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Scrum.org Agile By Sanjay Saini

Your Scrum Team Might Be Excellent at Building the Wrong Thing

Image Most Scrum Teams I work with are good at delivery. They have a stable Sprint cadence, a clear Definition of Done, and they deliver a usable Increment every Sprint. The Sprint Review runs on time and stakeholders nod along.And yet, when I ask Product Owners in class how many of last quarter's Product Backlog items measurably moved an outcome, the room goes quiet.That silence is what this post is about. Scrum is built on empiricism and lean thinking. A team can apply empiricism thoroughly to how it builds and hardly at all to what it builds. When that happens, every gain in delivery speed

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Scrum.org Agile By Ralph Jocham

Scrum's Protocol Is Easy to Copy. Its Agenda Is Not.

Image I have been a Professional Scrum Trainer since 2010, which means I have sat in the room when organizations decide Scrum is not working. Sprint Planning on Monday, Daily Scrum at nine, Sprint Review on the last Friday, Retrospective right after; every event on the calendar and every artifact named correctly. Nothing changed.These organizations usually ask whether they are running the wrong process, but the actual gap is more basic. Scrum carries a standard protocol and an agenda, and adopting the protocol while ignoring the agenda produces all the ceremony and none of the results.What a S

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Scrum.org Agile By Steven Deneir

You Can't Choose the System. You Choose How You Act Inside It.

Ask almost anyone on a struggling team why they've stopped pushing, and you'll get the same answer in slightly different words. There's no point. The org won't change. Leadership doesn't listen. The deadline is fixed, the mandate is thin, the priorities flip every week, and none of it is theirs to control. Most of that is true, and that's the uncomfortable part. A great deal of what shapes a team's day genuinely isn't the team's to decide. You can spend an entire career waiting for the system to hand you the conditions to do good work, and the system, mostly, won't. But there's a quiet sleight

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Scrum.org Agile By Robert Pieper

Current State vs. Future State in Business Analysis: Why You Need Both

Image Current state vs future state analysis helps teams understand where they are today, where they need to go, and what needs to change along the way. It sounds simple, but teams often skip this thinking. A business problem is identified, and the conversation quickly shifts to what should be built, purchased, automated, or changed. The problem is that choosing a solution before understanding the current situation can lead to decisions based on assumptions.Business analysis creates an opportunity to slow down the decision, not the work. By understanding the current state and defining a realis

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Scrum.org Agile By Yuval Yeret

How Next Insurance Broke Its Whole Lifecycle Into Agent Skills

Originally published on yuvalyeret.com.What an agentic development lifecycle looks like when it is actually runningShay Mandel has spent his career on the boundary between engineering and product. A developer at heart, as he puts it, who also likes to see big systems: how we impact customers, how we improve processes. He joined Next Insurance more than seven years ago, when it was quite a small company that then grew almost a hundred percent every year in revenue until it was acquired. They do small business insurance: think about a technician who comes to your house and needs general liabilit

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Scrum.org Agile By Yuval Yeret

From Deployed to Actually Used: The Lane Most Boards Are Missing

Originally published on yuvalyeret.com.Why is nobody using the AI agents you shipped?People are deploying a feature and calling it a day, essentially. The problem is that while the feature might be working, it might not be useful. Or even if it's useful, it might not be used. One specific scenario I'm seeing when working with AI enablement leaders is that they're working on AI use cases: they are deploying agents, deploying Gems, and nobody's using them. It's not really useful that way.What follows from treating deployment as done is that nobody pays attention to whether people are really usin

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Scrum.org Agile By Stefan Wolpers

KI auf einem dysfunktionalen System (1): Das Produkt-Backlog 🇩🇪

In Kürze: Aufwendig produzierte Artefakte, unveränderte Entscheidungen oder zehn Produkt-Backlog-Antimuster, die KI verschlimmertStülpen Sie KI über einen problematischen Produkt-Backlog-Prozess, und binnen eines Nachmittags scheint sich alles zu verbessern. Das Problem ist, dass das „Polieren“ von Artefakten mit KI die eigentliche Ursache nicht behebt: Die Entscheidungsgrundlage des Teams ändert sich nicht; die KI beseitigt lediglich das sichtbare Unbehagen, das früher signalisierte, dass mit dem Prozess etwas nicht stimmt. Damit vermindert sich auch ein Teil des Drucks, das Prozessproblem zu

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Scrum.org Agile By David Sabine

‘Batches’ in Scrum

Image Image In 1995, when Scrum was introduced, the release of software was a monumental task involving the printing of floppy disks or CDs, user manuals, reference cards, and boxes. Producers directed immense capital toward packaging and distribution and hoped for prime visibility on retail shelves. Between releases, a conventional SDLC (i.e., “Waterfall”) appeared rational and teams would process a large batch of requirements toward the next release…many months away.Scrum’s design, a Sprint is a month or less and the team must be capable of producing an increment of releasable functionality

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Scrum.org Agile By Steven Deneir

Your Team Isn't Slow. Your Handoffs Are.

Image Watch where the work actually spends its time. Not the hours someone is heads-down building. The days it sits, waiting. Waiting for the one person who knows that system. Waiting for the other team to finish their sprint. Waiting for a review, a sign-off, an environment, an answer from someone who's out until Thursday. Add up the building time and it's small. Add up the waiting and it's most of the calendar. That's the thing about a slow team. Usually it isn't slow. The people are working hard and well. The work is just passing hand to hand, stalling a little in every gap between one spec

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Scrum.org Agile By Yuval Yeret

Finding AI Gold With Lean Startup Techniques

Originally published on yuvalyeret.com.How do we deliver valuable real-world AI impact through solutions that solve problems, using some of what we've learned by building products over the last couple of decades?We're not seeing the value yetUnless you've been in a cave, you're aware that there's a gold rush happening out there. Certain companies are definitely making money building AI hardware and solutions, and a lot of people are heading out to mine for AI gold.A lot of the conversations inside organizations feel like they're more about the technology and the solutions than about what we ac

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Scrum.org Agile By Chuck Suscheck

Cognitive Trap: Planning Certainty

Planning Certainty TrapMost mistakes in Scrum aren’t because people don’t understand the framework—they come from applying reasonable thinking in the wrong context. Cognitive traps happen when decisions favor efficiency, control, or comfort over transparency, inspection, and adaptation. Here is one of ten cognitive traps, Planning Certainty. Over-investing in upfront certainty delays learning and reduces the ability to respond to change.Simulated Assessment QuestionA Scrum Team spends significant time refining Product Backlog Items to ensure they are fully understood before starting work. As a

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Scrum.org Agile By Sanjay Saini

Does Your AI Know the Scrum Guide? Twelve Questions to Find Out

Image More and more participants in my Professional Scrum Master classes arrive with Scrum "rules" they picked up from an AI chatbot. Some of those rules are accurate. Some stopped being true in November 2020. And a few were never part of Scrum at all.The trouble is that from the outside, the correct answers and the incorrect ones look the same. They are equally fluent, equally confident and equally well formatted. An AI that knows Scrum is useful. An AI that only sounds as if it knows Scrum is risky, especially when a Scrum Master repeats its answer to a Scrum Team or a stakeholder.This artic

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