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
Build A Car With Scrum
Scrum accelerates any effort. Yesterday at Agile DC 2013 a group of people who didn't know each other, most of whom probably have never changed the oil in their car and have likely never thought they could do it built a car in three thirty-minute Sprints. And they had...
eduScrum!
Ashram College isn’t really a special school by Dutch standards. It’s a public secondary school with about 1800 student ages 11-18. The special part comes in the Chemistry classes of Willy Wijnands. In those classes the student’s desks aren’t set up in rows, they face...
Scrum Guide 2013 is Here!
— Honored Guest Blogger Ken Schwaber Jeff and I have been working on the next revisions to the Scrum Guide... (Update: it is now posted at scrumguides.org) We first presented and published Scrum in 1995 at an OOPSLA conference in Tampa, Florida. Almost twenty years...
Women Required?
As we all know, the reason Scrum Teams are kept small is to simplify communication pathways. This allows for communication saturation, which is a cornerstone of cooperation and innovation. It is not an overstatement to say that the entire Scrum development process...
Scrum and eXtreme Manufacturing
-- Scrum Inc. Staff On July 24th Scrum Inc. is pairing with Joe Justice from Team WIKISPEED fame to broadcast a Webinar on Xtreme Manufacturing. Joe will also be teaming up with Scrum Inc. later in the week when he co-trains a Scrum Master course on the same subject....
USPS Goes Agile, At Least With Software
Often it's the things you never think about can really hit you. You've seen all of those U.S. Postal Service labelled sacks, trays, boxes, wheeled containers, etc. All of those are ordered from the postal service, some 230,000 orders each year. Large companies and...
The A3 Process: Find Your Scrum Pitfalls
Next week Scrum Inc. is broadcasting its monthly Webinar on some of the more costly pitfalls Teams wander into when implementing Scrum. In preparing slides for the presentation, Scrum Inc.’s Chief Product Owner Alex Brown is having some of the staff work through the...
Update 2018: Agile 2008 – Money For Nothing and Your Change for Free
Update 2018: Download the original Agile 2008 Money for Nothing presentation (updated) The Money for Nothing and Your Change for Free strategy has been widely deployed as the basis of most agile contracts. See the Money for Nothing and Change for Free patterns at...
Outsourcing: Scrum Best Practices
Outsourcing has long been a tool for reducing costs. Scrum changes the economics of outsourcing and helps build a strong business case for keeping development at home. If you can achieve an eighty-fold improvement in velocity with corresponding quality, why would you...
Scrum and Organizational Patterns
In the early days of what we now know as Agile processes, Mike Beedle was influenced by the online description of Scrum, implemented the process in his own company, and led the effort to drive Scrum through the Pattern Languages of Programming Design conferences. This...
Story Points: Why are they better than hours?
Story points give more accurate estimates, they drastically reduce planning time, they more accurately predict release dates, and they help teams improve performance. Hours give worse estimates, introduce large amounts of waste into the system, handicap the Product...
Hackathons: Developing Developers
Next weekend the sponsor AngleHack and two student groups at UCLA are throwing a huge hackathon. LAHacks will bring together students and alumni from Southern California’s premier technical schools in hopes of fostering a more cohesive start-up community. It seems...
Why Hours Don’t Work
There has been a lot of debate within the business world about the merits of time sheets. Some think tracking hours is an important metric while others feel that they are a waste of time. In the Scrum community there is a similar debate: should the team use points or...
Nativity Scene: How Scrum was Born!
IROBOT's Genghis Khan now in the Smithsonian I joined Easel Corporation in 1993 as VP of Object Technology after spending 4 years as President of Object Databases, a startup surrounded by the MIT campus in a building which housed some of the first successful AI...
Scrum & Big Data
I’ve been reading Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger and Kenneth Cukier’s stimulating new book Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think. The premise of the book is, now that civilization has the tools to both collect and analyze huge amounts data,...
Know the Scrum Basics: Get Your Velocity Right
This month, Scrum Inc.’s monthly webinar focuses on fundamentals and correcting bad Scrum habits. While a majority of us feel like we get the basics right, Scrum Inc. surveys and independent polls find that while most Teams understand the basics, many cannot...
Be Critical, Scrum and Feedback
There was an interesting radio piece on American Public Media’s Market Place the other day. Host Kai Ryssdal talked with Stephan J. Dubnar of Freakonomics fame about what the latest academic research on feedback tells us. Here’s how it breaks down: to get people to...
Call for Papers: Agile and Lean Organizations, HICSS 2014
Now in its 47th year, the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) is one of the longest-standing continuously running scientific conferences. This conference brings together researchers in an aloha-friendly atmosphere conducive to free exchange of...
The Serenity of Flow
The Scrum Master class attendees were off and running on a self-organization exercise. The drill was simple: plan, build, and test as many paper airplanes as you can in 3 minutes. I was busily preparing for the next class module when I gradually became aware of what...
Is Your Family Agile?
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...
Everyone Scrum!
By Joel Riddle Scrum is exploding across the industry according to the latest annual State of Agile Survey. Yesterday I talked to Robert Holler, CEO of VersionOne, a maker of agile tools and the sponsor of the survey. He believes the most dramatic number is a 14%...
Work Less, Get More Done!
There was a really interesting Op-Ed in Sunday’s New York Times by Tony Schwartz at The Energy Project. As any good Scrum Master knows, finding a sustainable pace for the team is incredibly important to increasing velocity. At Scrum Inc., we talk about avoiding Muri...
Another Waterfall Disaster: Steve Denning for Forbes
Reconciling Innovation With Control: The Air Force's $1.3 Billion Lesson In Agile Steve Denning, Forbes 11 Dec 2012 What are we to make of the news that the Air Force recently canceled a six-year-old software modernization effort that had consumed $1.3 billion and...
Scrum and Lean: Building Cars
As we prepare for the joint Joe Justice/WikiSpeed Scrum training in Redmond on 4-5 February, I'm reviewing the connection between Scrum and Lean. We continue to meet with key staff of the Lean Enterprise Institute to discuss opportunities to work together. John Shook,...
WIKISPEED, Scrum Inc, and Solutions IQ Team Up
Here at Scrum Inc. we are really excited about this new class we're doing with Joe Justice on taking Scrum beyond just software. Dear Agilistas, Are you enjoying what Scrum Project Management is doing for your software delivery teams? How about sharing some of that...