TL; DR: Adherence to Legacy Systems, Processes, and Practices
Administrative overreach and micromanagement in Scrum mainly arise from clinging to legacy systems and traditional (management) practices, leading to rigidity and misapplication of Agile principles. The excessive control by stakeholders and the management level stifles creativity and adaptability, disrupting planning and hindering a Scrum team’s growth. Moreover, these categories from the Scrum anti-patterns taxonomy often emphasize an unbalanced focus on short-term gains, neglecting long-term strategy, value creation, and the essential alignment among all stakeholders to succeed in uncertainty.
Learn how these Scrum anti-patterns categories manifest themselves and how they affect value creation for customers and the long-term sustainability of the organization.
This is the first of three articles analyzing the 183 anti-patterns from the upcoming Scrum Anti-Patterns Guide book. The following article will address communication and collaboration issues at the team and organizational levels.
TL; DR: The Minimum Viable Library for Scrum Masters
The Minimum Viable Library is available! Explore a series of carefully curated collections of essential books, newsletters, podcasts, and tools to elevate your agile expertise.
Read on and learn how the recommendations for Scrum Masters cover a wide range of topics, including Scrum, servant leadership, customer value creation, coaching teams, improving team dynamics through Retrospectives, and navigating agile enterprise transformations.
TL; DR: Life Is a Negotiation; Why Would Scrum Be Different?
Life is a negotiation; why would Scrum be different, particularly given its egalitarian nature? As you may recall, no one on a Scrum team can tell anyone else what to do, how to do it, or when to do it. Instead, solving your customers’ problems in a complex environment requires communication skills, empathy, patience, diplomacy, and professionalism. So let’s have a look at some typical agile negotiation scenarios.
TL; DR: ChatGPT 4: A Bargain for Scrum Practitioners?
When OpenAI released its new LLM model GPT-4 last week, I could not resist and signed up for $20 monthly. I wanted to determine whether ChatGPT 4 is superior to its predecessor, which left a good impression in recent months; see my previous articles on Scrum, Agile, and ChatGPT.
I decided to run three comparisons, using the identical prompt to trigger answers from the new GPT-4 and previous GPT-3.5 models. Read on and learn what happened. It was not a foregone conclusion.
TL; DR: The Stoic Scrum Master – Making Your Scrum Work (30)
Can wisdom from the past still be relevant to today’s VUCA-determined world? I started reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations some time ago and found it intriguing; maybe it applies to “Agile?” In other words: is there something like a Stoic Scrum Master?
If I understand Stoicism correctly, it is about living a life of virtue, which comprises wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. (All of those can be further subdivided, see Stoic Ethics.) For whatever reason, I felt reminded of Scrum Values and thought: could it be that the first principles of “agile” haven’t been defined by the Agile Manifesto but by “Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BCE?”
So, I embarked on a fun exercise of asking our beloved LLM to create an essay that applies Stoicism to Scrum, notably the Stoic Scrum Master.
“The Scrum framework is purposefully incomplete, […].” (Source.) This half-sentence is probably one of the more often misinterpreted statements of the Scrum Guide. On the one side, it defines the necessity to enhance Scrum with other practices and tools. On the other side, it is the reason that so many attempts to practice Scrum are simply botched, resulting in ScrumBut versions of epic diversity. So, let’s look at proven Scrum tools and practices enhancing a purposefully incomplete framework without defying or negating its first principles.
Please note that the following Scrum tools and practices list is not complete. Please feel free to add more suggestions by commenting.
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