Category Archives: Better Agile

Question: Advice to a beginning ScrumMaster

Question: “I am a beginning ScrumMaster in a tough situation. I have some ideas, but I am unsure what to do, and unsure what to do first. What can you suggest?” Answer: I think this is common. In reality, there is no end to the things a ScrumMaster can do to help the team. So, […]

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Learning from the Toronto Scaling Workshop

Last week we had a Scaling with Agile Workshop in Toronto. More and more I am convinced this scaling workshop is necessary for many people to apply Scrum well, in their business model.  They need to work through how to make it work in their context.  And many of the issues in ‘making it work’ have […]

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Peter Drucker on Knowledge Worker Productivity

In the Winter of 1999, Peter Drucker published an article on “Knowledge Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge.” Here is access to the article. “The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge workers.” He was looking for a 50 times increase […]

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Public Impediments – Charlotte March 2014

We are a strong advocate of a public impediment list.  Why?  There are many reasons, but my top 3 are: Team members know when to tell and when not to tell the ScrumMaster about a new impediment Assuming some attempt at prioritization has been made, the Team knows when to give the SM feedback about […]

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Definition of Ready

Gabriel asked: Hi Joe, Can you recommend few good sources for “Definition of Ready” ? Answer:  I like Jeff Sutherland’s ideas.  In general, but also in this area. Did you see this? http://scrum.jeffsutherland.com/2009/07/ready-dynamic-model-of-scrum.html It includes an article.  Read that. As he taught me, the DOR (or ‘ready, ready criteria’) is flexible team by team.  Each […]

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Public Impediment List – Charleston Mar 2014

I am a big advocate of each team having a public impediment list.  Elsewhere I describe that in more detail, and describe some issues with it.  The key thing: the main purpose of the list is to enable us to fix the ‘best’ impediment faster or sooner.  We don’t just have a list to do […]

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Impediments – Raleigh-Durham Feb 2014

I really want to advocate again that we must make the impediments visible in a public impediment list.  And never stop aggressively attacking them.  If you prefer to call it ‘our list of things to improve on,’ I won’t arrest you. Here’s the list the group made in this class.  They are not on order, […]

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Scaling Workshop Montreal

I am really excited about the Scaling Workshop Dave Muldoon and I just led in Montreal. Dave had mentioned this before, but it struck me how each person’s problems are different. And, even if they are somewhat similar, they need to be prioritized differently. We had some discussion of ScrumPLOP.org. We discussed some patterns for […]

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Question: How do I implement Scrum?

Question from Denise: “My organization has decided to go from Waterfall to Agile SCRUM. I have experience with SCRUM, but very little experience implementing it. I was wondering if anybody has this experience? If so, what were some of the challenges you faced? Lessons learned? Best practices?” Answer: This is a big question. And no […]

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The Retrospective and uncovering the best impediments

I chuckle when I say ‘best’ impediments.  Because, by its nature, an impediment is something that is slowing the team down.  It is ‘bad.’ But, to get better, the Team must focus on the most important things first.  And this is true for impediments.  We must fix the most important impediment first. It is human […]

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