Start optimising your Scrum (stop filling positions)

Scrum is a minimal, yet sufficient framework for self-governing product eco-systems to create, evolve and maintain complex products. Scrum defines the in and the out of the system: The system works on ideas, suggestions and options that are converted into Product Backlog for reasons of transparency and manageability. The system produces a valuable Increment of product, a release candidate, no…

Sprint Cadence at scale

A system called ‘Scrum’

Scrum is founded on empirical process theory. Scrum implements regular inspections and adaptations in a closed-loop feedback system to deal with unpredictable events, changes and circumstances. The output of the system is used to be compared against new or updated input in order to update the output.

The input to the system of ‘Scrum’ is Product Backlog. The output…

Agile Greece Summit – netweek interview

Yiannis Mavraganis and a crew of Agile enthusiasts organized the first Agile Greece Summit on Friday 18 September 2015 in Athens. It was an honor to be there and give a talk on Nexus and Scaled Professional Scrum. I hope attendants got many ideas and inspiration from the sessions and from sharing problems and insights. I hope it helps the Greek economy in these difficult times.

Preceding…

Scaled Professional Scrum – Nexus (Nederlandstalig)

Op de Scrum.org  website publiceerde ik recent de whitepaper “Scaled Professional Scrum – Rationale of the framework” (PDF).

Hierbij vindt de geïnteresseerde lezer dit document in (een licht aangepaste) Nederlandstalige versie terug als “Scaled Professional Scrum – Whitepaper (Nederlandstalig)”.

Achtergrond:

Scrum is een framework voor complexe productontwikkeling.

“Scaled Scrum” is elke…

Introducing Scaled Professional Scrum – Nexus

Scrum is a framework for complex systems development.

Scaled Scrum is any instance of Scrum involving more than one team creating and sustaining a product or system.

Scaled Professional Scrum is any instance of scaled Scrum that thrives on Scrum’s formal rules and roles, complemented by software development professionalism, and Scrum’s values and principles.

The Scaled Professional Scrum framewor…

Up till now strategies were developed top-down, 1-5 years ahead and where quit static. As agile teams are getting continuously market feedback a strategy could get out of date very fast. But how to overcome this mismatch?

In classic organizations strategies were developed by management together with business development department top-down. Output of this is as quit static strategy, summarized with tools such as a company balanced score card, business model canvas, LEAN Canvas, etc with 3-5 focus topics  for the current year. Based at these focus topics the line organization gets it’s targets and budgets for projects are given and prioritized usually 1-2 times a year. How agile is that?-Especially if there are multiple agile teams this gets another dimension of complexity. But how to overcome all this issues?

"The strategy is developed by people that are to far away from the „problem“ or market and might be out-of-date within weeks"  -- Mirko Kleiner, July 2015

It seems as there is a more agile tactical layer missing between strategy and operational execution?-With some of our customers we’ve solved this with an agile portfolio Board. This group of people (representatives of the main business areas) decides together about the business value of the upcoming new ideas, if the current priorities needs to be changed and if original strategy is still fine. The key thing is to form/update a strategy together, so no more political games for resources in the agile teams.

The way they practices this is agile too. They do continuous improvement by retrospective meetings to improve the process and update the frame conditions.

As the business portfolio kanban board is transparent to every employee everybody is always inline with the current priorities. This gets very important in a scaled agile organization of multiple agile teams. Furthermore by putting all initiatives to a kanban board makes these visible and more easily to identify constraints and work in progress. As the business portfolio board is meeting on a regular bases the progress is getting visible and the strategy becomes alive. Even better, things are getting done and everybody could celebrate joint success!

Scaled Scrum is still Scrum

I spent the last week of April in Karlsruhe, Germany with the wonderful and talented Scrum.org community. During that time, we worked through The Nexus Framework as part of the new Scaled Professional Scrumtraining. It was a come-together of some of the world’s leading agile thinkers, reviewing Scrum.org’s approach to the challenge of “scaling Scrum”. It was a profound experience I am grateful…