Looking for techniques for effective facilitation? In this first part of our facilitation techniques series, we’ll dive into paraphrasing: what it is and how to use it.
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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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Are looking to get an agile job, such as scrum master, product owner, or developer on a scrum team? I recommend using scrum to structure your job search. A job search is complex work, full of unknown unknowns. That’s exactly the sort of work that scrum is good for. Additionally, using scrum and related agile techniques to structure your job search will grow your agile knowledge and skills. Here are a few thoughts on how to use scrum to support your agile job search.
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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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Photo by Nick Wright
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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Photo by Zosia Korcz
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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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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I’ve never worked in tech, nor used scrum, but people tell me I’d make a good scrum master. Where should I start?
I get this question from time to time. In fact, I got it today. A good starting point is to read some short introductory articles and watch some videos. Here’s a collection that I recommend.
Want to know a secret to making decisions that will lead to better outcomes? Not so fast. Well actually, not too soon. The timing of when you make your decision will have a big impact on how well things work out.
Our natural tendency is to decide too early. It gives us the illusion of certainty. The problem is that you don’t know what you don’t know. Early decisions are made with less information than those we make later. Of course, it is possible to wait too long. You want to make decisions at the last responsible moment. This is the point where the cost of delaying the decision rises to meet the benefit of waiting for more information.
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Organizations 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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