The First Steps to Take to Become a Scrum Master
Scrum Master job is a hot topic these days. More and more companies are looking for a Scrum Master. Not just any Scrum Master, but a great one. It is a perfect moment to use this opportunity to gain more experience in the field. The tricky thing is, there is no “Scrum Master academy” that […]
3 Steps to Setting Expectations Around The Scrum Master Role
Have you ever noticed your team making assumptions on what the role of a Scrum Master is that do not align with your vision? During my Scrum-mastering years, I have seen it many times: teams and organizations have surprising expectations of Scrum Masters that have nothing to do with their actual job. If you want to […]
New Retrospective Poker Cards Ready for Sale
I am so excited! Big news here today! New Retrospective Poker cards are finally here. 100 of them, to be exact. The past couple of months after the end of the Indiegogo campaign, I have been working on improving the design and adding important explanations into the deck. Now everything you need to run awesome […]
Do Scrum Masters Have to Be Technical?
I get this question sometimes from Scrum Masters who are just starting their journey or want to get into this role. They are worried that they don’t have any technical background or don’t have a Computer Science degree. I definitely know where the confusion comes from: quite a lot of companies ask for a Computer […]
Agile Metrics to Help Your Team Improve
Collecting some kind of metrics to show the results of your work is important, no doubt in that. However, in the case of a Scrum Master, that may seem like a daunting task considering the type of work we do. So how do you go about counting your “coaching points”? (I have just made up […]
Avoid Doing These Things as a Scrum Master
There is a lot of talk about what a typical day of a Scrum Master looks like and it is a fair question. Because the role is described in a vague manner in the Scrum Guide, it is important to have a detailed responsibilities list to understand it sometimes. (thank goodness, I have created such […]
Traits that help you succeed in the Scrum Master role
I feel that often times Scrum Master role requires a specific type of people to do an amazing job and to enjoy the process. Let’s be honest, being a Scrum Master can be tough, but the right traits will help you get through it with ease (｡•̀ᴗ-)✧ As I worked with my Scrum teams I noticed […]
What to focus on when you join a new team as a Scrum Master
Ever thought of what you are going to do when you join a new Agile team? I am sure you feel overwhelmed just thinking about it: all the positive changes that you need to bring, all the expectations the company has about you and your team… Keep your cool v(￣ｰ￣)v I have […]
How to Set Positive Mood in your Team with a Successful Retrospective
I love writing about Retrospectives. I would even say that it is my favourite Sprint Ceremony. Interestingly enough, my mood often depends on the outcome of the Retrospective, because I really want the team to improve. So when the Retrospective is a success and the team finds great experiments to run in the next sprint […]
A Typical Day of a Scrum Master
Scrum Master is a misunderstood role in Scrum. Often people think that Scrum Masters are the Project Managers under another name. So it’s quite common for some to be confused after realising that the above statement is incorrect. ”Well, what do you do then? You can’t be just coaching people all day, there’s work to […]
Visual graphs and charts to increase team productivity
One of the things that Scrum Master is responsible for is making progress visible. This is an important task but I think it should not only be about progress. There is a lot of information that should be visible to the team at all times in the spirit of transparency and I think it is […]
How we Teach the Value of Refinements with a Board Game
As part of a Hackathon project at Bluecat Networks, our team of Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches decided to make a leaning game. The purpose of this project was to design a board game to teach teams difficult Agile topics, in this case, the backlog refinement. In the spirit of being Agile we used iterative […]
How we Increased Team Happiness by Introducing Scrum inside Kanban
Recently I’ve been working with a team responsible for triage. Though initially a medical terms, it explains quite well with what the team was doing – reviewing requests coming from customers and identifying whether issues reported are expected behavior, bugs or feature requests and how important they are Bright individuals were working in this team, […]
5 Reasons to use New Retrospective Formats
It seems like the importance of having retrospectives in Agile teams has been covered, and more and more teams understand the reasons behind it and believe in them. But the more retrospectives you’ve completed, the more difficult it becomes to keep teams engaged. How do you make your retrospectives not only more interesting, but also […]