Daily Stand-up: Why it’s time to ditch the ‘3 questions’
Are you still asking the ‘three questions’. It’s time you learned some better patterns to inspect your progress toward the team’s Sprint Goal.
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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
Return on Time Invested (ROTI) Retrospective Pattern
When things get stale, ROTI is a simple pattern for team feedback that places the ownus of actions for improvement back on them.
Stop escalating impediments. Support the team to solve them.
Got blockers? Don’t leave them til the Standup and don’t remove them yourself. Help the team to self-organise!
Top tips for putting the spark back in your team
All teams go through it. It’s the natural stage where the spark of fun has given way to the daily trudge of delivery of work. Here’s how to bring the zing back.
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).
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.
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.
Big Upfront Planning is Out. Pivoting to Respond to Change is In
With uncertainty at an all time high, the response of many organisations in those early days was to batten down the hatches and the impact may be felt for many months to come. To survive through this, big up front planning will be out and pivoting to respond to change will be the new normal.
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.
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.
Scrum Master resources for when you are starting your journey
Start your agile journey right with Mia Horrigan’s (PST) recommendations on great material for people new to Scrum and, more broadly, agile.
Demystifying Agile Estimation and Planning
Estimating in hours can be highly inaccurate. Estimating using relative wide band delphi like planning poker is key to understanding what you can do and when you can do it by as a team.
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.
Getting the most out of your Agile Roles
5 Scrum Master Myths (and 5 Facts You Probably Didn’t Know)
What does a Scrum Master do all day? Run events and facilitate meetings? The Scrum Master role has evolved greatly over the last 20 years and now encompasses leadership, coaching, and growing agility through Scrum.
What’s the difference between a Project Manager and a Scrum Master
Is a Scrum Master a team lead, agile project manager, or delivery manager? There are many differences between the role of project manager and Scrum Master. Who writes reports, approves work, and controls and manages outcomes for an agile team might surprise you.
Agile for All: How Does Agile IQ Benefit Everyone In Your Enterprise
Every executive knows that access to credible, reliable and independent data is the key to making sound decisions. Yet, while many organisations turn to intuition, gut instinct, self-reporting, and vanity metrics when it comes to agile capability maturity, now there’s a way to have an objective picture.
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?
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.
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?
What does a Scrum Master do?
The Scrum Master is a role in Scrum – an Agile Framework for optimising the delivery of products. In most organisations, when someone is given
Specialist Team Members within a Scrum Team – Testers
In my previous post on Business Analysts as Specilaist Team members within a Scrum team noted, individual team members may have specialised skills and areas
Specialist Team Members within a Scrum Team – Business Analyst
Whilst individuals within a Scrum development team may have specialist skills and areas of focus, accountability to deliver the Sprint work belongs to the Development
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.
Leaders: 4 key behaviours to help improve business agility
Four key behaviours increase business agility. But be warned, you need to know how to encourage and reward them if you want agile’s outcomes of faster to market and improved ability to pivot.
Agile training for executives. What do you need to learn to create the agile enterprise?
Learning how to drive through value with a focus on the customer is key to executives creating an agile organisation.
Agile maturity assessments: Going back to Shu Ha Ri.
Learn about the only agile assessment and coaching tool based on data analytics that can predict how agile you really are.
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.
Top tips for putting the spark back in your team
All teams go through it. It’s the natural stage where the spark of fun has given way to the daily trudge of delivery of work. Here’s how to bring the zing back.
Agile for All: How Does Agile IQ Benefit Everyone In Your Enterprise
Every executive knows that access to credible, reliable and independent data is the key to making sound decisions. Yet, while many organisations turn to intuition, gut instinct, self-reporting, and vanity metrics when it comes to agile capability maturity, now there’s a way to have an objective picture.
Top Five Concerns for Executives as Teams become a Remote Workforce
As more and more staff are adjusting towards working remotely, Executives and their programs and teams will need additional support to enable them to maintain productivity, to stay connected and engaged to deliver critical outcomes. Here’s how to address these challenges.
“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
Working with Agile Artefacts
What is an ‘Increment’?
How do you create an Increment of work in Scrum? What has it got to do with the Product Goal and Definition of Done?
Definition of a Defect in Agile and the Definition of Done
A stakeholder suddenly claims it doesn’t work as intended and therefore it’s a bug that requires immediate attention. What do you do? How do you treat bugs and incidents and change requests in agile teams?
What to do when a User Story is 'not done'
Teams love to get credit for their efforts, but is that what you should do if a User Story gets 1/2 way there but doesn’t get to Done in the Sprint? What should you really do with the remainder of the work?
To spike or not to spike?
So, what actually is a Spike? Where does the term come from and should all agile teams use them?
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Estimation and Planning
What Parkrun has taught me about Estimation
The duration of time to run 5kms will vary widely between runners due to complexity, fitness, elevation and effort. Relative Estimation is the key.
What to do when a User Story is 'not done'
Teams love to get credit for their efforts, but is that what you should do if a User Story gets 1/2 way there but doesn’t get to Done in the Sprint? What should you really do with the remainder of the work?
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.
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?
Scrum Master resources for when you are starting your journey
Start your agile journey right with Mia Horrigan’s (PST) recommendations on great material for people new to Scrum and, more broadly, agile.
Demystifying Agile Estimation and Planning
Estimating in hours can be highly inaccurate. Estimating using relative wide band delphi like planning poker is key to understanding what you can do and when you can do it by as a team.
Strategic Planning in Agile
What does strategic planning in agile look like? Do we need to fully understand and agree on a strategy before we proceed to deliver new
Estimating without a baseline
Agile Teams tend to use relative estimation rather than creating tasks, estimating hours, and then adding up all the hours. Adding up hours it fundamentally
Relative Estimating and Sizing Stories
How should we size Stories? Not by hours but through looking at new work relative to the size we gave to old work.
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Copyright © Zen Ex Machina® and ™ (2021). All rights reserved. ABN 93 153 194 220
Copyright © Zen Ex Machina® and ™ (2021). All rights reserved. ABN 93 153 194 220
