Decisions

Why dedicated Full-Time Scrum masters are hard to implement – and what’s the alternative

More and more organizations are implementing agile with Scrum. They define teams and assign Scrum masters to the teams to start working agile and become self-organized. Although agile looks easy, to implement the Scrum master role often turns out to be problematic. Let's discuss what makes it so difficult to work with full-time Scrum masters and explore the alternative of having technical people taking the Scrum master role.

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Getting Retrospective Actions Done

I sometimes hear of teams that have stopped doing retrospectives because they didn't see any improvements. When I talk with them it often turns out that they didn't have good actions coming out of the retrospectives, or that the actions weren't done and kept coming back in the retrospective. No actions leads to no improvement. Here are some suggestions on what you can do to assure that you will have actions from retrospectives that are doable and that those actions get done.

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What if we fail?

People are often afraid to make mistakes. They do things to prevent that something might go wrong and avoid doing things that might fail. And if it does go wrong then they don't talk about it. Is it really bad if once in a while something goes wrong? If something can go wrong, let arrange for it to happen as soon as possible, because then you can quickly learn from it. Create a culture where failure is allowed so that we can all learn from it and find ways to make fewer mistakes!

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Spice up your Agile Retrospectives

In the mini-workshop Experience new exercises to spice up your agile retrospective #RetroValue that I gave at Lean Kanban France teams experienced three different retrospectives exercises. They learned how retrospectives can help them to gain deeper insight in their situation and came up with actions to deal with problems and improve their performance.

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Waarom Agile?

Agile werken kan je helpen om organisatiedoelen te bereiken. Agile tot een doel verheffen werkt meestal niet, het doel is om resultaten te bereiken, niet om agile te worden. Het is belangrijk om goed te weten waarom je de agility van je organisatie wilt vergroten en wat je met een agile werkwijze verwacht te bereiken.

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Agile Value Creation

Organizations want to have insight in the values that Agile can bring to them. They want to know if and how Agile can help to satisfy customer needs more quickly, and what they can do to increase productivity and reduce development and operations costs. It is important to know the value that Agile can deliver and to be able to measure it. At the event Impact and Value of Agile, organized by the Agile Consortium, I presented the State of Affairs in Agile Value creation.

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