“People were saying that groups needed to communicate more. Jeff (Bezos) got up and said, ‘No, communication is terrible!’”    Alan Deutschman, 1 Aug 2014, Fast Company Yes, you read that right. Less communication is better. The reason for this is that more...

On March 8, 2019, in Tokyo Japan, I attended the press conference for the formation of Scrum Inc.’s new joint venture, Scrum Inc. Japan. Scrum Inc. is partnering with KDDI, Japan’s second largest telecom, and Eiwa Systems Management (ESM). This joint venture is out to change the way of work in Japan[…]

Scrum Inc. announced it is partnering with KDDI Corporation and ESM, Inc. to form Scrum Inc. Japan. This unique partnership will help boost innovation, productivity and optimize agile project development in the world’s third-largest economy. The joint venture will...

Agile Retail: Using Scrum to out Amazon, Amazon by Joe Justice The dominance of online retailers like Amazon, Jet and, Zappos, has disrupted traditional brick and mortar retail companies far and wide. Payless, Gymboree and Victoria's Secret are just some of the...

Over the years, I have heard from many teams the need for a tool that helps accelerate the learning and the application of Scrum. Scrum Essential Cards, capture the key ideas behind Scrum, providing an easy and handy reference guide. I worked with Ivar Jacobson...

Scrum Inc. has been a Trifork partner for over a decade in many parts of the world, especially Denmark and Switzerland. Last week I visited Trifork in Copenhagen to do a Certified Scrum Master course and a Certified Scrum@Scale course with Jens Ostergaard who is both...

Scrum improves gender parity in the workplace because it requires radical honesty and transparency. It helps to highlight prejudices and poor practices. This should lead to equal treatment, equal pay, and equal opportunities.

Agile Boston's 10th annual Give Thanks for Scrum event had a full house at Microsoft's training facility in Burlington, MA on 20 November. I delivered a keynote titled "The Holy Grail of Project Management: Linear Scalability." In my talk, I  laid out the roadmap for...

At Scrum Inc., we employ a workshop for launching many teams at once. As I contemplated how to improve this workshop, I began seeing a lot of different ways that the Lean Canvas layout was being employed for different purposes. I wondered if I could do the same for a team launch. The end result is our Team Working Agreement Canvas.

Update: See Process Efficiency – Adapting Flow to the Agile Improvement Effort the first of several papers to be published. By definition, Lean means that process efficiency is greater than 25%. The name Scrum derives from watching lean hardware teams. A new team can...

Today, one of the key questions around implementing scrum is: “How can leadership get the organization to buy into agility?” In this brief video Scrum co-creator Dr. Jeff Sutherland answers that question.

True business agility is no longer something that’s nice for an organization to have. It’s a core competency that will separate you from your competitors. Yet outsourcing Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches is still a tactic being used by companies large and small. In our experience, clients only become hyperproductive when their internal Scrum Masters are effective “team-level” Agile coaches and leaders. Here’s how to make that happen.