Working with Scrum Teams

Community Of Trust

The Fibonacci scale was first documented in the Middle Ages, but many agile teams use it today to estimate story points. Here's why it works!

Self-management is critical to succeeding as a Scrum Team because it leads to ownership and empowers the team. And it creates intrinsic motivation, which is such a powerful driver of team effectiveness. However, in reality we find that self-management remains a challenge. Developers in Scrum Teams often do not feel comfortable with self-management, and struggle to take ownership of their work.

The "Confidence Vote" is a SAFe mechanism that is intended to ensure both that the created PI Plan is feasible, and also to ensure that peo...

Overview Fist-to-five is a simple voting tool used to make a decision that requires a group to come to full agreement. This is known as consensus. It can also be used to arrive at a decision where everyone agrees to try out a course of action. This is known as…

In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, applications and software solutions have become an integral part of businesses and individuals' daily lives. Just like any other product, applications have a limited shelf life and technology expiry dates.

Lean-Agile Leaders need to understand an Enterprise’s current software development capitalization practice, as well as how to apply these principles in Agile development. Otherwise, the transformation to Agile may be blocked or, alternately, the company may not be able to correctly account for development expense. —SAFe advice CapEx and OpEx Note: This article is part of Extended SAFe Guidance and represents official SAFe content that cannot be accessed directly from the Big Picture. Capital Expenses (CapEx) and Operating Expenses (OpEx) describeRead more

Aligning CapEx and OpEx funding with Agile principles enables companies to enhance flexibility, innovation, and efficiency, ultimately driving sustainable growth and competitive advantage.

Buffers in classical project management are extra time or costs added to credible estimates in order to secure a strategic reserve and create a more resilient plan or one that is easier to communicate. Project stakeholders tend to need the sense of purpose and security offered by deadlines, mileston

There are many standard ways in Waterfall, Agile or other models to do estimations which require involvement of a whole team. However as a personal practice for getting better at doing rough estimations, certain techniques can be followed..

Michael was asked the other day to describe culture in a way that defined its purpose in terms that went beyond the usual cliché of “It's the way we do things around here”. The question put to Michael was "Can you tell me what's really going on with culture?" It's a great question, as what's really

Effective collaboration in teams is crucial for success, especially in the context of agile methods such as Scrum. Working agreements play a

Why create a team working agreement? A team working agreement provides an agreed upon set of guidelines for a Scrum Team to follow, so everyone understands what is expected as they work together in pursuit of delivering value. A team can use a working agreement to help them work toward self-management.

Learn everything you need to get started with working agreements: the what, the why, best practices, and example templates.

It appears that the performance of the task provides its own intrinsic reward…this drive…may be as basic as the others…. —Daniel Pink [1] Principle #8 – Unlock the Intrinsic Motivation of Knowledge Workers Details Lean-Agile leaders have acknowledged a game-changing truth: attempting to ‘manage’ knowledge workers with traditional task management is counterproductive. Management visionary Peter Drucker was one of the first to point this out: “That [knowledge workers] know more about their job than anybody else in the organization isRead more

According to the Scrum Guide, Scrum Teams are “self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.”It seems straightforward. And yet, this simple phrase is one of the most commonly misunderstood in the Scrum Guide. Self-managing doesn’t mean that the Scrum Team — or the Scrum Master — is all-powerful. (Sorry, not sorry!) It means that the organization gives the Scrum Team the mandate to deliver value according to the product vision and goal within a set of guardrails.

A self-managed team is responsible for organizing and managing its work without a traditional hierarchical structure.

Velocity is a popular tool that many Scrum Teams use to size and forecast work. But so many organizations equate "velocity" to team "performance", and that is not what it's for.

A discussion of where KPIs fall short in estimating value of a product for the user, and how a new metric, Key Value Indicators, or KVI, can fill in the gaps.

The Lean-Agile Leadership competency describes how Lean-Agile Leaders drive and sustain organizational change and operational excellence by empowering individuals and teams to reach their highest potential. They do this through leading by example, learning and modeling SAFe’s Lean-Agile mindset, values, principles, and practices, and leading the change to a new way of working.

In today’s fast-paced and constantly changing business world, effective teamwork is essential for success. Teams are responsible for…

Nurture your team to high performance with Tuckman’s Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, and Adjourning (Mourning) model.

The Toyota Kata Website

Building (and hiring) a great team takes time and effort. Patrick Lencioni’s “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” became a staple reading in an Agile community these days.

The amount of time you lose to distractions at work is much longer than you think. Learn how to refocus, regain lost time, and increase your productivity!

Insights from Google's new study could forever change how teams are assembled.

Every Ukrainian has their own story of how they met the full-scale war and how it changed them. As for me, on February 23 at 4 pm I was at…

A simple model to better understand why and when something is valuable to your team and its stakeholders