What Causes Conflict on a Team?
Change usually creates conflict, but a good ScrumMaster knows what types of conflict to expect and is prepared to handle it with correct conflict responses.
Has Your Company Chained You to Your Desk?
In my 35 years of coaching, many employees discuss managers who complain when a worker leaves their desk, but monitoring snack time and bathroom breaks won't improve productivity.
Dealing with Troublesome Team Members
Whether it’s conflicting personalities or just differing opinions, as a leader, you need to know how to deal with a difficult team member.
Gearing a Team for Maximum Outcomes
Creating a maximum outcome team is every ScrumMaster’s goal, but you must first understand how great teams form and what YOU need to do to create a great team.
Jim's 10 Tips for Scrum Development Teams
With COVID-19 forcing us all to learn about working from home, we're re-publishing our list of "Jim's 10 Tips for Scrum Development Teams," UPDATED for 2020!
What Does it Mean to BE Agile?
With the Agility mindset, it's critical to understand the concept of "being" Agile. Some people want "to do Agile", but you don't DO Agile, you must BE Agile.
5 Ways to At Least DOUBLE Team Performance
Here's 5 steps you can take as a manager or ScrumMaster to help DOUBLE your Development Team's performance (#5 is a shocker; it's easy but SUPER non-intuitive!)
Creating the Skills You Need for Agility
When beginning the transformation to Agile Development, it's hard to know exactly what skills the organization needs to adapt to the new way of working.
Speeding up Your Scrum Teams
Effective Scrum use is more than Sprint Planning, Daily Scrums, and so on. To see a big difference in your team's Sprints, make these workflow changes.
Self-Managing Teams
When I teach or coach people about Scrum, we talk about self-organization, but the importance of self-organizational principles cannot be understated.
Limited Skills, Great Demand
Specialists with a particular skill can get stretched thin! But there's ways to solve this dilemma other than assigning them to ten Scrum teams at once.
Ground Rules for Your Team
Some initial “rules” that everyone agrees to follow will help your team avoid misunderstandings and deliberate misconduct.
DONEness Definitions (DoD)
What's the one thing YOU could do as a Scrum Master to improve your team's reliability, quality, and productivity? Read on and find out!
Don't Manage Your Product, Own It!
If your Scrum teams aren't seeing the quality, value, and productivity improvements you were hoping for, it's possible that they don't understand their roles.
Keep Your Eyes on the Sprint Goal
In this article, we'll discuss how a team bares responsibility for the Sprint and what should be done if they can’t get everything done they committed to.
Avoid Adding Content to a Sprint
One of the worst things we can do to our teams is allow too many changes to the content of the Sprint after the Sprint has been planned.
Never Extend a Sprint
Scrum Sprints provide empiricism, part of the Agile core beliefs, which is why extending a Sprint is never a good idea!
Keep Your Daily Scrum Short
Many Scrum events seem simple, but aren't. The Daily Scrum seems to be the event that causes the most problems for teams.
Keep Your Work In Process Low
The fastest team productivity killer is working on 3+ backlog items at once. You'll end up with a team that's great at starting work, but lousy at finishing it.
Teaching the Scrum Framework
It's critical everyone on a new Scrum Team starts with the same understanding of Scrum. A learning structure called “ShuHaRi” can be related to teaching Scrum.