Accelerating Positive Culture and Engagement with Agile Coach Training

Written in 2001 the Agile Manifesto states that in-person interactions are the most effective way to facilitate communication. As technologies and connectivity have evolved, so has the ability for teams to work in different ways. Successful organizations are embracing these new ways of working and reaping tremendous benefits as a result.

Since 2001 it’s become more and more common for team members to be geographically dispersed to the extent that throughout 2020 most teams have been working remote. We have found that not all remote teams perform at the same level; in addition it’s clear there are teams that are working even better remote while others are struggling to cope. With the recent pandemic, it has forced a new way of thinking and working making it critical that agile teams not only survive but thrive during this workplace transition.

Check out this webinar to learn about the practices, tools, and values at agile coach certification online that have allowed many agile teams to thrive while working remotely and the steps that your organization can take if you have teams or individuals who are struggling.

We’ll discuss:

• What great can look like

• Signs that a team or team member may be struggling

• The role tools play in helping organizations navigate and stay productive

• Steps your organization can take to boost engagement and build positive culture

Speakers

Eric Naiburg - VP of Marketing and Operations, Scrum.org

Eric is co-author of UML for Database Design and UML for Mere Mortals. Eric is responsible for all aspects of marketing, support, outbound communications, Professional Scrum Trainer programs, partners and operations for Scrum.org. Eric was program director at IBM and Rational Software where he was originally hired in 1999 by original Scrum Team member John Scumniotales for who he worked for several years and worked closely with another original Scrum Team member Jeff McKenna sitting in the next desk. At IBM and Rational Eric was responsible for application lifecycle management (ALM), DevOps, Data Governance and Agile solutions.

Danny Presten - Chief Methodologist, Digital.ai

Danny has several transformation tours of duty behind him in which he's worked in agile organizations, consulted with senior leaders and led training initiatives. He is an entrepreneurial self starter with over 20 years experience successfully addressing complex delivery challenges in a variety of industries including web development, e-commerce, healthcare, non profit, supply chain, and legal.

Derek Holt - General Manager, Agile & DevOps, Digital.ai

As General Manager of Agile and DevOps at Digital.ai, Derek brings nearly 20 years of experience leading large enterprise and startup technology companies with a consistent focus on the digital transformation. Derek joined Digital.ai after serving as President & COO of K4Connect, a venture backed IoT software company focused on bringing digital solutions to empower older adults and individuals living with disabilities. He received a BS in Computer Engineering from The Pennsylvania State University and an MBA from Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, where he was named a Fuqua Scholar.

Resource: https://www.scrum.org/resources/accelerating-positive-culture-and-engagement-distributed-teams 

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Scrum Certification Online: Contract Your Team!

In this blog series I would like to address topics that relate to professional team coaching as well as Professional Scrum. In the course of becoming a Professional Team Coach, I noticed a lot of interesting topics for Scrum Masters who want to improve their coaching stance. I'd like to note that models and terms I am using and discuss are not mine. They come from training and coaching sessions belonging to Vroemen from Teamchange. The connection I make to Scrum is my interpretation.

Contracting and containment

The word contract often triggers some raised eyebrows in the Scrum community. It may feel like something strict that prevents people from collaborating, referencing back to the agile manifesto for software development. The fact that this manifesto motivated us to collaborate with our customers instead of negotiating contracts, was a sign that collaboration and contracting were out of balance. However, there is a new need for a contract: a (psychological) contract between the Scrum Master and the Scrum Team (including the Development Team).

By this I don't mean a big contract upfront with the signature of the whole Scrum Team. There are more ways to contract a team.

A couple of examples:

- You have a certain objective in mind for this Retrospective. At the beginning of the session you're transparant about this and check if the Scrum Team is ready and willing to achieve this objective together;

- You're an hour into a refinement session and you read the room. There is tension in the room, discussions are hardened. You suggest a short break and you do a check-in before continuing;

- You start with a new assignment as a Scrum Master. You're assigned to the marketing team. The marketing team never asked for Scrum, let alone a Scrum Master. So this is the first thing you bring up when you meet the team. Together you set up some rules of engagement during professional agile leadership certification, so you can be a servant leader to the team. Or maybe you don't take on the assignment at all?

- You meet with a new team and you create a set of team rules that everybody can agree on.

I'm sure now that I've given some examples, you can think of a couple examples of you're own?

So this contracting doesn't happen just once. It happens over-and-over-again.

Creating a contract like this will create containment and safety for the team to freely express themselves because of the containment of this contract.

Contract the team, not (just) the manager

You will often encounter managers or customers you work with to take on some improvements regarding a specific Scrum Team. Things have not been going that smooth and you're the perfect match to solve this teams' problems. Before you agree to take on the assignment, take a moment to talk to the team first to assess their view on the situation. If this team does not want to be coached, chances are you will be having a very hard time doing so. Find out what the needs of this team are. What do they think/feel? What's the relationship between them and management? All of these things affect the ability of you being able to help this team grow or not. 

I was once the Scrum Master of two teams that started out with Scrum. I was hired by the CEO to help these teams become better Scrum Teams. Or actually, the CEO thought I would help the team perform better on their targets. Management started putting more and more pressure on the teams and they wanted me to do the same. This led to the situation that I had to end my contract with this company. The CEO did not want Scrum, he wanted to get results as fast as possible by pressuring the teams. No sustainable pace what so ever. My contract with the CEO was in conflict with the contract I had (not) made with the Scrum Teams.

Contact and contract

Contact and contract are not that different. Making contact with the people in your team is like making a psychological contract. Sometimes this is done by a subtle check-in, sometimes more clearly by asking for permission to proceed with the agenda for a session. Or having a conversion on the expectations of your role as a Scrum Master in a team. If you treat a contract in this way, you and your Scrum Team will most definitely benefit.

Resource: https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/scrum-master-contract-your-team 

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How Tools Condition Our Way Of Working In Certified Scrum Master Training?

This week twitter was full of comments about the latest update from JIRA, the dictator of the way we work, the world's most famous Ticket Management tool. I put Ticket Management because it is what it is. JIRA is super vitamin with plugins but what it does really well is ticket management.

Returning to the topic, I put here the update, sorry because I only found it in English and I prefer to show the speech from the original source.

This is the most impressive thing I have seen in time. We put decimals in the story points. We have gone crazy! Various things here. The first is that in good professional scrum master training the story points are a complementary practice.

From what you see and what I have seen in many organizations that I have helped, JIRA makes you a slave to the way you work. Epics, Story Points, Versions, JIRA is assuming that all teams in the world use story points. Big mistake! I'd like to ask the audience a question. How many people who are going to read this newsletter are comfortable with the story points?

It's more. How many people have had to explain to their hierarchical superior who is in the orbit of the development team that a Story Point is? And finally, how many people in the audience are slaves to these JIRA setups? Unfortunately, JIRA imposes our way of working.

I have been endless times trying to answer these questions. And I have always had to make a break, like the day from Messi to Boateng, to have a kind of board for converting hours to story points…. until I discovered Kanban with Scrum.

Kanban with Scrum gave me what I needed. Go back to talking about days instead of story points. In Kanban, we planted 4 metrics; we planted Work in Progress, Throughput, Work Item Age and Cycle Time.

With these 4 metrics you will not need anything else. The most important thing is that you are going to think again in days and not in points.

I made a video explaining how to ditch the story points and move on to more realistic metrics for team day. I am attaching the video below in case you want to see it. I recommend it to end your "nightmare" of story points. Flow control is basic and strategic for any team. There, conversations change and better decisions are made.

Bottlenecks are better observed from the flow analysis and also with the 4 previous metrics we can better manage future predictability. You do not believe me? I recommend you watch the video that I am attaching to you in this newsletter. Make a game of Twig and you will see how these metrics help you.

As professional advice, I also tell you that your life will be better with JIRA faraway since it is to capture the dictatorship imposed for our way of working in the 21st century.

Resource: https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/como-las-herramientas-nos-condicionan-nuestra-manera-de-trabajar 

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Certified Scrum Master Training - Question Should Ask Their Teams to Get Up To Speed

TL; DR: 20 Questions a New Scrum Master Should Ask

Twenty questions for you — the new Scrum Master — that fit into a 60 minutes time-box. Start learning how your new Scrum Team is currently delivering the product and get up to speed: from Product Backlog forensics to metrics to team challenges and technical debt. Download a printable template for your convenience.

Start Learning the Ropes as a New Scrum Master

I was recently asked to participate in the Product Backlog refinement of a team that was looking for a new Scrum Master. I was skeptical in the beginning. I had only limited knowledge about the project—a commercial website based on a CMS—, the refinement session was time-boxed to 60 minutes, and I hadn’t met the team members before beyond a very brief “hello.”

So, I prepared a questionnaire comprising team-related topics. I wanted to learn more about and listened to the Scrum Team, refining several work items. When appropriate, I asked one of the prepared questions. Surprisingly, the insights turned out to be much more qualified than I expected. Particularly, I could identify the low-hanging “Scrum fruits” to improve product delivery relatively easily. Remember that as a Scrum Master, the stakeholders will always judge you by whether “your Scrum Team” can deliver a valuable, potentially releasable, “done” Product Increment regularly.

The questionnaire I used as is available as a download for your convenience:

Let us get into the questions for a new professional scrum master training at tryScrum:

How large is your Product Backlog?

I do not believe in Product Backlogs that are larger than what the team can handle in three, maybe four Sprints. If the Product Backlog exceeds this threshold, the Product Owner might be in need for some support.

What is the typical age of a Product Backlog item?

A Product Backlog item that has not been touched in five months is obsolete. Cluttering the Product Backlog with ideas, reminders, or other low-value items increases the noise, thus probably impeding the value delivery of the Scrum Team. (Admittedly, I am a fan of Product Backlog forensics.)

What is your average lead time from an idea being added to the Product Backlog to its delivery?

No one could answer that question in the before-mentioned session. But it is actually one of only a few metrics that can provide some insight on whether Scrum has been successfully adopted by your organization. (Read more: Agile Metrics — The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.)

Does your Product Backlog contain work items none of the current team members is familiar with?

If so, the Product Backlog items in question may no longer be valuable. Consider re-refining or deleting them.

How often are you refining the Product Backlog?

That should be a continuous process. As a new Scrum Master, however, I would love to have a Product Backlog refinement session once a week with the whole team.

On how many Product Backlog items are you working in parallel during Product Backlog refinement?

Ideally, a team should not be working on more work items than it can handle within the next two or three Sprints. Otherwise, the risk of allocating resources on work items that may never make into a Sprint Backlog becomes too high.

How long does the refinement of a typical Product Backlog item take?

The refinement should not be taking more than one to two Sprints. Otherwise, the Product Owner might need some support in preparing ideas properly for the refinement sessions.

How are you creating Product Backlog items? (Is it a joint team effort with the PO, or is the Product Owner writing the work items and the Development Team estimates them?)

There is a tendency to observe that Product Owners become more a kind “technical writer” of Product Backlog items which then get estimated by the team. I suggest, however, to turn Product Backlog item creation into a joint effort of the whole team. Remember Ron Jeffries’ CCC: card, conversation, confirmation?

Where are you discussing Product Backlog items? (Only during refinement sessions or also on Slack or via comments on tickets, for example?)

Every team has its own habits and maybe commenting in Confluence, Jira, Github, or utilizing Slack is an effective means of communication in your organization. As long as this happens before a work item is selected for a Sprint Backlog, this should be fine. Discussing its essentials afterward is a problem, though, as the Sprint Goal might be compromised.

Who is writing acceptance criteria and in what format?

It should be the Product Owner in collaboration with the Development Team following the Definition of “Done,” thus creating a shared understanding of what the team needs to build.

How are you estimating the likely effort of a Product Backlog item?

There are plenty of practices on estimating a work item if your Scrum Team estimates at all. (Think of #noestimates or creating similarly sized work items instead.) The emphasis should be on creating a shared understanding among all team members what shall be created. An estimate is a side-effect, not the primary purpose.

Are you estimating in man-hours or story points?

Estimating in man-hours is better than not estimating at all. However, I prefer story points, particularly if the application in question is burdened with legacy code and/or technical debt. Predictability and stakeholder communications become easier this way as story points have a built-in buffer.

How are you practicing the estimation process, if the team shares different opinions?

Preferably, you should observe the team’s estimation process in real life. But in case you have to ask: is it a typical vote-discuss-revote cycle? Or: when and how do you pick an estimate? (Examples: 50:50 split, e.g. 3*3 and 3*5 – which one do you take? Or a majority split: 2*3 and 4*5. Or the estimations cover a range, e.g. from 2 to 8?) It is a good way to learn more about the team building state, too.

What is a typical distribution of work item sizes in your Sprint Backlog?

This question tries to figure out, where the productivity sweet spot of the team is, based on the Sprint Backlog composition. In my observation, Scrum Teams often work more successfully when a Sprint Backlog comprises one or two larger Product Backlog items, some medium-sized stories, and a few small ones.

Are you re-estimating work items at the end of a Sprint? If so, under which circumstances are you doing so?

That should always be done if a Product Backlog item turns out to be way off its original estimation. Re-estimates make good data-points for Sprint Retrospectives, too.

What was your velocity for the last three Sprints?

A Scrum Team should know its velocity or productivity, how could it otherwise possibly improve?

How many user stories are typically not finished within a Sprint and for what reasons?

If the team is bullish and picked more Product Backlog items than it could probably handle at the beginning of the Sprint, so be it—nothing to worry about if the Development Team meets the Sprint Goal nevertheless. If the Development Team, however, is regularly leaving work items on the board and not meeting Sprint Goals, this should be a major concern for the new Scrum Master. See also: Scrum: The Obsession with Commitment Matching Velocity.

Are you changing Product Backlog items once they become part of a Sprint Backlog? And if so, under what circumstances?

Making work items smaller if the Development Team runs into a problem is certainly not great, but acceptable—if the work item in its reduced form still delivers value and the Sprint Goal is met. Extending it after the Sprint Planning, however, would only be tolerable if the Development Team agrees on the extension, and the Sprint Goal will not be compromised.

How would you consider the level of technical debt?

As a new Scrum Master, you want to know everything about the current level of technical debt and dependencies on other Scrum Teams or external suppliers. These issues are directly responsible for your Scrum Team’s ability to deliver product Increments. (Read more: Technical Debt & Scrum: Who Is Responsible?)

What are the three main challenges the Scrum Team is facing today?

This closing question is by design an open-ended question to get some ideas for the next Sprint Retrospective.

Conclusion

The New Scrum Master and the Scrum Team

What is your preferred technique to get familiar with a new Scrum Team as soon as possible? Where do you start? Please share your experience in the comments. 

Resource: https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/20-questions-new-scrum-masters-should-ask-their-teams-get-speed

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Valuable Coaching Tips for Certified Scrum Master Training

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Stephanie Ockerman provides tips for Scrum Masters while in the coaching stance. Stephanie discusses 6 different tips that you can take start applying immediately. The Scrum Master course is for anyone involved in Improving the software development using the Scrum framework. It is particularly beneficial for those people within an organization accountable for getting the most out of Scrum, including Scrum Masters, Managers and Scrum Team members. In this course, you’ll explore what it takes to MASTER the art of being a Scrum Master. The most exciting part is the practical guidance & Mentoring from Venkatesh Rajamani offers to support you on your own path to greatness.

Know more: https://tryscrum.com/scrum-masters/ 

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52 Challenging Cases for Scrum Practitioners with Professional Scrum Master Training

The Scrum Framework is a lightweight framework to solve complex and adaptive problems with others. Although it looks easy on paper, it’s often much harder to do well in the messiness of the real world. Where do you make trade-offs? How can you model the Scrum values? How can you work empirically in an environment that isn’t suited for it?

To encourage Scrum practitioners to explore these questions during professional scrum master training at tryScrum, we created 52 real-life cases. These cases are inspired by our own experiences and those of the people we frequently work with. Use these cases for your community of Scrum Masters, as conversation starters in and around your Scrum Team, or put your own understanding of Scrum to the test. And no, there is no “right answer” :) The learning is not in knowing the answer, but in jointly deepening your understanding of the Scrum principles and values through reflection, dialogue, and putting new ideas into practice.

    

The deck is provided as a digital download with 52 cases for a small fee. We also have a free version available that includes 10 cases. In this blog post, we offer inspiration for when to use these cases and give suggestions for what Liberating Structures to try as conversation starters.

Example of the case: “What are good metrics?”

When to use the cases?

Finding a good opportunity to use the Scrum cases shouldn’t be too difficult. You can use them for individual reflection, within your Scrum Team, or the wider organization. Some specific examples to use the Scrum cases are:

During Sprint Retrospective. Share the Scrum cases before the Sprint Retrospective with your Scrum Team. Ask everyone to select the cases they think are the most interesting, relevant, or challenging. Identify the top-3 and bring those cases to the Sprint Retrospective to discuss in more detail.

    

For individual reflection. Select a Scrum case, get your own thinking started, and share your thoughts on LinkedIn. Most likely, it will trigger a conversation in which you can explore the case with other Scrum practitioners.

Within your Community of Practice. Many organizations have a Community of Practice in which participants share experiences and give & get help. Organize a session with the most relevant Scrum cases as a topic. Also, you can learn vast knowledge about product owner certification online.

As a conversation starter with management. Share the Scrum cases with management in your organization. Ask them to identify the most challenging cases or the one that raises the most questions. Simply have a one-on-one conversation with a manager about a specific case. Or host a workshop with more managers to discuss the cases.

During a public meetup. Make a specific Scrum case the topic for a public meetup. For example, your local Scrum user group. The wide variety of experiences will offer many different, fresh, and surprising perspectives.

For a job interview. Use the cases for any kind of Scrum related job interview. Prepare a couple of cases, ask the candidate to select the one (s)he considers the most interesting, challenging, or recognizable and simply have a conversation. By discussing the case you’ll get a good sense about the person’s understanding of the Scrum Framework.

Example of the case: “The technical Sprint Review”

How to use the cases?

We purposefully wrote each case in such a way that there is no clear “right” answer. Instead, there are different sides to each case, different arguments to make, and different solutions — some better than others. Just like the real world …

For the best learning experience, use Liberating Structures to structure the conversation. That way, everyone can offer their perspective. You may even find creative solutions to your own challenges!

 

Some examples of Liberating Structures to try are:

Conversation Cafe. We like to use Conversation Cafe to dig into cases like these. It encourages people to listen and understand each other’s perspectives on a profound, shared topic or challenge instead of trying to convince or persuade others to see it your way. Sitting in a circle with a simple set of agreements and a talking object, small groups engage in consecutive rounds of dialogue. Follow-up with 15% Solutions or 1–2–4-ALL to translate learnings from the case to your own team or environment.

1–2–4-ALL. Only doing a 1–2–4-ALL during a session is already a good approach to explore a case. Start with 1 minute of silent self-reflection. Take 2 minutes to generate ideas in pairs, building on ideas from self-reflection. Create groups of four and use 4 minutes to share and develop ideas that you’ve discussed within your pair. Notice similarities and differences. Take 5 minutes to share insights, ideas, and takeaways.

Impromptu Networking. With Impromptu Networking, you can discuss a case within 15 minutes. Invite the participants to stand up and form pairs. Present the case to discuss. Within the pairs, ask people to share their answers to the case. Signal the end of the first round and have people from new pairs. Within the new pairs, ask people to (again) share their answers. But also ask them to pay attention to similarities and differences from their previous conversation. Do one rounder. After the 3 rounds, gather insights and patterns that the participants noticed.

User Experience Fishbowl. The UX Fishbowl is ideally suited for unleashing the local wisdom of groups of any size. If within your team or organization people have experience (successes or failures) with a certain case, invite them to participate as the “inner circle” of the fishbowl. During the UX Fishbowl, the inner circle shares experiences while the outer circles listen. In alternating rounds, the outer circles generate questions they’d like to ask the inner circle. By focusing strongly on listening and asking questions about experiences, you can use UX Fishbowls to create an environment where people can learn together (rather than get solutions imposed on them).

Conversation Cafe in a workshop with Swisscom and KPN iTV. Conversation Cafe is a great Liberating Structure to explore the cases.

Discovery & Action Dialogue. “Discovery & Action Dialogue” (DAD) exists to help groups invent local solutions to the problems they face. Rather than giving up or immediately reaching to “best practices” that worked elsewhere, it helps groups carefully analyze the problem, potential solution, and how everyone can contribute to both. To use “Discovery & Action Dialogue”, select the most challenging case for your team or organization, download this worksheet, and discuss the questions in small groups.

Wicked Questions. Especially because there are no right answers, the Liberating Structure Wicked Questions is ideally suited to discuss the cases. The purpose of Wicked Questions is not to find a single answer, but to create transparency about seemingly paradoxical realities that exist side-by-side. By accepting both realities, you can engage in deeper strategic thinking and explore new possibilities for the “Wicked Cases” at hand.

              

Integrated Autonomy. Most of the challenges we face in the real world don’t have an easy answer. Different solutions can be true or happen at the same time. This is also reflected in the 52 Scrum Master cases where multiple answers might be true. When discussing the cases, it’s tempting to get stuck in either/or-thinking. But what would happen when we start thinking in terms of ‘and’ instead of ‘or’? What if we can find solutions that are helpful to both sides? Integrated Autonomy will help you adopt a more holistic view of the cases. Instead of steering the group in one direction of possible solutions, it actively invites them to uncover solutions that work across the field.

Wicked Questions combined with Discovery and Action Dialogue and Integrated Autonomy. A string we used during the Immersion Workshop in May 2019 in Amsterdam. The visualization is created by Thea Schukken.

Shift & Share. Especially in larger groups, Shift & Share is an ideal structure to discuss one or multiple cases. Prepare 4–6 stations with each a specific case. Ask the group to form small teams and to pick one station. At their station, the teams discuss the case and write feedback on the flip-over. After 10 minutes, the teams move clockwise to the next station. This is repeated until the teams have visited all stations. Discuss the key-takeaways with the group as a whole.

Improve Prototyping. The purpose of Improve Prototyping is to re-enact a challenging scenario (e.g. Scrum case) faced by a group or an individual and work together to devise different behavioral strategies and interventions by acting it out. The twist that this structure brings is that the person who introduced the scenario becomes the ‘director’, while the others become the ‘actors’. This allows the director to playfully experiment with strategies, behaviors, and interventions. As such, Improve Prototyping is ideally suited to explore the Scrum cases!

What, So What, Now What? ‘What, So What, Now What’ is a foundational Liberating Structures that helps by asking us to step back and consider what is going on. It structures our thinking by breaking our experience down into three steps: “What do we notice?”, “So, what does this mean?” and “Now, where do go from here?”. The flow of this Liberating Structure makes it ideally suited to reflect on the Scrum cases. Considering using 1–2–4-ALL to answer the questions. This prevents a group discussion and allows everyone to reflect and contribute.

Example of the case: “The part-time Scrum Master”

Closing words

In this blog post, we offered inspiration for when & how to use the 52 Scrum cases we created for the Scrum community. We hope it will trigger valuable conversations in and around your Scrum Team, improve your understanding of the Scrum Framework, and grow a stronger Scrum community. The 52 cases are available as a digital download for a small fee. We also have a free version available that includes 10 cases. Enjoy using them!

Want to learn more about Scrum and how to become a more effective Scrum Master? Join our on-site Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master II course or the online edition. We guarantee a unique, eye-opening experience that is 100% free of PowerPoint, highly interactive, and serious-but-fun. If you need help, feel free to join our user group ‘The Liberators Network’, which is all about learning and growing, together!

Resource: https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/52-challenging-cases-scrum-practitioners

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Know Business Agility in the 21st Century by Certified Agile Coach Training

Since the Industrial Revolution, increased competition has led businesses to strategies that preserve and expand their market share. More than 100 years ago, Henry Ford revolutionized industrial productivity with his assembly line technology. Over time, countless others have improved, finding ways to adapt and forever change the ' status quo '.

This process of setting standards, eliminating bottlenecks and fine-tuning technologies to be repeated at scale has worked for a long time. The timing was right and the market was not as hungry for innovation as it is today. So we have to learn more about this by certified agile coach training at tryScrum.

Out with the old man

The market has outgrown the one-size-fits-all approach. Consumers have become increasingly aware of their needs and have demanded customized solutions. Once again, companies went back to the drawing board by finding ways to provide some level of customization and ensuring reasonable ROI's for their investors. Of course, this is another pattern: companies adapt to the needs of the market.

This innovative and adaptive cadence has been increasingly frequent - almost frantic. The 'magic formula' - finding patterns, establishing processes, hacking market demands and repeating on a large scale - has not worked the same way anymore.

When we delve into the reasons behind this loss of value, we find that companies are still trying to apply standards in places where there are no standards. The market is changing in ways that make scale repetition almost impossible.

The new definition of business agility

Some companies understood this early and adapted. Some - got it wrong - maintained the status quo and failed, while others are still in the business, but face strong competition from new market players (fintechs, startups, etc.) who are extremely consumer-oriented: listening to all their needs and quickly adapting as they add value to remain relevant.

This is the real meaning of business agility and ICP ACC agile coach certification, not any sophisticated or jargon-laden definitions.  Business agility is the efficient response to market changes. Basis of empiricism, where it is mandatory to be transparent to explore the demands and adapt accordingly.

In the midst of all this, the truth is irrefutable: it is impossible to sustain this level of adaptability without defining a new level of collaboration, where people not only perform tasks and follow the rules, but also maintain a clear vision of their goal and work to contribute to building value for the customer, innovating, collecting  feedback  and applying continuous improvements.

As business leaders in the current scenario, we must ask ourselves: “How can we enable an environment in which people can offer the best, that is, achieve business goals and redefine new ones, while maintaining a clear vision about creating value for consumers? ? ”, The answer varies for each company, but the focus on this resolution will lead you to a more agile business.

Regardless of the business your company does, the improvement will in fact happen with a profound cultural change, in which practice and learning go hand in hand and especially when people are encouraged to develop their skills that will change the game within this process of transformation.

Therefore, having a fruitful, fertile and facilitating environment with motivated and empowered individuals, is what will qualify your organization to be successful, allowing processes and systems to be optimized, more adaptable, intelligent, results-oriented and focused on customers. 

Resource: https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/business-agility-21st-century

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4 Signs You Are Too Modern For Agile Coach Certification Online

In this Scrum Tapas video, Professional Scrum Trainer Ravi Verma uses satire as a way to emphasize how agile can help an organization by discussing ways that some of the organizations that he has been brought into are thinking and acting prior to really understanding what agile truly means. Ravi then takes a more serious view in each area with suggestions of how the Agile and Scrum Values can come into play and enable the organization to decide if this is right for them. International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile) is a community-driven organization that consists of pioneers, experts, and trusted advisors. ICAgile is a certification and accreditation body, not a training company. The ICP-ACC is one of two knowledge-based certifications on the Agile Coaching track. The certification focuses primarily on the mindset, roles, and responsibilities of an Agile Coach. After finishing the certification, the learner will be able to differentiate between and among mentoring, facilitating, professional coaching and teaching, and will also gain the skills needed to create a safe environment for meaningful collaboration and healthy conflict resolution within an agile team.

Know more: https://tryscrum.com/icagile/

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Understanding the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams in Professional Scrum Master Training

It’s been so exciting to hear so much positive feedback and interest in the new Scrum.org Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams and the accompanying Professional Scrum with Kanban class. Creating the class and guide together with Daniel (Vacanti) & Steve (Porter) and then working on getting it to market in a professional way (how else?) with the Scrum.org staff has been a great experience and a major focus area for me in the last couple of months.

As you might imagine, together with the interest come some questions about some choices we made in the design of the guide and the class. Several are emerging as the frequently asked ones. I wanted to tackle a couple of those in this post.

Where are some of the core Kanban practices?

The major one we’re getting comes from people who are experienced Kanban practitioners who notice that how we describe Kanban in the Kanban guide for scrum teams in professional scrum master training is different than the definition they’re familiar with. (Including my Kanban Primer for Scrum Teams blog post for example…) This isn’t an oversight. It’s by design. When we set out to create the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams/approach we had a specific context in mind. That context is teams using Scrum according to the Scrum guide, ideally professionally.

In the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams, we focus on helping in this context. These teams already have a collaborative inspect and adapt experimentation process together with a set of explicit feedback loops they’re using. So, we set out to define the minimal simplest set of Kanban practices that these Scrum teams would need to add in order to achieve steadier, healthier, more sustainable flow (I like to say it is like moving from a sprint that looks like a swamp to one that looks like a river).

After some discussion we decided that these practices actually complement what a professional Scrum team is already doing:

 

·    Visualization of the workflow

 

·    Limiting WIP

 

·    Active management of work items in progress

 

·    Inspecting and adapting their definition of "Workflow"

 

While we agree with the importance of “Improve Collaboratively (Using models and the scientific method” and “Implement feedback loops” we think they are redundant in a professional Scrum context.

Where are some advanced Kanban concepts like Classes of Service, Cost of Delay, Flow Efficiency?

They’re not part of the guide because we don’t consider them part of the “Minimally viable set of practices” a Scrum team should focus on when trying to improve their flow. Having said that, our guide and especially the PSK class provides people with some pointers towards advanced complementary Kanban/flow practices/metrics that at least some can use to continue their learning and improvement journey.

Beyond that - Some of them might be useful in some Scrum contexts, some less so.

Is this an application of the Kanban Method or not?

In my personal view, it is pretty close, as long as you assume professional scrum is your starting point. (see a blog post I wrote back in 2012 about this context). You are starting with the way the team uses Scrum and with respecting their current Scrum process & roles. You are obviously interested in pursuing an incremental evolutionary change to improve your performance and satisfaction with your process beyond what you’re currently achieving with Scrum. There is that argument that limiting your work in process is far from being an evolutionary change but rather a disruptive revolution. My personal take on it is that yes, limiting your work in process and moving to a disciplined pull mode is far from being easy, but it’s still evolutionary compared to changing team structures, roles, process flows. And in any case, this is an argument about the Kanban Method outside of a Scrum context as well. A professional Scrum team should actually have an easier time limiting WIP than most.

Is this ScrumBan?

Depends who you ask. Some people’s definition of ScrumBan is “A way to help teams’ transition from Scrum to Kanban”. This isn’t what we’re talking about here.

Another definition (that I subscribe to) is to see ScrumBan as a way to introduce Lean/Kanban flow into a Scrum context – while keeping the core Scrum process intact. This is pretty similar to our take on the process Scrum teams will typically take to get to an effective combination of Scrum and Kanban.

Finally, a variant on this definition is to see ScrumBan as simply the Scrum+Kanban combination itself, without worrying about your starting point and journey. This, in my view, is indeed what the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams describes.

Why/When should you add Kanban to Scrum?

The last question I want to tackle is one of the first you might want to think about. Essentially the question is “Why bother? Isn’t Scrum great as is?”

Most of the teams I’ve worked with since 2010 or so find Scrum+Kanban to be the ideal mix. I’ve helped Scrum teams achieve an even healthier smoother flow by adding Kanban to their process. I’ve helped Kanban teams accelerate their pace of improvement by adding cadence/rhythm and clarity. I’ve helped teams look beyond their Sprint at the end to end flow all the way from idea to outcomes using a Kanban system. I’ve helped organizations manage the flow across several Scrum teams using a Kanban system.

When a Scrum team wants my opinion on whether adding Kanban would be a good idea I typically ask them to think about how hard it is for them to Sprint and whether they feel like they have good flow during the Sprint. (And like I mentioned above - do they feel like their process is a swamp or a river). It’s as simple as that. I find most Scrum teams struggle to achieve good sustainable healthy flow and Kanban tends to help them with that.

When is Kanban with Scrum a bad idea?

Some Professional Scrum Trainers asked “When would it be a bad idea to introduce Kanban to your Scrum? What are some indicators that you should stop using Kanban as part of your Scrum?” I can’t think of any team where I thought they should stop using Kanban. If they understand Kanban and do it well, there’s really little that can go wrong. The problems start when they don’t understand Kanban or use it as an escape from the challenges of Scrum. Yes, Kanban can help you make your Scrum more sustainable and healthier, but please don’t add Kanban if you’re looking for an escape from the difficulties. Kanban done well adds discipline to your Scrum. Another bad time to introduce Kanban is when the team isn’t looking to improve. If things are working well or more importantly if the team perceives things as working well, they won’t have the energy needed to successfully add Kanban to their process. So make sure you agree on pains/motivations before you move forward to implementing something like Kanban.

Kanban - A way back to Scrum!

To finish with scenarios where introducing Kanban IS a great idea – It pains me every time I see a team/company using Scrum as a new variant of “project management command and control” focusing more on tasks, story points, velocity and burndown than on empiricism leveraging Done Increments of potentially releasable product.

What I’ve noticed is that introducing Kanban ideas helps these teams/companies finally understand what Scrum really is about and shed a lot of the unnecessary and even harmful baggage and instead refocus on the transparency, inspection, and adaptation brought to life by the core Scrum events, roles, and artifacts. Pretty amazing isn’t it?

Interested to learn more about how Kanban and Scrum make each other better together? Join a public Professional Scrum with Kanban class or request a private training for your team.

Resource: https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/understanding-kanban-guide-scrum-teams 

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The Value of Scrum Certification Course Bangalore

What's the value of (Scrum) certifications? Is there any value? Why should you get certified? Is it even necessary?

Discussion

Definitely an interesting topic and when you start "googling" it, you'll stumble upon many yeses, no, yes, no, maybe debates.

For this blog, I'll be focusing on Scrum.org. So, let's take a step back again. What's the value of scrum certification course Bangalore? Is there any value? Why should you get certified?

I would say, it depends on your intentions. If your intention is only to get the Scrum certifications, then I'm sorry, there is no value there. Perhaps you should not even be doing it then Why? Because you're doing it for the wrong reasons!

Then what should be the reason?

But, if you're intrinsically motivated to help your organization become Agile by adopting Scrum, improving the profession of product delivery with Scrum and be an ambassador of change then yes, there is definitely value in getting yourself certified.

Knowing Scrum vs. Understanding Scrum

Every Scrum role, event, and artifact has an important purpose. What does empiricism truly mean? What's the power of bottom-up intelligence through self-organized cross-functional teams? How to use the Scrum Values as a compass? What's validate-learning? What do we mean by value? Know where you can bend the rules without breaking the principles. All of this, Scrum.org has a clear vision when it comes to the usage of Scrum. The fundamental distinction between knowing Scrum and understanding Scrum.

Scrum grew lighter and lighter. Less complete, less perfect in a way. Prescriptions, situational practices and techniques were gradually removed from the official definition of Scrum as it is documented in the Scrum Guide. Scrum turned into the framework that it was always designed to be. - Gunther Verheyen

Conclusion

Experience is not equal to knowledge. Having the knowledge doesn't always mean you understand it.

Scrum is a simple lightweight understandable framework, but extremely difficult to master.

Scrum.org training and exams (especially the advanced ones such as PSM III and PSPO II) consists of the case studies in essay format, where your in-depth understanding of the application and practices of Scrum (Scrum Master, Developer, Product Ownership, Scaling), the values and underlying principles in a variety of complex team and organizational situations are being challenged. In my opinion, a verification of this understanding is valuable!

It's clear that passing the exams doesn't make you an expert yet:

First, work on understanding Scrum. A training could be a great way to kickstart this process.

Once you have the proper understanding, you can start exploring Scrum to gain experience.

When you have the proper understanding and start applying Scrum in real life, you'll experience the challenges and highlights. Don't walk away from challenges, but face them! Eventually, knowledge will come.

So, what were your intentions when you decided to become Scrum certified?

Resource: https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/value-scrum-certifications

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