Around the Definition of Ready

Some days ago we had the ret­ro­spec­tive meet­ing and as a kick off for the dis­cus­sion we want­ed to describe the sprint by using one word. Most of my col­leagues described their cur­rent sprint with “Suc­cess­ful” so we agreed to dig deep­er in the top­ic and under­stand what hap­pened, what were the fac­tors that contributed…

Start with self-awareness

Self-aware­­ness and self-man­age­­ment are crit­i­cal skills for any Scrum Mas­ter or Agile Coach. We need an aware­ness of our own emo­tion­al state before we can self-man­age those emo­tions. Lack of self-aware­­ness can lead to us not even know­ing when we are being dom­i­neer­ing, non-col­lab­o­ra­­tive or biased about a top­ic. There­fore, as a Scrum Mas­ter or Agile Coach, that…

Moving motivators 3.0 — what motivates my team mates?

I love using games and inter­ac­tive activ­i­ties when I share Agile and Scrum with peo­ple. It allows me to explain con­cepts in a much more direct, fun and pow­er­ful way than any the­o­ry ses­sion will do. Dur­ing the last ret­ro­spec­tive meet­ing, we’ve used the oppor­tu­ni­ty to engage our­selves in an activ­i­ty that will allow us to get…

What did you learn today?

This is what I’ve asked myself dur­ing one of my run­ning train­ings. I don’t know about the rest of you, but for me, this mod­ern life has become increas­ing­ly com­pli­cat­ed, busy and chaot­ic. I find in my long runs a place where I can tru­ly take a time­out from the dai­ly grind and look within,…

What trust is made of

Have you ever been part of a team in which there was a high lev­el of trust? What kind of team is a high-trust team? At a first glance, for me it’s when I know that oth­ers have my back, when I don’t have to be the hero every day because I know that one…

A better future with solution focused retrospectives

Ret­ro­spec­tive meet­ings are a nat­ur­al fit in any work­ing envi­ron­ment and allow teams to improve prac­tices, han­dle issues and focus atten­tion on how they work and inter­act. It’s less impor­tant what kind of agile method the team is cur­rent­ly using, as long as they have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to reflect at the end of every prod­uct increment…

Influencing the future using the hero’s journey

Our life is what our thoughts make it” – Mar­cus Aure­lius Often, when some sort of event is hap­pen­ing, that even­tu­al­ly also cap­tures every­one’s atten­tion, we don’t man­age to see or to have the whole pic­ture of it. This is main­ly because each one of us have our own per­spec­tive on what hap­pened. The topic…

Scrum and the scaling frameworks

Don’t do it! If you can avoid it, do not use a scal­ing frame­work!” Imag­ine how puz­zled I felt once the train­er kicked off the Scaled Pro­fes­sion­al Scrum course with this sen­tence! My enthu­si­asm dropped imme­di­ate­ly but the curios­i­ty grew even stronger: Why does he mean it like this? He got me! The 2 days-course was great…

A not-so-infamous compromise

Agile is a jour­ney, not a des­ti­na­tion. You prob­a­bly already heard this quote, and hope­ful­ly you spent some moments to reflect on its truth. When start­ing from scratch — as it hap­pens in agile trans­for­ma­tion projects — the first steps of this jour­ney might not be per­fect­ly fit­ted to all agile good prac­tices. But, hey!…