Scrum Accountability

TL; DR: Scrum Accountability

‘Autonomy without accountability equals anarchy’ summarizes an essential design element of any agile organization. Without these checks and balances in place any aspiration to transform an organization is likely to fail. (Or at best level out at a mechanistic level.) Learn more about how Scrum deals with accountability.

Scrum Accountability: The Boss imposes Scrum upon the Team — Age-of-Product.com
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Liberating Structures for Scrum (3): The Product Backlog

TL; DR: The Liberating Structures Product Backlog Meetup

The fourth Liberating Structures for Scrum meetup addressed the Product Backlog, more precisely the issues with Product Backlogs that subsequently cause Sprint Plannings to fail and Scrum Teams to deliver below their capabilities; as the saying goes: garbage in, garbage out.

Liberating Structures Product Backlog — Hands-on Agile Meetup #14 by Age-of-Product.com
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Liberating Structures 4 Scrum: Lessons from a One-Day Immersive Workshop

TL; DR: The Liberating Structures Immersive Workshop for Scrum

Why running a Liberating Structures immersive workshop? Since the beginning of 2019, the Hands-on Agile meetup in Berlin has been exploring how to apply Liberating Structures to Scrum. Beyond the basics, we have addressed the Sprint Retrospective, the Sprint Planning, the Product Backlog as well as the Daily Scrum.

While the initial meetups went smoothly, the last two meetups felt rushed given that we usually have about two hours. Also, the changing composition of the meetup attendees has become more challenging; less than 10 percent of the approximately 150 participants so far have attended meetups.

So, I thought it might be a worthwhile experiment to aggregate the previous meetups into a one-day immersive workshop on Liberating Structures for Scrum, built around climate change and MegaBrain.io, a struggling startup with little runway left and in desperate need of two successful Sprints. We ran that workshop last week, and this is what we learned.

Liberating Structures 4 Scrum: Lessons from a One-Day Immersive Workshop — Age-of-Product.com
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Survey Results: Scrum Master Problem Dealing

TL;DR: Scrum Master Problem Dealing — The Survey Results

Scrum Master Problem Dealing: We all know it; changing the way we work is extremely difficult. It requires us to find novel solutions to wicked challenges, to deal with cultural baggage (‘the way we do things here’) and to bring along the people needed to make a change successful. And yet, this difficult challenge is a core responsibility of Scrum Masters: How can your organization work effectively with Scrum if it is not considering the entire system?

But how do Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches go about this? What strategies do they use to change the system? Who are their most important allies? And what else can we learn from them?

We teamed up with The Liberators to identify what works in the field. We gathered both quantitative as well as qualitative data from a survey completed by over 200 participants.

Survey Results: Scrum Master Problem Dealing — Age of Product
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