Scrum

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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Read more about the article Retrospective Prime Directive in many languages

Retrospective Prime Directive in many languages

The retrospective prime directive is a sentence that is used by facilitators to establish safety in a retrospective meeting. Safety is crucial if you want people to speak up and be open, which is an important precondition to reflect and learn which is what agile retrospectives are all about. Since our book is being translated into many languages we now have translations of this unique and important statement.

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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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Guest blog: Retrospective Doughnut! A fun way to measure team’s response to Retrospectives.

Retrospective Doughnuts can be used to make the adoption rate of retrospectives and the value that they deliver visible. This support organizations in using retrospectives to establish a routine feedback loop leading to continuous improvement. A guest blog post from Mukyul Vyas.

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Read more about the article Agile needs coaching

Agile needs coaching

Agile definitely needs coaching. But the way that people are coached can make a huge difference, it can be done more effectively with part-time coaching. It’s not about the coaches, it’s coaching and the coachees that matters!

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