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The Team is in the middle of a Sprint, but the Product Owner has discovered unplanned work and interrupts their flow mid-Sprint to deal with it because it’s now “high-priority.” How should a ScrumMaster deal with this or similar Scrum Anti-Patterns? An anti-pattern is a common ...continue reading

What does it take to be a Great ScrumMaster? When I was in my early years as a Scrum Trainer, circa 2011, it was noticeable to me that while there was a plethora of content out there explaining the role of the ScrumMaster and what qualities you want in a person for the role, ...continue reading

There are many ways to redefine a work environment to support greater creativity that have been discovered through experience, experimentation, and accident. At the same time, modern neuroscience suggests guidelines for deliberately designing conditions to enhance creativity, ...continue reading

No, of course not. So when should your Team start and end Sprints? The usual rules of Scrum apply – ask the Team. Run an experiment. There is an instinctive tendency to want to wrap up things at the end of the work week so we can unplug our brains for the weekend, and start ...continue reading

Definition of “Done” The ScrumGuide says that: “When a Product Backlog item or an Increment is described as ‘Done’, everyone must understand what ‘Done’ means.” I can promise you, that sentence and the paragraphs that follow are the most poorly understood aspects of the ...continue reading

As most Canadians can tell you, the rollout of the Canadian Government’s Phoenix payroll modernization system has gone disastrously badly. At one stage, there were over 80,000 civil servants who had payment problems, with some even losing their houses over the mess. I’ve seen ...continue reading

(Continued from Agile Change or Adoption Always Starts with Why: Part 1, Part 2) Sense Your Current Culture To understand the culture you’re attempting to change in your organization, you need to measure (or sense) the current state and then map that state to a model. The model ...continue reading

(Continued from Agile Change or Adoption Always Starts with Why) If you’re going to become an Agile Organization, and you understand that it has to be a collaborative discussion and effort rather than an executive decree, here are the key ingredients to move forward with that ...continue reading

Daily Scrum? It’s a waste of time and interrupts my work. Daily Scrum is just a chance for the ScrumMaster to show up and micromanage. Daily Scrum is for reporting status, but I could do that in an email. Have you heard these complaints before? I have. But I got a new version of ...continue reading

Some interesting reading for the Agile community, including Don’t Give Partial Credit, by Andrew Fuqua, and We Don’t Hire Product Owners Here, by Rich Mironov. ...continue reading