Scrum Blog
Better Scrum Through Essential Cards
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@Scale at GOTO Copenhagen and NETS Agile Meetup (slides)
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...
How Scrum Improves Gender Parity in the Workplace
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.
A Roadmap for Scrum@Scale
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...
Team Working Agreement Canvas
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.
Process Efficiency in Scrum – Why it Matters and How to Measure it
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...
Getting the Organization to Buy Into Agility – It’s All About Leadership
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.
Why You Should Hire Your Own Scrum Masters
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.
Framing Impediments – Empowering Teams and Helping Leadership Listen
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.
Scrum: Get Your Requirements Straight Before Coding
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...
Agile 2018 – Linear Scalability of Teams: The Holy Grail of Agile Project Management
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 of Scrum
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.