Category Archives: leadership

Managers: How to have break-out, outstanding Teams. #1

The Agile community is not generating enough high-performing teams. Managers: I put this to you.  We could put it to the SMs, the POs, the Scrum Teams, the CEO, etc. So, why so few break-out Teams? Well, to be honest, I do not care much why we are NOT having this success — what I […]

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Managers: Scrum can help you now!

Here is the situation for many managers: We need more productivity now! There is TONS of opportunity, but we can’t get to it. We cannot hire people (fast enough).  We want to retain people more. Our staff want a nicer situation (or they will…) Again, this means that we need to use the staff we […]

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Scrum and Leadership

Many of the readers know Scrum. Scrum is a bare framework, but it does talk a bit about leadership. Some examples regarding leadership: 1. The Product Owner (PO) is the final prioritizer of the Product Backlog By this I mean that anyone (Team member or business stakeholder or customer, etc) can have an opinion, and […]

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Servant Leadership – one quote

There are two main things to say about a ScrumMaster. The SM is a servant leader. The SM is the impediment-remover-in-chief. With this latter one, we are saying that the SM is not the only one who can remove impediments (the rest of the Team, Managers, people outside the company could all help do that).  […]

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Emergent Leadership

In Scrum, the whole team is supposed to self-organize. By “whole team” we mean all seven people, the Product Owner, the Scrum Master and the “Doers.” They always self-organize — well, we can’t say they always do it successfully. Occasionally they do not self-organize well, but they did self-organize, kind of, given the conditions they […]

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HBR on Agile! May Issue.

The Harvard Business Review has three new resources on Agile now. The original classic article is “The New New Product Development Game” by Takeuchi and Nonaka. The first of three new resources is here. This is by Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland and Hirotaka Takeuchi. Rigby is with Bain, Sutherland is the co-creator of Scrum […]

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Scrum makes work a Game.

You know, of course, that Scrum is named for the Scrum formation in rugby. Generally, Takeuchi and Nonaka were inspired by the ‘rugby’ they saw in several great companies and how they created new product innovation. Sutherland and Schwaber read that article in HBR titled “The New New Product Development Game.” That was a key […]

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Management Scrum Team – Part 4

This is the last of 4 parts. See here for the first part. Links to all four parts are there, or search to the right. __________________________________ Retrospective. Again, telling the truth here can be difficult. The whole MST comes to this meeting at the end of every Sprint. For a two-week Sprint, maybe two hours. […]

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Management Scrum Team – Part 3

This is the 3rd of 4 parts. Part 1 starts things. ________________________________ Now we come to a harder meeting. The Sprint Review. It is hard because no one in this team is used to showing anything completed in two weeks. They are often used to showing Powerpoints. Vaporware. “Thoughts.” With knowledge workers or managers, when […]

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Management Scrum Team – Part 2

Part 2.  (See here for Part 1.) Now, the work of the Sprint needs to be defined in small ‘stories.’ To me, for two weeks, eight stories for a team of seven is about small enough. Team. Did I mention that this is and should be a cross-functional and multi-functional team? The ‘people’ within the […]

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