Articles and videos on creating and managing cross-functional Scrum teams: scrum master, product owner and development team.
There are several techniques that can be used to promote communication in a Scrum team, like for instance the Dialogue Sheets that are proposed by Allan Kelly for retrospectives. In this blog post, Alan Dayley discusses how silence is a powerful tool for management and the need for constructive conflict.
One of the first steps in an Agile adoption is the formation and organization of agile teams. Leadership often struggles to figure out how many people should be on each team, what skill sets should included, and whether the team should be focused on solution components, feature delivery, or a mix.
An Agile team reset occurs when an Agile team take a step back to review and relearn the foundation principles and practices of Scrum. Justin Hennessy presents in this article how he did it when a team he was coaching had successfully implemented the practices for Scrum but didn’t really understand the values or principles behind it.
Analyzing the bottleneck faced by a Scrum team, Mark Levison introduces in this blog post the concept of Skills Matrix. The Skill Matrix is a visual management tool that shows at a glance how much cross-training you have in your organization between different people and different tasks.
In this article, Elton Gao starts by giving us the definition of a good ScrumMaster: someone who knows Scrum well. He or she understands the do’s and don’ts and is familiar with related artifacts and tools. He or she knows how to run a daily Scrum, a planning/review/retrospective meeting and how to take advantages of related tools and so on. But is this enough?
Should you track individual performances in Scrum and how do you do it? Nanda Vivek says that there is only one answer and this is “No”. Measuring individual productivity is against the spirit of Scrum and the article discusses the importance of being helpful and collaborative in teams. The author however does not give guideline on how to deal in this case with the individual review that is a common practice in many large organizations.
This article focuses on the obstacles to using Agile in a distributed team environment and recommends how to counter them with what is called “de-Agile.” De-Agile is tailoring Agile to fit your team by taking out processes that don’t make sense and tweaking those that need to be modified to suit your needs. In a distributed team environment, de-Agile is mostly about removing the sense of being distributed. You need to educate each team member about the additional communication responsibilities required when working with remote team members and emphasize the importance of being open and available.
Scrum Expert Copyright © 2009-2025 Martinig & Associates