TL; DR: The vACB21’s Schedule, Session Proposals, Technology, and Workshops
The Agile Camp Berlin 2021 will be a virtual event from May 27-29, 2021.
We will spend three energizing days from 1 pm to 7 pm CEST at a live virtual Barcamp using open space technology principles and practices. The general conference language is English; sessions in other languages are welcome!
Read on and learn about the organization of the virtual Agile Camp Berlin 2021, its preliminary schedule, from your session proposals to session planning to the essential technology to enjoy the best possible experience.
Peer Recruiting is the new hiring: Shortly, all creative, technology-based organizations will need to abandon the command & control structures that served the industrial world of the 20th century so well. Instead, they will reorganize themselves around autonomous teams to deal with the complexity and pace of innovation of the 21st century.
In such an agile world, recruiting will become a team decision, and the “human resources” department’s role will change into a supportive one. Recruiters will need to become servant leaders or facilitators, guiding the peer recruiting process.
The following guide to peer recruiting is based on my experience in participating in recruiting Scrum Team members over the last ten years. This first article will cover the Scrum Master role.
Scrum has proven to be an effective product delivery framework for all sorts of products. However, Scrum is equally well suited to build the wrong product efficiently as its Achilles heel has always been the product discovery part. What product discovery part, you may think now. And this is precisely the point: The Product Owner miraculously identifies what is the best way to proceed as a Scrum Team by managing the Product Backlog. How that is supposed to happen is nowhere described in the Scrum Guide. Consequently, when everyone is for themselves, product discovery anti-patterns emerge.
From sunk costs, HIPPO-ism, my-budget-my-features to self-fulfilling prophecies — learn more about the numerous product discovery anti-patterns that can manifest themselves when you try to fill Scrum’s product discovery void.
TL; DR: How to Make Agile Work in Fast-Growing Startups
For years, I worked in several Berlin-based, fast-growing startups in my capacity as Scrum Master, agile coach, and Product Owner. These are my lessons learned on making ‘agile’ — including Scrum as a framework — work in a fast-growing startup. Also, let me introduce you to the anti-patterns agile startups shall avoid at all costs.
TL; DR: A Forensic Product Backlog Analysis (Part 1)
Garbage in, garbage out: No matter whether your team chose Scrum for the right purpose—solving complex, adaptive problems. No matter whether your Scrum Team’s product quality is top-notch or whether your teammates embrace self-management to the fullest. If your Product Backlog is not up to the job, all of these accomplishments will account for little, as your team will provide less value to its customers than possible. Here is where the forensic Product Backlog analysis steps in, a light-weight, simple practice to help Product Owners and Scrum Masters unearth anti-patterns that led to your low-value Product Backlog.
Learn more on how a piece of paper and a pencil can turn around the perception of your Scrum Team among stakeholders and customers.
Like a job ad for a Scrum Master position, the equivalent for the Product Owner position also reveals excellent insight into an organization’s progress on becoming agile. Yesterday, I analyzed 60-plus randomly selected job ads from the UK, the US, and Germany for that purpose. Learn more about what makes job ads such a treasure trove with the following 23 Product Owner anti-patterns.
