TL;DR: Webinar Sprint Review Anti-Patterns
The ninth Hands-on Agile webinar sprint review anti-patterns addresses twelve anti-patterns of the sprint review—from death by PowerPoint to side-gigs to none of the stakeholders cares to attend.
Survey: How Do You Solve Impediments Outside Your Team’s Control? (Anonymous.)
TL;DR: How to Solve Impediments (Survey)
No matter if you are a Scrum Master or an agile coach, sooner or later, you will run into a problem that’s outside of the team’s sphere of control. The question is: How do you solve impediments of this kind? What approach has worked best for you in the past?
Barry Overeem, Christiaan Verwijs and I teamed up to provide some transparency in this matter and share your best techniques and approach with the agile community. All it takes to contribute is five minutes of your time to participate in the anonymous ‘how to solve impediments’ survey. (We expect results to be available in November.)
The Meta-Retrospective — How To Get Customers and Stakeholders Onboard
TL;DR: The Meta-Retrospective
A meta-retrospective is an excellent exercise to foster collaboration within the extended team, create a shared understanding of the big picture, and immediately create valuable action-items. It comprises of the team members of one or several product teams—or representative from those—and stakeholders. Participants from the stakeholder side are people from the business as well as customers.
Meta-retrospectives are useful both as a regular event, say once a quarter, or after achieving a particular milestone, for example, a specific release of the product. Read more on how to organize such a meta-retrospective.
Webinar #2: Agile Maturity and Agility Assessment
TL;DR: Webinar Agile Maturity and Agility Assessment
Is agile maturity a fad or a trend? How can an organization make an informed decision on what level of agility might become achievable before starting a transition?
Our second webinar addressed the question of agile maturity and detailed the survey results what indicates an agile organization. Moreover, we introduced the ‘Agility Assessment Framework’ open source project which aims to provide agile practitioners with the tools needed to answer these questions.
Hands-on Agile 2019 Conference — Survey Results Are in: It’s Berlin by 2:1
Hands-on Agile 2019 Conference
Almost three years into building this community, I believe we might now have achieved the critical mass to organize a great conference — the Hands-on Agile 2019 Conference. Currently, I would target the second quarter of 2019 for the first Hands-on Agile conference. To reduce complexity, I would plan for Berlin as its location although London might be an alternative.
Update 2018-08-12: The survey results are in — it is Berlin, see below.
Accelerate: Building and Scaling High-Performing Technology Organizations [Review]
TL;DR: Accelerate
Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim latest book Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations [advertising] describes the factors that drive high-performing tech organizations, derived from the data that has been aggregated with the State of DevOps Report since 2014.
“Accelerate” [advertising] is a must-read book for anyone involved in building agile organizations and teams. It lays out a path to success based on a statistical analysis of data. It also puts an end to the popular narrative that ’becoming agile’ is somehow a fuzzy process. The data shows that there are patterns at all levels that successful agile organizations share.
In other words: becoming agile can be data-driven. (A hypothesis that I shared in How to Measure Agility of Organizations and Teams—The Results of the Agile Maturity Survey earlier.)
Scrum Master Duties, Serving a Single Team (Survey Results)
TL;DR: Scrum Master Duties, Serving a Single Team
Scrum Master Duties: supposedly, a great scrum master serves only one scrum team — that's at least a popular narrative in the scrum community. Nevertheless, there is also a loud voice that doubts that approach: what would you do the whole day - with a single team? Aren't they supposed to become self-organizing over time? And if so, does the scrum then need a scrum master 24/7?
As I worked for years as a product owner on scrum teams without a dedicated scrum master-which was working well-I was curious to learn more about that question, too. Hence I ran a survey in late June and early July 2018, the results of which are presented here.
In total, 261 scrum masters participated in this non-representative survey in the two weeks before July 5th, 2018. 19 participants chose not to provide their consent to Google processing and to store their answers. Hence their contributions were deleted, resulting in a sample size of 242 responses.
Hiring: 38+9 Scrum Master Interview Questions to Avoid Agile Imposters
Scrum Master Hiring: Demand Creates Supply and the Job Market for Agile Practitioners is No Exception
Maybe, “Agile” in general is a management fad and not trend at the moment. But what we can say for sure is that Scrum has become very popular for software development purposes. A seasoned Scrum master is nowadays in high demand. And that demand causes the market-entry of new professionals from other project management branches, probably believing that reading one or two Scrum books will be sufficient.
If you are looking to fill a position for a Scrum master (or agile coach) in your organization, you may find the following 38+9 interview questions useful to identify the right candidate. They are derived from my ten years of practical experience with XP as well as Scrum, serving both as Product owner and Scrum master as well as interviewing dozens of Scrum master candidates on behalf of my clients.
Scrum Stakeholder Anti-Patterns
TL; DR: Scrum Stakeholder Anti-Patterns
Learn how individual incentives and outdated organizational structures — fostering personal agendas and local optimization efforts — manifest themselves in scrum stakeholder anti-patterns which easily can impede any agile transition.
Agile Failure Patterns in Organizations 2.0
TL;DR: Agile Failure Patterns — Why Agile is Simple and Complex at the Same Time
Agile failure seems to be increasingly more prominent nowadays despite all the efforts undertaken by numerous organization embarking on their journeys to become agile.
The funny thing is: Who would disagree that the four core principles of the Agile Manifesto —
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following a plan
— are derived from applying common sense to a challenging problem? Moreover, that the application of those principles might be suited to fix numerous organizational dysfunctions and reduce an error-prone and complex social setting to maybe just a complicated one?
Scrum Master Anti-Patterns — 20 Signs Your Scrum Master Needs Help
TL;DR: Scrum Master Anti-Patterns
Scrum Master Anti-Patterns: The reasons why scrum masters violate the spirit of the Scrum Guide are multi-faceted. They run from ill-suited personal traits and the pursuit of individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.
Read on and learn in this final post on scrum anti-patterns how you can identify if your scrum master needs support from the team to up his or her agile game.
28 Product Backlog and Refinement Anti-Patterns
TL;DR: 28 Product Backlog and Refinement Anti-Patterns
Scrum is a practical framework to build products, provided you identify in advance what to build. But even after a successful product discovery phase, you may struggle to make the right thing in the right way if your product backlog is not up to the job. Garbage in, garbage out – as the saying goes. The following article points at 28 of the most common product backlog anti-patterns – including the product backlog refinement process – that limit your Scrum team’s success.
Hiring: 42 Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions to Avoid Agile Imposters
TL;DR: 42 Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions That Will Benefit Your Organization
This second publication in the Hands-on Agile Fieldnotes series provides 42 questions and answers for the Scrum Product Owner interview.
Co-authored with Andreea Tomoiaga, 42 Scrum Product Owner Interview Questions to Avoid Hiring Agile Imposters represents the most important learnings of our more than 20 years combined hands-on experience with Kanban, Scrum, XP, and several product discovery frameworks. We have worked as Scrum Product Owners, Scrum Masters, agile coaches, and developers in agile teams and organizations of all sizes and levels of maturity.
We have each participated in interviewing dozens of Scrum Product Owner candidates on behalf of our clients or employers. The questions and answers herein are what we have learned.
Agile Metrics — The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
TL;DR: Agile Metrics
Suitable agile metrics reflect either a team’s progress in becoming agile or your organization’s progress in becoming a learning organization.
At the team level, qualitative agile metrics typically work better than quantitative metrics. At the organizational level, this is reversed: quantitative agile metrics provide better insights than qualitative ones.
Food for Agile Thought #164: Servant Leaders, Scaling Agile and Product Organizations, Minimum Lovable Products
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #164—shared with 19,635 peers—focuses on successful behavioral patterns of servant leaders, the reasons why change at an organizational level is so hard, and how to cherry-pick existing agile scaling frameworks from SAFe® to Nexus and LeSS.
We also learn from Trello’s example how to scale a product organization, what path Buffer chose to create their new minimum lovable analytics tool, and that distributed teams do not stand in the way of building excellent products.
Lastly, we follow Dave West when he outlines the five most pressing challenges of agile transformations and how to deal with them.
Have a great week!
Food for Agile Thought #163: Building Agile Teams, Curiosity and Discovery, Squandering Brilliant Ideas
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #163—shared with 19,504 peers—focuses on building agile teams. We learn that a group of folks being in the same place at the same time does not constitute a team, that throwing money at the challenge cannot buy success. It seems, though, that successful team coaching is a long and windy road.
We also come back to another favorite topic—how to avoid building the wrong product—and understand that continuous product discovery based on hypotheses and experiments is essential for product success.
Lastly, we secretly enjoy some schadenfreude when diving into the reasons why big organizations squander brilliant ideas.
Have a great week!
Food for Agile Thought #162: Organizational Agility, Enterprise Slowness, Product Strategy, State of DevOps Report 2018
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #162—shared with 19,373 peers—focuses on the problem of imposing agile practices top-down to achieve organizational agility, why enterprise organizations are so nerve-wreckingly slow, and why commitment cultures seem to produce better outcomes.
We then dive deep into product strategy. From how to be more strategic, to establishing an effective process, to running bets from a portfolio of innovation options.
Lastly, we applaud Puppet for providing the community with the 2018 edition of the State of DevOps report, now including a maturity model.
Have a great week!
Food for Agile Thought #161: Toyota Scrum, Lean vs. Agile vs. Design Thinking, XP Revisited, Sunk Cost Fallacy
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #161—shared with 19,269 peers—covers Toyota Scrum, a combination of the Toyota Production System and Scrum, we learn that Lean, Agile and Design Thinking absolutely make good partners, and how Ron Jeffries might express XP practices nowadays.
We then borrow leadership practices from winning sports teams for Scrum teams, we take five tips to heart to prevent product failures, and we gain new insight on how to de-risk the innovation process.
Lastly, we dive into a notorious decision making trap: the sunk cost fallacy.
Have a great week!
Webinar #8: Scrum Master Anti-Patterns — October 16, 2018
TL;DR: Webinar Scrum Master Anti-Patterns
The eighth Hands-on Agile webinar Scrum Master Anti-Patterns addresses twelve anti-patterns of your Scrum Master—from ill-suited personal traits and the pursuit of individual agendas to frustration with the team itself.
