Increasing Revenue in the Enterprise
Our scrum leadership classes and courses are directed at leaders looking to leverage scrum to drive revenue across their business unit or enterprise. If you’re not a member, visit our pricing and plans page for more detail.
Scrum at Scale Part 1
Alex Brown and Jeff Sutherland present Scrum at Scale Part I – an object-oriented model for scaling Scrum across the business. The modular approach allows for the overall system to work together even if individual modules aren’t agile. Visit the full course page.
Disruptive Leadership
Jeff Sutherland, Scrum Inc’s CEO and co-Creator of Scrum, talks about disruptive leadership and the inspiration for his book The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time at TEDx in Aix en Provence, France.
All Scrum Leadership Topics
Sprint Planning
Sprint Planning Sprint Planning opens each Sprint. The Product Owner discusses the Sprint Goal with the Team and the Scrum Master. They then collaborate to reach a mutual understanding of the Sprint Goal and the work needed to achieve it. This resulting plan gets...
Sprint Backlog
Sprint Backlog The Sprint Backlog is an ordered list of Product Backlog Items or Increments, preferably User or Job Stories, that will achieve the Sprint Goal and that the Team believes it can complete during the coming Sprint. These items are pulled from the top of...
Product Backlog Refinement
Product Backlog Refinement Because requirements in Scrum are only loosely defined, they need to revisited and clearly defined before they come into the Sprint. This is done during the current sprint in a ceremony called Product Backlog Refinement. Estimated time for...
Sprint Review
Sprint Review The Sprint Review takes place at the end of the Sprint and is designed to gather actionable feedback on what the Team has completed. This ceremony, also known as the "Demo", is an exciting opportunity for the team to showcase its work and to inspect the...
Sprint Retrospective
Sprint Retrospective The Sprint Retrospective, the last ceremony in the Sprint, takes place after the Sprint Review and before the next Sprint Planning. The meeting should be time-boxed to no more than an hour per week of Sprint length. The Scrum Master facilitates...
Yet Another $163B Waterfall Disaster
The F-35 Is Worse Than HealthCare.gov Vocative.com - Eric Markowitz, 25 Mar 2014 The $400 billion jet project is the most expensive weapon the Pentagon has ever purchased. It's also seven years behind schedule and $163 billion over budget ... And here’s the kicker:...
Potentially Shippable Product Increment
Increment or Potentially Shippable Product An Increment (sometimes referred to as a 'Potentially Shippable Product') is the value delivered for the customer via the Product Backlog Items completed during a Sprint. Each Increment should interface seamlessly with all...
Happiness Metric – The Wave of the Future
The Happiness Online Course archive is available. ... any investor should be able to measure its return, and now a group of U.K. researchers say they've provided the first scientifically-controlled evidence of the link between human happiness and productivity: Happier...
Six Signs your Team’s Acceleration is Too Good to be True
Let me say right from the beginning that I am a huge fan of tracking velocity in Scrum…it is an amazingly powerful concept. The ability to measure team output from sprint to sprint allows a team to systematically experiment with different process improvements and...
Agile Progamming for Families
New York Times columnist and author Bruce Feiler has just published a new book titled: The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More. The secret it turns out is applying agile development to...
Agile Leadership Dashboards: Post 1
I am having lots of conversations these days about executive dashboards for Scrum…what does a leadership team really need to know in order to do their job well, and how can teams provide that information without wasting valuable of time preparing reports? Within...
How Waterfall Led Healthcare.gov Off a Cliff
....And no one noticed until it was too late. Steven Brill's recent cover story in Time about how a handful of Silicon Valley engineers and experts resurrected HealthCare.gov from technical and political disaster should be a warning to politicians and policy experts...
Kickstart an XM Class in Seattle
Scrum Inc. in collaboration with Joe Justice and Team WIKISPEED are Kickstarting a hands-on workshop teaching the basics of Scrum and eXtreme Manufacturing (XM) in which participants will build a car over the course of two days. XM is the newest Agile framework that...
Call for Papers – HICSS 48
HICSS is one of the top conferences in paper citation index rankings. This means papers will be seen and used by researchers worldwide more than papers from other conferences. All HICSS papers are published in the IEEE Digital Library and are FREE to download, so...
Guidance on Agile Acquisition in DOD
Just got a heads up from Will Hayes who took one of our regular Product Owner training courses a few weeks ago. He works at the Software Engineering Institute at CMU and is the lead author of a technical note that gives guidance to acquisition professionals at the...
Systematic CMMI 5 Fixed Price Contracts After 7 Years of Scrum
In 2006, I trained the first 30 Scrum Masters at Systematic in Aarhus, Denmark. As a CMMI Level 5 organization, they wanted to go lean by testing Scrum as a process improvement. Within six months Scrum cut project costs in half and reduced defects by 40% plus or minus...
War and Organizational Change
In yet another odd intersection of the two worlds I've worked in, covering war and Agile transformation, I recently came across the Michael Horowitz book, The Diffusion of Military Power (via Tom Ricks’ excellent blog at Foreign Policy The Best Defense). Horowitz...
#idefineagile Winner
Agility, by its very nature, is hard to pin down. In many ways it shouldn’t be codified and corralled by a restrictive and reductive definition. Agile is about adaptation to a changing landscape, so really the best description is laid out in the values and principles...
Can You Define Agility?
Most years, just after the first of January, I fly to Hawaii and while escaping the New England winter is a bonus, my real reason is to attend the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS.) The conference is pretty broad, but one of the tracks...
Update: DoD Goes Agile
Update November 2013: SEI has posted a report analysing the legal documents that require Department of Defense to use agile practices. Defense contractors that Scrum Inc. is working with propose Scrum for most new projects. See also DoD CIO comments on agile...
Give Thanks for Scrum 2013
Every year just before Thanksgiving Agile Boston hosts Give Thanks for Scrum. It is the only time that the two co-creators of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, speak together, and answer questions. Jeff gave the latest iteration of his talk, Scrum: The Future...
Pioneering Multitasking Researcher Has Died
One of the things we emphasize in Scrum is the toll that multi-tasking can take on productivity. Study after study shows switching from one project to another in quick succession can seriously hurt your velocity. In many companies teams are often assigned more than...
Jeff Sutherland weighs in on HealthCare.gov launch
Hear what Jeff has to say about the HealthCare.gov launch on NPR's All Things Considered. From the NPR website: "The federal government's beleaguered health care exchange site, HealthCare.gov, shares little in common with the e-commerce sites consumers use every...
When is an Engineer Worth $10M a Year?
Salesforce.com Agile Transformation - Agile 2007 Conference from Steve Greene Chris Fry just got $10M in stock options as Twitter prepares for public stock offering. He previously drove an all-at-once transformation of SalesForce.com to Scrum which helped make it the...
What the Heck is Business Value Anyways?
If you use Scrum, you probably hear the term “business value” tossed around a lot. At Scrum Inc., we get asked about it all the time. Here are some of the more common questions: “Business value seems so vague, what does it mean exactly?” “Does lowering costs have more...
6 Agile Ways To Increase Employee Engagement
Organizations who utilize Agile ways of working experience a 20-30% improvement in employee engagement. Engage, Equip & Empower your employees.
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