10 Essential Tips for Effective Leaders — Time management has always been important, but it has become vital for managers in today’s fast-paced work environment. However, with a limited number of hours in a day and increasing tasks, it can be challenging to manage time effectively. To help you overcome this challenge and achieve success, here are…

And How To Maintain It — As Scrum Masters, our job is to lead and support the team. An essential part of this role is the ability to be empathetic. Empathy means seeing things from someone else’s perspective and understanding their emotions. It is vital to communication and relationships, especially in the work environment. Why empathy is important Empathy is…

How to Create a Learning Environment as a Scrum Master — As a Scrum Master, your primary objective is to help your team succeed. To achieve this goal, you must create an environment fostering continuous learning and development. When your team members constantly learn and grow, they become more productive, creative, and motivated. Encourage Collaboration Collaboration is the key to creating a learning…

A Balancing Act — A conflict within a Scrum Team is a regular and inevitable occurrence that can arise due to differing opinions, work styles, personal differences, or misunderstandings. In an agile environment, conflicts can signify a high level of commitment and a strong desire for a quality outcome. …

How to Choose and Use Scrum Metrics for Maximum Impact — As Scrum Masters, we often face the challenge of collecting and presenting metrics to show the team’s progress. However, these metrics can be either valuable or nonsensical, and it’s important to understand which ones drive the team forward. Mangement often requests metrics like the number of user stories completed per…

How to foster respect in agile environments — As an Agile Coach, I have accompanied many teams and gained an important insight: Respect is essential to any successful collaboration. Unfortunately, this value is often overlooked or taken for granted. …

5 steps to get successfully started — Yes, I know, the title is provocative, and long-time Scrum Masters will be outraged and say: “You can’t become a Scrum Master in 3 months; you need years of experience!” That is true: the more experience you have, the better you can assess situations and the more possibilities you have to…

It’s all about flow — Now and then, clients ask me: “What is the most important task of a Scrum Master?” Of course, the people who ask me expect answers like “the Retrospective,” “facilitating Scrum Events,” “conducting training,” etc. But there are more important things. The most important task is to optimize the flow. The…

How to work with personas — If you want to sell something, it is crucial to know who the target audience is and what the needs of the people in the target group are. A good approach is to create personas. Definition of personas A persona represents a typical person of a target group. They have expectations, values, desires…

Must the Scrum Master facilitate the event? — When companies hire me as a Scrum Master, the first task that comes to mind for most is the facilitation of the Daily Scrum. But is that the case? Is that one of the tasks of the Scrum Master? The Scrum Guide (2020) states: “The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute…

Or is the position only a career springboard? — A typical question in job interviews is, “What do you want to have achieved in 5 years?” The question is easy to answer if you’re starting your career path. For example, you start as a “Junior,” gain experience, take on more responsibility, and after five years, you might be a…

How to deal with fear — Courage is one of the Scrum values among respect, commitment, openness, and focus. But what does it mean to be courageous? Courage requires fear because only if you overcome something you are afraid of you are courageous. When it comes to fear, we can distinguish between different types of anxiety. …

Peer consulting for Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches — Scrum Masters act as consultants, coaches, trainers, mentors, and facilitators. But sometimes, they are also at a loss and need support. Intervision is an ideal instrument for this. It can be established relatively quickly and is suitable in all companies with several Scrum Masters or Agile Coaches. Intervision is a…

Challenges and ideas — Remote work is excellent. You can bring talented people from different regions, disciplines, and cultures together. But, anyone who has worked in a remote team knows that there are positive aspects and challenges. Teams that work together on-site discuss many things along the way. You also get to know how…

The more, the better? — When I started my Scrum journey more than six years ago, my mentor at that time, who has been a trainer of Scrum.org for a long time, had a clear point of view: Scrum Master is a full-time role: So not a Scrum Master for two or more Scrum Teams…

I like to paint, but my paintings are more abstract art. To illustrate something on a flip chart or whiteboard, on the other hand, has always been difficult for me. That changed when I discovered the book “The Flipchart Coach” a few years ago. It is unfortunately only available in…

In agile companies, one goal is to deliver value to customers within short iterations. But what delivers value? It often seems that everything is equally important. So what is value and are there other criteria that you should consider? The Scrum Guide states that the backlog is an ordered list…

When Is Small Too Small? — Scrum Teams come in many sizes. Often they tend to be too large, to include too many team members. For example, I have seen teams with more than 25 team members. On the other hand, I have also accompanied Scrum Teams that consisted of only six members. Small teams seem…

And how to set them — A few days ago, a Scrum Master working on the same project asked me: “What is your main goal as a Scrum Master with your two teams for the next three months?” That is an interesting question and not so easy to answer. However, I want the team members to…

Do extraverted and introverted attitudes really matter? — A few days ago, I saw a post on LinkedIn with a job ad: “Extroverted Agile Coach wanted.” My first thought: “WTF!” I’m an agile coach and an introvert. But then it made me curious. Maybe there are good reasons. Perhaps they already have many introverted Agile Coaches on the…