When I started my career as a Scrum Master, I knew absolutely nothing about anything related to project work, and I knew that I knew nothing. It was perfect. It only got dangerous after I thought I knew anything.

After my former position at a tourism firm got cut along with the entire IT department, in the early days of the pandemic, I started a new position as Agile Coach in an awesome project in the education sector. The conditions were amazing, a fertile ground for an Agile way of working. So I joined and when I found chaos, I…

Sometime earlier this year, I was talking to the tech lead of a California-based gaming organization. Asked what I did for a living, I said “I’m a Scrum Master,” which caused him to sigh and try to change the topic. But now I was curious and told him I sensed he was frustrated. Where, I asked, was this frustration coming from?

“Oh,” he said, wearily. “It’s nothing about you personally, but I am just sick and tired of agile in general and Scrum in particular.”

Unfortunately, I knew exactly why. Please forgive me if I wax poetic here, but reactions…

So, here’s the situation.
You and your Tech Lead are going through the effort of explaining the importance of technical debt and refactoring to your Manager and your CEO.

To that effect, you invite a few devs to talk about their impediments, and how they felt about it so that you can work together on a solution.

You don’t invite the Product Owners, because hey, it’s about handiwork and not really about them, right? Plus you can be relatively certain they will side with your Manager, delay the entire thing, and backstab you in front of your CEO, and that…

Ever since that fateful day when Henrik Kniberg published the ideas he and Jeff Sutherland planned for the future structure of Engineering Culture at Spotify (“The Spotify Model”), thousands of companies have tried to emulate their design.

It doesn’t work.

Not that their ideas weren’t excellent, but they were the beginnings of an experiment in organizational structures, and one that proved to be too prescriptive for its own good. Mind you, this was before ideas like LeSS and SAFe entered mainstream Scrum Master discourse. But I won’t harp on too long about it, because Jeremiah Lee wrote something that is…

Have you ever been to the optometrist?

In general, here is how it works. The optometrist sits you down on a chair that is clearly not designed for aesthetics but for one single purpose only and lowers a machine in front of your face that resembles a 50’s sci-fi robot mask more than glasses. You would never buy those glasses. They are too big, too clunky, and the color is atrocious. The optometrist knows that, but the things have a purpose.

Then, the optometrist puts the glasses they think you need in and asks you “Does this get better or…

For your Serious Scrum reading delight, we’ve summed up all 13 articles that were published by 9 different writers here at Serious Scrum between March 16th and 22nd.

Max Heiliger takes us into the World of Warcraft

In the last entry of his Scrum and Games series, Max proposes a compelling tale that will teach anyone who wants to listen the power of goals, and why gaming can be more like Scrum than you think.

Maarten Dalmijn compares Scrum to Jazz. Nice.

Paddy Corry offers advice on a Mindset in times of Chaos

Sahin Guvenilir discusses acceptance versus pushing for change

Sahin Guvenilir also looks for self-organisation in football teams

Willem-Jan Ageling has a call to arms for Scrum Masters. Step Up!

Roland Flemm has 2 episodes of the Koos coach comic this week

Scott Weiner took a look into clarity for remote teams

Kerry Martin asks if we are raising Scrum Kids

Paddy Corry thinks Scrum left some stuff out? What gives?

Anshul Kapoor took a look at Trust in Remote Teams

Willem-Jan Ageling looks at leadership in times of Crisis

This Article is part III of a series where I talk about how we can learn to Scrum better from video games. You don’t have to read the other two though, this article can be understood in a vacuum. It’s okay!

I admit, I was a hardcore WoW player myself. I probably logged somewhere up to 10.000 hours played in it, with thousands more standing around afk in various cities, chatting with my guild mates. But while in retrospective I probably should have spent half of that time writing another novel or three, I honestly believe that my time leading…

Back in the days (until 1986, actually), canaries were used as early warning systems in coal mines. Most hazardous gasses are heavier than air and completely invisible, which made detecting them impossible until the miners were literally neck-deep in “poisonous vapeurs” and the first pal dropped. As a solution, the workers would place a cage with a canary on the ground. When gasses pooled up, the bird would stop singing and eventually fall from its perch, letting them know that something was up.

Fast forward to today, where a young Scrum Master sits with her team and the canary has…