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.

I have been in a few organizations where leaders say, “we aren’t getting any impediments.” Why would teams raise issues but the leaders don’t think it is really a problem? We have come up with four questions to frame these impediments that allow for the teams to choose their own destiny, become more empowered while removing leadership as a bottleneck.

Much of the early history of Scrum was written on Jeff Sutherland's Scrum Blog almost 20 years ago. This may still be accessible at jeffsutherland.org/scrum but needs to be brought forward to scruminc.com so history is not lost. Today, many practitioners have no...

Scrum@Scale is a sponsor of Agile 2018. I am signing books and taking photos at the Scrum@Scale booth, 412. At 2pm on Monday, I presented "Linear Scalability of Teams: The Holy Grail of Agile Project Management", in which I described how the Scrum@Scale...

The 3-5-3 structure of Scrum provides us with much more than a basic framework. Understanding the 3 roles, 5 events, and 3 outputs of Scrum also gives you a method to check if Scrum teams are implementing the same practices observed in high performing teams.

2018 Scrummer Reading List Our annual tribute to beach reads is back. We asked our team what books they are reading this summer and they responded with some great suggestions; a combination of fiction, non-fiction, business books and academic papers that make for...

An aerospace parts client recently emailed me asking how best to poll happiness across a group of hundreds of employees. Since this is a question we get frequently, I thought it would be a great idea to share the answer with all of you. Here is what I’ve learned about measuring team happiness […]