Is Anonymous Feedback Useful?

How does feedback happen on your Team? A Scrum Team member recently told me that she receives feedback anonymously from her Teammates and the business as a whole, so she’s never told who made what comment in their feedback process—that’s normal in their organization. As someone who has facilitated numerous feedback processes, this surprised me…

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What Happened to my Team?
COVID-19’s Impact on Team Health

Remote-Scrum-Teams-Man-at-home-working-extra-hours-at-night

COVID-19: A silver lining? In the pandemic’s early days, a Team Leader told me, with an obvious sense of relief, that his people were doing really well despite the turmoil. Productivity had actually increased after the Team’s shift to working from home. They were working hard–it seemed like the transition had definitely improved the Team’s…

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Your Ticket Out Of Crazy Town:
How Scrum’s ‘Guardrails’ Protect Teams From Chaos

Chaos-Frustrated-Woman-at-Laptop

As we stated before, Scrum is for developing in Complicated/Complex environments. This ties nicely to the Cynefin (ku-NEV-in) framework, which breaks Decision-Space into four areas: Clear, Complicated, Complex, and Chaotic. The detailed definitions aren’t important to us right now; the only thing we need to know is that Chaos is very bad. Chaos makes things…

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Scrum Guide: A Sacred Text?

Scrum-Guide-A-Sacred-Text?

As practitioners, the Scrum Guide is an important document and embodies core shared values, aims, and language. With any important, foundational text, the question comes up: how should we relate to it? Specifically: should we view the Scrum Guide as something like a Sacred Text, or in some other way? By “Sacred Text,” we mean…

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Virtual, Self-Paced, Interactive A-CSM Training Is Here

You asked for Advanced Certified ScrumMaster® Training (A-CSM®) in a flexible, on-demand, web-based format. You asked for live, virtual Q&A sessions with expert Scrum trainers. You asked for more interactive discussions on challenging Scrum issues and learning from others within the Agile community. We listened. That is why beginning April 13, 2020, 3Back’s Advanced Certified…

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When A Team Graduates From Its Coach

When a Dev team, their Agile Coach, and Team Facilitator are working well together, it’s a great thing to see! The Agile Coach helps a number of teams to strengthen their use of Scrum, improve technical skills, and identify a team kaizen each Sprint. Each of these teams has a Facilitator whose role is to…

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Zombie Standups (And How to Bring them Back to Life)

Are you Trapped in a Zombie Standup? Do you find yourself tuning out during Standup (Daily Scrum)? Do you feel like everybody’s monotonously reciting laundry list answers to the Three Questions: what you worked on yesterday, what you’re working on today, and…maybe…what impediments you’ve run into? When it’s your turn, do you find yourself facing…

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Leader-less Scrum?

3Back Scrum & Agile Blog - Situational Leadership - Well Formed Team

Is your Scrum vocabulary missing the word “leader”? Is the idea of recognized leaders something you think belongs to the waterfall world, not agile? Some people were trained that in Scrum the only acceptable uses of leader refer the Scrum Master’s servant leadership or Dev team members’ situational leadership. Do you have a vague sense…

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6 Signals of Collective Conflict Avoidance

Conflict Avoidance in Scrum

The primary goal of Scrum Mastering[1] is to enable a Well-Formed Team™ (WFT). Ideally, a Well-Formed Team[2] would take on most of its own facilitation and coaching. However, some Teams get stuck in earlier stages of maturity that we describe as Collective Conflict Avoidance. Collective Avoidance is a norm that needs to be thoughtfully and…

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Sleepwalking Through Scrum

Sleepwalking Scrum Team

How do we recognize when the way we’re “doing Scrum” is impeding our Agility? Two alternative scenarios are possible: The Team has fully internalized Agile practice in the past but now seems to be sleepwalking through the Ceremonies: the Team’s Agile practice has gotten stale, we’re sleepwalking through Scrum. The Team hasn’t experienced Agile practice…

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A Day In The Life Of A ScrumMaster

Multi-Tasking-Scrum-Master

The daily life of a ScrumMaster is anything but mundane. Play along with one ScrumMaster as she facilitates, plans, and runs interference all in the name of becoming a Well-Formed Team™.

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