Scrum Masters Under Fire: Addressing Criticism with Pragmatism
During a Sprint Planning session, a frustrated developer whispered under his breath: “Our Scrum Master just slows us down. Why do we even need them?” The room went quiet, but...
During a Sprint Planning session, a frustrated developer whispered under his breath: “Our Scrum Master just slows us down. Why do we even need them?” The room went quiet, but...
Why Organizations Need Answers About Project DeliveryI hear it all the time. The organization wants to know when is this work going to be done? How much does it cost...
Not long ago, a team I worked with decided they no longer needed their Scrum Master. “We know Scrum,” they said. “We’ll save time if we just do it ourselves.”...
Did You Know? I recently discovered this article from SafeDelusion. It does a great job at highlighting the challenges of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), suggesting that while it promises...
A product team I once coached disliked the “no changes during the sprint” rule. It was hard to disagree as there seems to be an agile principle (#2 welcome late...
The experiment seemed like a sure thing. The product team had been exploring ways to speed up definition-of-done checks, so they trained an AI to generate acceptance criteria for new...
The leadership team was buzzing. The new AI-powered dashboard had just shown a sharp spike in the velocity forecast, and everyone took it as a sign that productivity had jumped...
Midway through a sprint, a Kanban team’s AI analytics dashboard flashed an alert: “High probability of downstream delay in QA within 3 days.” The forecast wasn’t based on guesswork; it...
A lot of people ask, what does a Scrum master do every day? Now we can elevate this and say, scrum master, agile coach, whatever the term is that you...
It was Sprint Planning, and the team’s AI-powered estimation tool had just suggested that a feature would take “3 story points” to complete. One of the senior developers noticed a...
It started as a small experiment. A Scrum team decided to trial an AI work-item recommender to speed up backlog refinement. Within a few sprints, something subtle but significant began...
You instrumented five usage signals on Monday, translated them into hypotheses on Tuesday, sliced a thin story with telemetry on Wednesday, and ranked the work with evidence on Thursday. Today...