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Scrum

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Scrum is Hard and Disruptive #7 - Change is Required!

Scrum is a commitment to continuous change that can be challenging.
Change must be led from the top, with executive buy-in.
Transformation requires sustained effort, conflict resolution, and may lead to staff turnover.
Sustainable change goes beyond individual leaders and must be embedded within the organization.

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Dev

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Kanban for Multi-Project Management

Kanban is no longer unsuitable for multi-project management with modern Kanban tooling like Teamhood.
Unique features of Teamhood enable flexible Kanban board structure, customizable visual cues, and global reporting.
Flexible Kanban board structure with swimlanes, statuses, and sub-statuses allows easy management and identification of important work.
Customizable visual cues help focus attention where it matters, with options like coloring rows, statuses, and items, and featuring attached images on item cards.
Global reporting enables tracking progress for all projects in one place, including a global workload view to match capacity with project needs.
Teamhood offers a system that supports multi-project management with Kanban.

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Scrum

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What Are the Secrets of a Great Product Owner?

A great product owner leads with vision, validates the value delivered, and encourages experimentation and risk-taking.
They focus on understanding the real user's needs and experiences, leveraging insights to drive product decisions that solve real problems.
Key qualities include strategic thinking, effective communication, resilience and adaptability, and stakeholder engagement.
The journey of a product owner is one of continuous learning and growth, striving to deliver value and drive success.

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Scrum-Master-Toolbox

Anita Kalmane-Boot: Rebuilding Bridges Between an Agile Team and Their Manager

Anita shares a story about a team paralyzed by fear of their own manager
Anita focuses on mediating and rebuilding trust between the team and the manager
She highlights the importance of understanding neurodiversity in Scrum teams
Anita introduces the book 'NeuroTribes' as a resource for Scrum Masters to support their team members

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Scrum

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Image Credit: Scrum

Scrum Master - Are you still relevant?

Scrum is no longer innovative as it was when the Agile Manifesto was established.
Scrum masters are responsible for making their teams effective.
Scrum masters who focus on non-Scrum practices and create boundaries become ineffective.
Most Scrum masters avoid the responsibility of improving product development and engineering practices.
The Scrum master's role is no longer relevant if they are not helping the teams to become effective.
The downward trend in open positions for Scrum masters may be due to the irrelevance of the role.
Scrum masters must acquire technical mastery to have meaningful conversations with developers.
Scrum masters may facilitate product backlog refinement to help product owners maximize value.
Scrum masters may start exploring the realms of technical and business expertise to remain relevant.
Teams need to evolve beyond the mechanics of Scrum and continuously find ways to innovate themselves to create valuable products.

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Medium

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Crafting User Stories That Drive Development: A Personal Guide

In this post, author shares his insights on creating effective user stories that not only guide development but also resonate with users.
Effective user stories serve as a common language between stakeholders, developers, and designers, allowing for iterative development and easy adjustments as needs change.
A classic user story follows a template: As a [type of user], I want [an action] so that [a benefit].
User stories should be clear, concise, specific, and incorporate acceptance criteria.
Crafting effective user stories involves understanding user goals and needs, writing the story, defining acceptance criteria, collaborating with the team, and prioritizing the story.
Avoid common mistakes such as being too vague, focusing on implementation details, and overcomplicating the story.
Tips for enhancing user stories include using the INVEST acronym and leveraging real user feedback.
Effective user stories can have a significant impact on both user satisfaction and business metrics.
The best products are built when the whole team understands and is passionate about the user’s journey.
In conclusion, well-written user stories help to improve communication, ensure a user-centric focus, offer flexibility and prioritize development easily.

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Medium

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Embracing Agile and Scrum: Supercharging Your Product Development

Agile and Scrum are game-changers for product managers navigating the fast-paced world of product development as these methodologies improve team's adaptability, flexibility, and responsiveness to changing customer needs and market conditions.
Traditional project management methods, such as the Waterfall model, are unable to keep up with the diverse demands of modern markets where feedback and technological advancements demand flexibility.
Agile emphasizes four components: customer collaboration, responding to change, individuals, and interactions, and working software over documentation.
Agile can help teams to adapt quickly, improve quality and boost morale.
Scrum, an Agile framework, helps teams to work together to develop, deliver, and sustain complex products by breaking down work into manageable chunks, focusing on collaboration and continuous improvement.
Scrum's key roles are Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development Team.
Scrum artifacts are Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, and Increment.
Scrum events include Sprint, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective.
Scrum helps teams to enhance their flexibility and adaptability, increase collaboration, improve product quality, enhance transparency and visibility.
Transitioning to Agile and Scrum can be challenging; however, starting with training and education, securing executive buy-in, customizing practices to fit the team, fostering a culture of trust, and being patient can help to integrate the framework successfully.
Agile involves continuous planning and adaptation, documentation is valued but should be concise and relevant, and Agile principles can be applied across various industries and teams.
Adopting Agile and Scrum can lead to better products, happier customers, and more successful teams by fostering a mindset that values collaboration, adaptability, and continuous improvement.

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Medium

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Scrum 2024 — or the lack of empathy

Scrum, once focused on user needs and promoting communication and empathy, has morphed into something different in the corporate world.
Developers now use sprints as an excuse to work in isolation, avoiding communication and disregarding the needs of others.
The role of the project manager/product owner is seen as the only one responsible for talking to the customer, leaving engineers disconnected.
The lack of empathy and communication skills among engineers is setting back progress and hindering the true spirit of agility.

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Medium

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Cut the Complexity: A Lean Approach to Product Management

Balancing customer-centricity and market opportunities while ensuring technical feasibility and execution becomes central.
Overcompensating by adding layers to the product management structure leads to confusion, slow decision-making, and vague responsibilities.
Ensuring clarity of roles and avoiding dependency on key individuals promotes scalability and agility.
Simplifying the product management structure and promoting clear communication and alignment between teams enhances agility and innovation.

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Scrum

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Image Credit: Scrum

Scrum is Hard and Disruptive #6 - The Point of Scrum is DONE!

Scrum is a challenging and transformative framework that demands improvement.
The iterative, incremental nature of Scrum puts stress on engineering skills and optimizing ROI.
The 'Definition of Done' drives teams towards excellence in engineering practices.
Scrum's disruptive nature is intentional, pushing teams towards continuous improvement.

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Scrum

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How to make value flow without interruptions in SAFe

Andrew Sales, chief methodologist and SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc. proposed 8 flow fundamentals for improving flow of customer value in SAFe systemically.
Visualizing and limiting work in progress improves team capabilities but does not solve the systemic problems of flow at higher levels.
Addressing bottlenecks can be done by increasing capacity, replanning work or learning new skills, but first move to the right on the Org Topologies map to make teams more specialized.
Minimizing hand-offs and dependencies can be achieved by reorganizing around value at ART or Solution level, or by redefining the system design for cross-functional teams.
Getting fast feedback requires improvements in technical feedback loops, automation, and more frequent customer reviews at ART level or higher.
Working in small batches is essential, and proposed solutions include creating different delivery types or becoming a team of teams that work on issues at the customer level to enable vertical slicing.
Managing queue lengths involves not committing beyond the current Program Increment and focusing on less informal work. Removing team backlogs and letting a team of teams coordinate work can also speed up the system.
Optimizing time in the zone is made possible through optimizing meetings and events, keeping WIP low, and using collaboration patterns such as pairing and mobbing.
Finally, remediation of legacy policies and practices may require systemic thinking using the Org Topologies map.

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Medium

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Achieving Greatness while Avoiding Burnout: My Experience as an Agile Coach

Individuals, teams, and organizations who reach their goals have one trait in common: consistency.
Individuals often create their own doom, working excessively to gain a promotion, release a new product, or shift to a new business result which usually ends with them feeling burnt out.
The Agile Principle of Simplicity, the art of maximizing the amount of work not done, and a principle from queuing theory, Little’s Law can help achieve success.
The story of the tortoise and the hare highlights the importance of being consistent and sustainable rather than just working fast.
Consistency helps in setting a challenging pace which can be indefinitely sustained.
In order to find that consistent pace, we can figure out what needs to be done specifically, look at our energy, and establish a baseline for what the team can deliver.
Little's Law, a mathematical theory helps teams in reducing the number of things in progress at one time to complete each item faster.
Applying consistency helps in realistically reaching our goals. It eliminates guesswork, allows us to manage expectations, and have enough energy to tackle the next goal.
It does not mean there won’t be long days or challenges, but one will have the knowledge about what is actually sustainable to truly achieve success.
Consistency truly is the secret to success. The tortoise wins.

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4 Likes

Medium

398

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Mastering Backlog Refinement: The Key to Agile Team Success

Backlog refinement is an ongoing process in Agile teams.
It fosters shared ownership, clear communication, and collaboration.
The primary purpose is to keep the product backlog healthy and manageable.
Regular refinement sessions bring benefits like improved prioritization and task clarity.

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Scrum-Master-Toolbox

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Anita Kalmane-Boot: When an Agile Team Rejects Scrum, Knowing When to Walk Away

Anita shares her experience with a team that rejected Scrum despite her efforts.
Challenges of remote work during the pandemic worsened the situation.
Anita made the difficult decision to step away from the team.
Importance of seeking external perspectives and approaching situations without judgement.

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9 Likes

Scrum

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Image Credit: Scrum

Myth: The Scrum Master Can’t Remove People From The Team

The Scrum Master is responsible for the Scrum framework and may need to remove people from the team in certain situations.
Prolonged conflicts within the team can harm the empirical process and require the Scrum Master's intervention.
Removing someone from the team is a last resort and should be avoided, but it can help restore trust and improve collaboration.
Agile teams without a Scrum Master need to find alternative ways to handle such situations.

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