I thought this question from a recent Professional Scrum Master delegate highlighted some common issues facing Scrum teams. I’ve reproduced the question with their permission, and answered below.
Hi Duncan,
I took …

Suggestions from Ed Scotcher
“Invisible Women” – Caroline Criado Cortez
A book all about the gender data gap. The default human has become male – and many things are designed around men, …

For many years when teaching these concepts, we have compared this practice to the Surgical Safety Checklist advocated by the World Health Organisation. This was established as a sanity check …

Am I a bad interviewer?
Despite my attempts and desire to be a good and fair interviewer no doubt my judgement can be clouded by bias. Several different cognitive biases …

 
“The Product Owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product resulting from the work of the Development Team.”
The intent behind agile frameworks such as Scrum is …

Visualise an agile programme
The approach I am advocating is suited to when you want to look at a single agile programme. It allows the programme to be managed in …

When they told the whole story of how they got off track, it seemed totally avoidable. If anything, it was simply down to a lack of preparation. They were so …

Are you part of the Scrum vs Kanban debate? Now, as an attendee of these conferences and an enthusiastic participant in discussions on pull systems; time boxes; empirical process control; …

1. Your developers define the order the work is done irrespective of value
a) TRUE
b) FALSE
2. You’re not sure what’s in the backlog because your BA did all …

Claim some of the points? I generally don’t encourage teams to try and take partial credit for unfinished work. If it’s done in the current Sprint, then claim the points …

Rather than dictate to the teams the PLT agreed they wanted to develop a culture of ownership.  The hypothesis was: if the teams have some stake in defining the work …

Agile objectives are best if they describe the intention of the functionality of the system rather than prescribing a specific technical approach. For example, rather than the objective describing the …