Category Archives: scrum

Improve Your Scrum Implementation with Our Scrum Scorecard

Health metrics displayed on a heart monitor

Photo by Joshua Chehov

While the effectiveness of scrum is made up of much more than what a scorecard can show, having some criteria to start conversations about how well scrum is working on your team can be helpful. For this reason, we’ve created the Scrum Scorecard. Use this Scorecard to assess your team’s implementation of scrum and identify areas of improvement.

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Team Health Assessment

A stethoscope hangs on a mesh wall before a setting sun

Photo by Oluwaseyi Johnson

Healthy teams are effective teams that meet goals, produce high-quality work, and delight customers.

When we measure team health, we step away from these outcomes of the team – however valuable they may be – and instead look at the team itself. What environment are they working in? How do the team members feel about the work they’re doing? How do they feel about each other?

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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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