Background

See this kind of post as an experiment, how to best spread my favorite readings of Scrum related input and gain possible input for additional valuable sources from the agile community – meaning YOU. Along with this I’d like to avoid spamming – therefore let’s start with summarizing it weekly and having only the top 5 readings listed.

 

 

Readings Overview

More detailed information 

Roles in Scrum and conflicts having more than one role on one person

 

This article describes nicely why having more than one Scrum role fulfilled by one person needs to be considered carefully and often leads to dysfunctions. 

 
As this is in my experience a topic often discussed and implemented in a misleading way, this article may help you arguing and reflecting the way you currently use it.

The Human Side of Agile – How to Help your Team Deliver

Source:  The Human Side of Agile – How to Help Your Team Deliver (Author: Gil Broza)

A long time missing part in the agile book shelf – focussing on us – individuals working in Agile environments. I’m half way through it and already highly recommend reading it if:

  • You would like to get more input on the roles and tasks connected with these roles in agile environments (it helped already to see the product owner and scrum master role a bit different than before)
  • You would like to see ways to improve your communication within the team and your organization – based on good examples.
    • better meetings – and answers about necessary meetings 
    • practice details like active listening, give empathy,… 
  • What makes a great agile team leader – highly recommended input
My book notes will follow later. Thanks a lot to Gil Broza!
 

Scrum Metrics

 
A description of 10 metrics used for Scrum to measure the teams increasing productivity (recommended right from the beginning of using Scrum).

In my opinion it’s really important to support your agile journey by backing it with facts instead of relying on gut feelings (I missed this point in the past and in a later post I’d like to describe the problems with NOT having measurements). 

 
The suggested measurements (e.g. Velocity, Work Capacity, Focus Factor, Accuracy of Estimation,…) enable fine grained visibility on various aspects of your Scrum implementation.
 

6 rules for awards – Kudo cards


Jurgen Appelo describes in his post 6 rules for awards and presents the nice idea of introducing the Kudo box – an implementation for having awards with the 6 rules applied.

Idea is to enable everyone to reward someone’s contribution using a small reward (that is paid by the company 😉 ). The rewards are dropped in the Kudo box using fancy Kudo cards. Once a week (or day, or whatever schedule makes sense for you) the content of the box is published and rewards are given…  

 

Enterprise Scrum: Scaling Scrum to the Executive Level

 
A nice case study how Scrum can be used above the level of development teams.  
 
 
 
Do you have other interesting sources of information around Scrum? Or maybe you have already experience with the listed ones? Your feedback is highly appreciated!