experience, people are the poor step child t...

A program team of over 40 people decided to move to Agile from their traditional development practices. The program was old and had been in existence for over 6 years. In these 6 years they had released multiple versions of their software product to their customers. In the rush to satisfy the custom...

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...

To imbibe Agility in an organization which is a state of high responsiveness, speed, and adaptiveness organizations should promote a new organizational culture of openness, transparency, respect for people, constant learning, improving, and constant adaptation. Even with so much of awareness, cultur...

When reading the role of the Scrum Master in the Scrum guide, one of the core competencies is to facilitate meetings. While in a meeting, a Scrum Master might want to visualize what the team is thinking or expressing. Or he might want to enhance the collaboration through an activity. Colored Post-It...

In this short video, Ken Schwaber explains the challenges of scaling Scrum and how to create a Nexus™ to manage multiple Scrum teams to deliver an integrated increment every Sprint.

In this short video, I explain the challenges of scaling Scrum and how to create a Nexus™ to manage multiple Scrum teams to deliver an integrated increment every Sprint.

EMBARRASSING DISCOVERY True Story from when I was Agile Coach for a Multi-Billion Dollar, Fortune 15 Giant… It was a large Agile program and we had new team members joining the program in waves. Not everyone was familiar with Agile and we did not have money for in-person training. So we had to do t...

Dear Scrum Master! Being a Professional Scrum Trainer, agile coach & consultant for a while I had a chance to work with around a thousand Scrum Masters across different organizations. I see recurring patterns of misunderstanding and misapplication of Scrum usually visible in how Scrum Masters a...

“Eventbrite Order Notification” – This is probably one of the best mails I receive as a ScrumTrainer It usually means I have another student with whom I can share my passion for Scrum. Sometimes it doesn’t quite work that way. Last year, I got this notification for a student who wanted to attend m...

Years ago I was complimented on “improving the group dynamic” by bringing in a cafetiere for the my agile team to use.  We developed a bit of a ritual around this object.  One person had made it clear that the kettle needed to be left to cool so the coffee was not burned, procedures were in place fo...

"Agile" (the label) is all over the place. Who would have guessed in early 2001? When the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was created and the English adjective ‘agile’ obtained its specific meaning in the context of software development. What is this manifesto, commonly known as the Agile M...

Have you ever been in a meeting where you felt afraid to share a difficult and truthful statement? Was "the obvious" in the room the whole time, but no one would speak up and talk about it? If so, then the time has come for your organization's leadership to embrace the role of a Courageous Communica...

I always spend time during training classes thoroughly covering the concept of Definition of Done, sometimes abbreviated “DoD.” As a concept it’s fairly easy to understand and people generally see the value right away. And in practice, for many teams, this concept is the single biggest game changer ...

Are you a Manager that believes in the power of Scrum? There is a difference between thinking, believing and knowing. Don't miss out on a huge opportunity to become the next market leader in your space. It's time to understand your role and how it needs to change in order to survive in a creative ec...

File this one under: “how do you do Sprint Reviews when you have lots of teams?”  Indeed, the traditional presentation format gets long, boring, and ineffective when you have more than a handful of teams presenting at a Sprint Review.  From the point of view of an executive, this is exponentially tr...

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="842"] A judge preparing some feedback, a.k.a. passing judgment[/caption] One of the favorite activities of HR departments seems to be herding people into teamwork trainings. In these trainings they will have endure learning about all sorts of ideas related...

As people and organizations grow and mature their implementation of Scrum, they regularly check with us at Scrum.org about particular points of interest. Recently we have seen an increase in the need for help and inspiration in scaling Scrum and in ways to educate and assess Scrum practitioners.

This blog is part of my series on “Agile Trojan Horses – Covert Appetizers for Agile Discovery”. This series helps spark conversations that restore focus on Agile Fundamentals, whet the appetite to discover more about Agile and help apply Agile in day-to-day decision-making. I am writing this blog a...

The ability to create high-quality and attractive flip charts is one of the basic skills of any facilitator. If you are the Scrum Master, Agile Coach, business coach or just a person who used to capturing thoughts using paper and markers and prefers the old timeless classics - these simple rules wil...

In this webcast, Ravi Verma, Scrum expert, and founder of SmoothApps discusses self-managing teams, a fundamental element core to agile software delivery and any Scrum Team.

Young Jimmy is in 3rd grade.  He's constructed an immaculate paper-mâché volcano.  It took every spare minute of the last to weeks to make.  His mom carefully loads it in the back of the minivan.  The anticipation is too much for Jimmy, he can't even look.  Arriving at school, Jimmy helps her carry ...