THE Team Playbook

Coaching tips and resources for agile teams by certified Professional Scrum Trainers™

Smarter ways to build smarter teams

True busienss transformation starts with the law of “The Small Team”. These free resources are a sample of Agile IQ® Academy™ and are designed to help your teams be more agile – how to get the most out of agile events, roles and artefacts.

Facilitating agile events

How do I run a Retrospective?

The Retrospective is one of five events in Scrum. It’s purpose is to inspect the whole Scrum Team from the perspective of people, process and tools, and then adapt the way the whole team works (including the Product Owner).

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How do I run a Sprint Review?

The Sprint Review is one of five events in Scrum. It’s purpose is to inspect the Increment of work, get feedback, and then adapt the Product Backlog. And while many people refer to the Sprint Review as the “demo” or “showcase”, this is only one aspect of the Sprint Review.

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How do I run a Daily Scrum?

Many people use the Daily Scrum to provide a status report to the Product Owner or Scrum Master, and even to stakeholders, but this event plays a more critical part in ensuring that the team continues to stay focussed on their goal and adapt their work so they improve their chance of achieving it.

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Remote PI Planning – Insights into what worked and what didn’t

Running remote PI planning for the first time 100% virtual was a bit daunting a few weeks ago when the reality set in that with the current crisis, this was now our reality. We prepared, thought through worse case scenarios and had back up plans and felt eerily calm as the day began. It was a great success and here are our tips.

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Scrum Master Tips for Running Scrum Events Remotely

As Scrum masters we are used to dealing with an ever changing, complex environment and that is the sweet spot for being agile and where having an agile mindset is crucial. It’s now more critical than ever, for Scrum Masters to ensure agile practice is maintained and to support teams to continuously improve their practice and self organise but stay connected and focused on the Sprint Goal.

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Accelerate Through Retrospectives

Teams were bored with their Retrospectives. I was bored. They were just doing mechanical Scrum. Retrospectives are such a powerful tool to drive continuous improvement, so here’s what we did to fix the problem.

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Getting the most out of your Agile Roles

Product Management versus Project Management

Gartner reports that 85% of executives are now turning to agile product management over projects. Why is this shift occurring and what do you need to know about product management to optimise your strategic investments for greater market share, better ability to pivot, or get your products to market faster?

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Principles of Effective Governance

What governance best supports product development efforts using agile frameworks? Don’t be tempted to over complicated things with a hybrid committee structure. Scrum has all the roles and responsibilities you need to deliver value.

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What does a Product Owner do?

The Product Owner is a role in many Agile Frameworks. They are responsible for optimising the delivery of products and maximising the value of the work of the Team. But what does a Product Owner do?

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Teaming

Agile IQ: What we’ve learned about agile delivery from 500+ teams

What top behaviours drive organisations to higher performance, lower costs, and reduced delivery risk? To understand agile delivery metrics, ZXM took a science-based approach to the statistical analysis of its Agile IQ® data on delivery effectiveness, cost reduction, risk and how it relates to agile capability maturity.

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Groupthink: the bane of high performing Agile Teams

What makes an agile team great and why? After coaching a number of teams in Scrum, we’ve now seen a number that, after a some months now, could be considered high performers. Some of these go bad and reject any external criticism regardless of how accurate that might be. Why do these teams go bad? Groupthink might have the answer.

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“Netiquette” for online meetings for remote and distributed teams

As with face-2-face meetings, online meetings also have an etiquette (“Netiquette”) to make them effective. One of the 12 principles of the agile manifesto suggests face-to-face is the best option but in today’s world of social distancing and WFH, it is no longer an option.

Here are the guidelines we have found useful for having for online meetings with distributed

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Working with Agile Artefacts

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Estimation and Planning

How do I run Sprint Planning?

Sprint Planning is one of Scrum’s five events. There’s more to it than just making a plan. Importantly, as an action of empiricism, the team should be inspecting the Product Backlog and adapting, and creating, a Sprint Backlog that makes their plan to achieve the Sprint Goal, and deliver a potentially releasable Increment, transparent.

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Does agility go out the window when we work remotely?

Many organisations are making guidance on what tools to use for remote teams in response to COVID-19. The situation isn’t a tools problem. This is a people problem – how can people, who are social creatures, successfully work remotely without physical interaction?

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