Building your personal brand is the long-term strategy for Scrum Masters that will pay big dividends You’ve got your Scrum Master certification, you’ve beefed up your LinkedIn profile, and yet no one is beating down your door to hire you. That’s probably because you don’t stand out from the hundreds of other worthy candidates competing…
How events, rituals, and ceremonies add value to meetings Not another meeting! People generally don’t look forward to meetings. It’s one more task in a day filled with demands and deadlines. For Agile teams, meetings are an essential part of daily work life. Adding ritual to these meetings makes them meaningful. It gives them value.…
What is Agile backlog refinement? And What to do with it? Product backlog items are all the tasks we hope to complete before we deliver the product to our customer. Every now and then, we run into some ideas that were sourced a long time ago: they are still things we might want to do…
Sprint Tasks Tips: Staying Focused when Agile Sprint Planning Assigning tasks at sprint planning makes us task-driven or more focused on our tasks than the goal of the sprint. For some time, it looks like we’re making rapid improvements until some tasks get blocked. Then, we just move on only to later on realize that…
Benefits of Agile Explained – How to Realize Agile Cost Savings? Agile benefits are all about delivering the most valuable products or features in the least amount of time by prioritizing the highest valued things and then delivering them through to completion very quickly. With agile, we get to accelerate the returns so we can…
Product owners, the team members who’re responsible for investing in the product that we’re delivering, are not mandatory participants of the Daily Scrum. But as people shepherding the investment, they are interested in them because it’s a valuable 15 minutes spent synchronizing with the team: an opportunity to be updated with what’s happening with the…
What should we do if our team members are in distant time zones? Team members can be difficult to manage when they’re in distant time zones because the time overlap is so small that there’s not enough opportunity to collaborate or participate in events. So, how do you turn things around, empower your team members…
In an Agile environment, you don’t have to be nice. But you should always be kind. Leaders should be: [Fill in the blank.] Depending on whether you’re a traditionalist, boomer, Gen X, millennial, or Gen Z, you probably have very different perspectives on what leadership looks like and how leaders should act. In recent years,…
People Over Process: Behind Agile’s Core Principles In “People Over Process,” Michael K Levine explains how the focus on “Individuals and Interactions” over “Processes and Tools” is key to Agile. That’s why it was the first value listed in the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. 20 years on, we can see why and how this…
Is Your Team on Target? How to use Scrum Burndown Charts to Measure Performance Scrum Burndown Charts are designed to provide your team with feedback on how you’re performing, so you can make informed decisions as you move forward. There are different levels of burndowns including project, release, and sprint burndowns, but they all have…
