Category Archives: scrum

The Evolution of Sprint Planning

Still hearing sprint planning being referred to as a two-part event? Ever been in a sprint planning where developers had to explain their plan of work to the product owner and scrum master?

What you may be dealing with are relics of sprint plannings past. To understand how sprint planning has changed, we’ll take a look at the evolution of the event throughout the years.
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Strategic Planning For Scaled-Up Scrum: An Overview

Here’s an overview of one approach to doing strategic planning in a scaled-up scrum environment. We’ll use twelve weeks as our planning horizon, though the approach works fine for shorter periods as well. We’ll start by looking at how a single team could plan for such a time horizon on their own without considering the broader organizational context, and build up from there.
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Daily Scrum Antipatterns

Now that we’ve examined the history of daily scrum, we can shed some light on common anti-patterns of the event. Many of these are relics from Scrum Guides past: like scrum, the Guide inspects and adapts for continuous improvement. In other words, if you’re still following practices from an older Scrum Guide, you may be doing your team a disservice.
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The Evolution Of The Daily Scrum

Ever been in a daily scrum that sounds like this?: “Yesterday, I… Today, I… I’m blocked by….”
Does your scrum master still show up to every daily scrum?
Have you heard the one about the chickens and the pigs?

Scrum is an ever-evolving framework. And the events within it evolve too. As a result, some artifacts from past iterations of the events will still linger. You might be wondering where they came from.
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Your First Year As A Scrum Master

You’ve put in the work and you’ve secured your very first job as a scrum master. Congratulations! Now what? Your first scrum master job is an exciting time for growth and change – for yourself and for your teams. It can also be scary, stressful, and mystifying. If you’re experiencing all of these feelings, you are not alone. Here’s what you can expect in your first scrum master year.
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Why Is Everyone Busy But Delivery Is Slow?

Very Busy WomanOrganizations that are scaling up with scrum often find that Everyone Is Busy But Delivery Is Slow. This syndrome is usually caused by a lack of visibility into what people are working on, poor prioritization, and too much work in progress. The more work in progress we have, the more overhead we incur. We have meetings about the work. We create and read dashboards, reports, emails, and chat messages about about the work. People are doing all this work in order to achieve goals. Where are the goals coming from? Which ones are most important? Getting control of work in progress requires effective management of the goals.
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Everyone Is Busy But Delivery Is Slow

Person overwhelmed with workEveryone is super busy, yet things take forever to get done. I encounter this at organizations that are scaling up with scrum. All too often, leaders want to jump to a solution, such as implementing a scaling framework. Sadly, implementing a ‘fix’ without a deep understanding of the causes of the problem will likely make things worse. Blindly implementing the framework will make people even busier and things will take even longer to get done.

Exploring and understanding the root causes of the problem is a better starting point. Read the full article…

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How Do I Get A Scrum Master Job?

 Season Hughes

By: Season Hughes

“How do I land my first job as a scrum master?” This is the #1 question I get asked. You’re in luck because the agile community is one of the warmest and most open communities I have found. People truly want you to succeed and are here to help. At the same time, no one is going to hand you a job. It is entirely up to you to grow your skills, market yourself, and build the connections you need to get the role you want.

So where do you start?

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Eliminating The 7 Wastes of Software Development With Kim Poremski

Inspired by the Toyota Production System, Mary and Tom Poppendieck describe the seven wastes of software development as: partially done work, extra features, relearning, handoffs, delays, task switching, and defects. In this video from the February Scrum Professionals MeetUp, Kim Poremski explores the seven wastes and introduces tools and techniques to overcome the seven wastes and unlock organizational agility and scalability.

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Nominal Group Technique For Working Agreements

A group using nominal group techniqueNominal Group Technique (NGT) is a facilitation tool that helps a group quickly build a comprehensive list of ideas, issues, options or solutions, and then select the best one(s). NGT works faster than traditional brainstorming, yet generates more complete and higher quality results. NGT prevents the quieter voices from being overwhelmed and allows each participant to contribute to their full potential.

The Nominal Group Technique was developed in the 1970’s by Andre Delbecq and Andrew H. Van de Ven. The effectiveness of NGT has been validated by subsequent research.

Let’s see how NGT can be used by a scrum team to create working agreements for their scrum events and other meetings. Such agreements are often called meeting ground rules.
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