I keep hearing the need for "Growth Mindset," "Collaboration," "Empathy," etc. while describing the characteristics of agile teams. However, I rarely see someone highlighting the need for the "courage to speak up" in agile teams. Every day, I see that…
Scrum Masters coach, mentor, guide, and enable their teams to develop great products. For a new team in an organization that is also new to Scrum, this can be a challenging and time-consuming job. At first, a Scrum Master may…
Attempting to Improve Productivity In my many years of attempting to improve productivity for my clients and myself, I’ve tried just about everything. Regardless if the post, podcast, or book is promising to do twice the work in half the…
We're entering flu season. No, no, I feel fine. And you won't catch anything from me just by reading this. But flu seasons means some of your teammates are bound to be sick soon. And that means they'll occasionally stay…
Some teams use the sprint review as a time for product owners or key stakeholders to formally approve the product backlog items completed during the sprint. Is this a good idea? In general, a sprint review should not be used…
What I Believe If you want to increase productivity, I believe you need 3 key things. In a previous post, I wrote you needed ritual and motivation. After some reflection, I decided to update that. First, create a system to ensure…
This is a guest post written by Kat Boogard, a writer for Toggl who covers a little bit of everything — but places most of her focus on career, communication, and self-development topics. So, you want to be an amazing…
Story points are a unit of measure for expressing an estimate of the overall effort that will be required to fully implement a product backlog item or any other piece of work. When we estimate with story points, we assign…
Leadership in Agile Organizations On Tuesday October 4th 2016 it is time for our annual Conference on Leadership in an Agile Organization. What can you expect? We’ve got keynotes from Jurgen Appelo, Jaap Peters and Edwin Stoop. Parallel sessions on:…
Achieving system optimisation goals in LeSS Large-Scale Scrum(LeSS) has incorporated deep Systems Thinking ideas in its recommendations. Whether it’s the way Sprint Review is done or the recommendations around team co-ordination, LeSS recommends system optimisation over local. In this short…