Blog

The Agile Manifesto's biggest design flaw is one word. Each of the four value pairs is a polarity rather than a problem; replacing 'over' with 'over AND' fixes the read without changing the intent.

Five Scrum Master stances mapped to how skilled your team is — consulting, teaching, mentoring, coaching, supporting. Coaching sits at the top of the curve: the stance you earn, not the one you default to.

Three years of teaching the Scrum Master Coaching Sprint taught us one piece the original under-played: pick your Coaching Sprint Goal last, not first.

Two managers, one chair, six years between them. A leadership fable anchored on Cook-Greuter, and the part of the story nobody warns you about.

"Agile is dead" is the wrong question. The methodology dissolved into how good organisations work, and that absorption is why your job title keeps changing.

Facilitate great working agreements sessions with the Working Agreements Canvas for High Performing Teams.

In the Agile coaching world, we put a lot of emphasis on gaining professional coaching skills - and for good reason. It’s more than just teaching people how to fish. Providing the space and opportunity for people to learn that they are resourceful, creative and have what it takes to overcome challenges is invaluable. When a coach shows up in this way, people gain confidence in their own abilities and become ready to tackle the next challenge without their coach. Coaching is a very powerful modality when working with clients. However, sometimes you just need to provide the answers and you need an effective tool to do that.

Executive support is super important for any change initiative to succeed. Knowing how to deliver a solid elevator pitch to an executive is crucial because sometimes all we have is three-minutes and one shot to pique their interest for further conversation.

Many teams I work with like the idea of sharing their burnup charts at sprint reviews but are not sure how to create one or get the information needed to populate it. In this article, we’ll cover both how to create a burnup chart and how to populate it.

Start impressing your customers, stakeholders and executives with beautiful burnup charts at your next sprint review. All you need is your Scrum team’s velocity and the number of story points required to reach your next goal.

Now that you’re clear on the problem you’re trying to solve by implementing a scaling framework, your organization has built a solid foundation on one-team Scrum, you’ve evaluated the more lightweight ways to manage dependencies without scaling and you’ve communicated a clear and compelling vision for making this change...it’s time to get started scaling! But wait! How do I start?

Many challenges faced by Scrum teams can be traced back to poorly written and poorly maintained product backlogs. A key ingredient to product backlog health is that every user story is kept up-to-date with accurate estimates. Finding the time to estimate the full product backlog and keep those estimates current can be daunting for Scrum teams. Here are some tips on estimating your full product backlog like a pro.

It’s been a while since Part 1 of this blog series was published. The second blog has been far more challenging to pull together in terms of what I feel is most valuable for you to read. It started out as a random collection of thoughts on scaling from a couple of different coaches, morphed into a change management approach to scaling and has ended up as a discussion on considerations to keep in mind when scaling Scrum. Check it out!

We’ve all been there…scope and schedule have been planned, work has begun, time has passed and now your leaders are asking for an update, but what they really want is for you to tell them that everything is on track and exactly as originally planned…

So, there I was, with a team in their weekly coaching session when everything went wrong (that’s how it seemed to me, at least). I was not in sync with my coaching partner - even accidentally muting him at one point during the session. I felt awkward and unsure - stumbling through questions like I was walking in the dark without a light. The activities I led the team through weren’t clear to them and the team wasn’t connecting with me as deeply as in our other sessions. What happened?

There’s a common situation that many agilists find themselves in when working with organizations: while the Agile Coach or Scrum Masters are working with teams to help them improve their execution of their chosen agile framework, leaders are pushing towards implementing a scaling framework. Leaders and organizations must first evaluate the “ground conditions” necessary for effective scaling and, only then, determine the best way to proceed.

Transformational questions are designed to spur insight on behalf of your client. They invite big picture thinking without constraints, allowing your client to access all possibilities and explore those that are most useful to them. Most importantly, forming questions in this way leaves the coach’s opinions of what the client should do out of the conversation.

Let me guess - you're in a coaching engagement right now with no clear agenda or timeline. You hang out at the back of team meetings and try to add value by interrupting with powerful questions. There's no rhyme or reason to when you intervene, and the team is making little visible progress. The sponsor is frustrated in your weekly check-in because she doesn't see progress. You try and convince the team to work in the way that the sponsor wants by winning each person over one-by-one. Eventually, you're kind of just...there; no one really knows why and everyone, including yourself, wonders when you'll leave.

A healthy product backlog is a necessary requisite to a healthy Scrum team. Rather than focusing only on refining user stories for the upcoming sprint, prudent Scrum teams invest in refining the full product backlog to increase transparency, stay focused on their vision, and keep the full organization aligned. Achieving transparency consists of much more than simply making information available, interested parties have to be able to get the information they're looking for in a matter of seconds.

You’re leading an agile software delivery team in some capacity - maybe as a ScrumMaster, product leader or manager. Your team has worked hard to align with the Agile Manifesto and you're proud of their ability to build and ship software at regular intervals. You believe the business is better off as a result of your team’s ability to learn and adapt to changing market conditions faster than before. Unfortunately, your work becomes more and more challenging as the differences between agile and the status quo become apparent. The more agile your team gets, the more you rub the rest of the organization the wrong way.

Join our Superheroes Academy Coaches, Brock Argue and Erkan Kadir as they discuss the various agile scaling frameworks, the why behind scaling and their insights into how best to approach scaling Scrum in your organization.

Use the Self-Awareness Worksheet to uncover patterns in the way you think, feel and act to grow in awareness of self. Building your own Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is the key to success for leaders at any level.

No Agile coach is immune to moments where their coaching powers sputter and they feel a little less than a superhero. Self-limiting beliefs, impostor syndrome, difficulty taking the next-step or being unclear about what we truly want can all send our inner heroes back into the shadows. Keeping radioactive spiders or cans of spinach handy might help, but what does it really take to transform a Peter Parker into someone so confident and fully actualized that they're compelled to use their powers to save the world? The fact is, we're all brimming with the potential to make this transformation and the best way to unleash our Agile coaching superpowers is to enlist a coach of our own.