In short, yes - absolutely. This is a common question I get from my clients. “We used to have weekly status meetings and now, with Scrum, we have them every day. Can’t we skip a few or just do twice weekly?” When I get a question like this, I can tell that the person asking doesn’t understand the purpose of the daily Scrum. And I will admit, when I was new to Scrum (having come from the world of project management) I fell into this too.

As ScrumMasters work to enhance their knowledge of Scrum and help their organizations move towards agile transformation, there is definitely a time and place to use Scrum-specific books to help with that. Books like mine, 30 Days to Better Agile, give specific and targeted advice about how to fix some of the most common problems that occur during…

Of all the Scrum meetings, the daily Scrum is the one I am most likely to see done out-and-out wrong. I think this stems from the fact that many people learned what to do in the daily Scrum, but never learned what a daily Scrum is supposed to produce. The purpose of the daily Scrum is work coordination. It is a meeting for the team to…

In the previous installment of this blog series, we looked at what might happen when moving our managers or team leads into the ScrumMaster role. Now, we'll discuss the value of choosing a "natural" ScrumMaster. When I visit my clients onsite to give them private Scrum training, the…

In Part One of this blog series, we looked at the potential pitfalls of moving our project managers into the ScrumMaster role. Now, let’s look at what might happen if we move someone from a leadership position - a team lead or manager - into the ScrumMaster role.

In our previous blog series, we looked at traditional organizational roles that sometimes move into the Product Owner role. We also examined the benefits and pitfalls of “converting” these individuals to product owners. Now, let’s answer the same question for the ScrumMaster role. Who makes a good ScrumMaster? Before we can answer that question, we need to examine…