Needed in 2025
Year: 2024
Increasing the Agility of Biotech Companies by Tuning their Scrum (Wisdom from Michal Epstein)
On 6 & 7 June 2024, I joined the Regional Scrum Gathering in Ghent (in my home country Belgium). Besides delivering the closing keynote about “Moving (your) Scrum Downfield” and having many hallway conversations, I also attended a few sessions by fellow speakers.
Continue reading Increasing the Agility of Biotech Companies by Tuning their Scrum (Wisdom from Michal Epstein)Teams Are More Than Collections of Technical Skills (Wisdom from Uwe Schirmer)
In the summer of 2019 I got in touch with O’Reilly Media about their ambition to expand their “97 Things” series with a book about Scrum. Drained as I was after an engagement as Scrum Enterprise Coach at a large organization it was a great way to re-energize and practice some writing again. As the title of the series suggests, the idea was to publish 97 essays about Scrum, to be provided by people (‘experts’) from around the world. Having no other plans for that time being, I could completely focus on my work as curator: contacting people, collecting ideas for essays, reviewing potential essays, suggesting potential edits, ordering and categorizing the articles, reviewing the manuscript and the cover.
Ultimately, 69 people delivered one or more essays that made it into the book and O’Reilly published the result in May 2020, when I could proudly announce the availability of “97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know”.
Uwe Schirmer was so kind to contribute two essays:
- Thing 5: “Start with the Why of Your Scrum” (Together with Peter Goetz), part of Part I (“Start. Adopt. Repeat.”).
- Thing 67: “Teams Are More Than Collections of Technical Skills”, part of Part VII (“People, All Too Human”).
A Scrum Caretaker’s view on Agility, Scrum and organizational transformation
In August 2024, the 4th edition of my book “Scrum – A Pocket Guide” was published. I created it because I am continuously uncovering better ways of explaining Scrum and want to help people by sharing these ways. Luckily, my publisher, Van Haren Group, agreed that there was value in making my update available (again) for the many friends of Scrum around the globe.
In my announcement I said I was planning to share a few excerpts from the updated version. Find herewith a compilation of my thoughts and observations on Agile, agility, Scrum and organizational transformation from the updated edition of my book.
The challenge is real
The use of lightweight, Agile methods continues to gain traction with Scrum being the most widely adopted framework. The general level of interest in Scrum is already huge and still its use keeps expanding, in and beyond software and (new) product development.
Continue reading A Scrum Caretaker’s view on Agility, Scrum and organizational transformationThe Creation of the PSM II Assessment
In the spring of 2013 I abandoned my position as Principal Consultant at a large international consulting firm to engage in a partnership with Ken Schwaber and his organization Scrum.org, operating under the title “Director of the Professional Scrum series”. Next to and after co-developing the Agility Path framework, from which Evidence-based Management (‘EBMgt’) was derived, and the Nexus framework for Scaled Professional Scrum (‘SPS’), I vividly remember creating the first version of (what became) the PSM II assessment of Scrum.org. In my mind it was in the spring of 2015, but checking out my archives tells me it must have been the spring of 2016. That is most likely an indication of how flawed my memory actually is…
By that time, we observed how many people took the PSM I assessment (‘Professional Scrum Master level I’) and how few people were taking the assessment that was by then known as PSM II (‘Professional Scrum Master level II’). I remember (thereby potentially disregarding how flawed my memories can be) that at that time around 40k individuals held the PSM I credential while no more than a few 100 had achieved the PSM II certification. It felt like we were failing to help people understand Scrum better and demonstrate that knowledge. In practice, mostly people aspiring to become a Professional Scrum Trainer (‘PST’) were actually doing the PSM II assessment (as a mandatory requirement). I remember taking the assessment myself with that ambition in mind. Luckily I wrote a blog note on 8 September 2010 to ‘remember’ (hence: compensate for my flawed memory) that I was #27 worldwide to achieve it.
Continue reading The Creation of the PSM II AssessmentThe fourth Scrum Wave (shows that the journey is far from over)
In August 2024, the 4th edition of my book “Scrum – A Pocket Guide” was published. I created it because I am continuously uncovering better ways of explaining Scrum and want to help people by sharing these ways. Luckily, my publisher, Van Haren Group, agreed that there was value in making my update available (again) for the many friends of Scrum around the globe.
In my announcement I said I was planning to share a few excerpts from the updated version. Find herewith the (slightly edited) excerpt with my thoughts and observations on the past waves of Scrum and the rise of the 4th Scrum Wave.
Continue reading The fourth Scrum Wave (shows that the journey is far from over)
Announcing the availability of the 4th edition of “Scrum – A Pocket Guide”
Uncovering better ways of explaining Scrum
In 2013 I ended up writing a book about Scrum for Van Haren Publishing, a publishing house specialized in IT publications based in the Netherlands. They wanted to add a book about Scrum to their portfolio. By that time, I had been applying Scrum for 10 years and in the two years preceding the actual creation of my book, I had been at the heart of the Scrum storm that was sweeping the Netherlands. And survived.
Writing a book about Scrum was anything but a long-lived hope, ambition or dream. Rather, it was an accidental and unplanned endeavor. At the same time, writing a simple book with as few lines of text as possible actually turned out taking a lot more time and energy than I thought it would take. I went through that effort in the time between ending my position as a Principal Consultant at a large international consulting company and embarking on my partnership journey with Ken Schwaber (Scrum co-creator) as the Director of the Professional Scrum Series at Scrum.org.
Imagine my surprise that more than a decade later the 4th edition of my book is now globally available via diverse channels.
A journey in itself
Continue reading Announcing the availability of the 4th edition of “Scrum – A Pocket Guide”The Origins of the Daily Scrum (Wisdom from Bob Warfield)
In the summer of 2019 I got in touch with O’Reilly Media about their ambition to add a book about Scrum to their “97 Things” series. Drained as I was after an engagement as Scrum Enterprise Coach at a large organization it was a great way to re-energize and practice some writing again. As the title of the series suggests, the idea was to publish 97 essays about Scrum, to be provided by people (‘experts’) from around the world. Having no other plans for that time being, I could completely focus on my work as curator: contacting people, collecting ideas for essays, reviewing potential essays, suggesting potential edits, ordering and categorizing the articles, reviewing the manuscript and the cover.
Ultimately, 69 people delivered one or more essays that made it into the book and O’Reilly published the result in May 2020, when I could proudly announce the availability of “97 Things Every Scrum Practitioner Should Know”.
Among the contributors was James Coplien. I had never spoken to or met James before but I remember him for responding very enthusiastically when I fearfully approached him. Much to my delight, he ended up contributing no less than 5 essays.
Continue reading The Origins of the Daily Scrum (Wisdom from Bob Warfield)The Origins of Scrum Might Not Be What You Think They Are (Wisdom from Rafael Sabbagh)
In the summer of 2019 I got in touch with O’Reilly Media about their ambition to add a book about Scrum to their “97 Things” series. Drained as I was after a mission as Scrum Enterprise Coach at a large organization it was a great way to re-energize and practice some writing again (as I had sacrificed that to fully focus on my customer). Having no other plans for that time being, I could completely focus on my work as curator: contacting people, collecting ideas for essays, reviewing potential essays, suggesting potential edits, ordering and categorizing them, reviewing the manuscript and the cover.
As the title of the series suggests, the idea was to collect 97 essays in the book, to be provided by people from around the world. O’Reilly and I compiled and merged our lists of potential authors and in August 2019 I started contacting them as potential contributors. We did not invite people to contribute because of their titles, ranks, or positions. We invited them because we believed they had valuable insights to share with fellow practitioners.
I ended up contacting 129 people, of which:
- 22 People never responded (although being contacted at least 2 and sometimes even 3 times)
- 38 People eventually said ‘no’ (often after having been contacted a few times).
- 69 People ultimately delivered one or more essays that made it into the book, where:
- 2 People contributed 4 Things.
- 8 People contributed 3 Things.
- 7 People contributed 2 Things.
- 52 People contributed 1 Thing or co-authored a Thing.
I thank every single contributing author and am glad they all ended up with their picture on the cover:
Continue reading The Origins of Scrum Might Not Be What You Think They Are (Wisdom from Rafael Sabbagh)5 Whys to Explore Scrum with an independent Scrum Caretaker
I embarked on my Agile journey in 2003 when we wrapped eXtreme Programming in Scrum. Besides having engaged with many teams and organizations I have also created and facilitated many Scrum workshops and classes about various topics for various audiences since then. In 2011 I obtained my license as a Professional Scrum Trainer for Scrum.org from Ken Schwaber (co-creator of Scrum). From 2013-2016 I maintained the official “Professional Scrum” series of Scrum.org meanwhile training candidate-PSTs and shepherding the global community of Professional Scrum Trainers and coaches. After ending the exclusivity of Scrum.org over my work in 2016, I had to think about a new title. I started calling myself “Scrum Caretaker” because it best represents what it is that I do. As a one-person company, all other titles felt silly too (like CEO, CFO, cleaning person, helpdesk, sales agent, office manager or spreadsheet administrator). I added ‘independent’ to my self-chosen title to emphasize that I am not part of any fixed structure, small nor big. As from the start of the program, my company and business vehicle, Ullizee-Inc, became a member of the Professional Training Network of Scrum.org. Next to teaching Professional Scrum classes, I keep evolving my Scrum Pocket Classes, a series of proprietary half-day workshops based upon my book “Scrum – A Pocket Guide”.
Continue reading 5 Whys to Explore Scrum with an independent Scrum Caretaker
