Dave West

The Product Backlog is an essential artifact in Scrum, but backlogs could be better for many teams. In this blog, we discuss introducing a new class, Professional Scrum Product Backlog Management - Skills, and how it provides learners with the skills necessary to improve their Product Backlogs.

The Product Backlog is crucial for Scrum to be effective. But for many teams, Product Backlogs are bloated, confusing, and hard to navigate. This blog discusses the challenges of building a great Product Backlog and what Scrum Teams can do to fight the bloat.

Agile is over 20 years old, and the Agile conference has been running since 2005. But are we seeing any changes? Has agile adoption stalled? This blog discusses enterprise adoption challenges and the environment necessary for Agile to succeed.

Scrum is a Product centric approach to delivering value. But what if your team is not aligned with a Product? In this blog, we discuss what Product means in Scrum and why it can help a team even if they do not feel they are working in a Product organization. In this blog, we talk about why Product is used in Scrum, the characteristics of a Product, and how those characteristics can even help if you are working on a Project.

Product Owners have a variety of job titles ranging from Project Manager to Product Manager, From Business Analyst to Team Leader. Still, these job titles reflect the complexity of their work environment. In this blog, we discuss the messy reality of Product Ownership and provide a 2 by 2 grid focused on Product-ness and Ownership to reflect that complexity.

In the following interview with Marjolein Pilon, she describes how Scrum has empowered the Scrum Teams she has worked with to approach the challenging problem of Climate Change.

Lean Startup provides an approach to delivering breakthrough businesses. It does that by focusing on learning and working with customers and stakeholders to explore the problem and product space. By connecting the ideas of Lean Startup with Scrum practitioners have a blueprint for exploring risk and value. In this blog, we discuss how the two approaches can work together.

Scrum and Digital are not the same things, but often Digital Transformations comprise some sort of agile change. In this blog, Dave West discusses a recent Dare To Lead Podcast where the overlap between Scrum and Digital was apparent. He discusses the six elements of a digital strategy and their relationship with Scrum.

Today, Scrum.org announced a new skills-based course focusing on facilitation. Professional Scrum Facilitation Skills (PSFS). This class provides a practical, hands-on learning experience focused on developing facilitation skills and the mindset to apply them. This class responds to the importance of facilitation in working in teams on complex work and how good facilitation can lead to improved Scrum adoption.

For many years the agile movement advocated that all teams had to be co-located for success. Scrum also encouraged that approach. But the pandemic taught us that remote does not always mean bad. However, we are seeing more and more executives force an in-person return to the office as the pandemic resides. But will this improve productivity? Yes and No. Without a clear focus on three things neither in-person nor remote work will be successful, so stop focusing on that and instead focus on the what and the how of working together to deliver value!