scrum

Agile coach Bob Galen helps teams continuously improve and avoid getting stuck, complacent, or worse—regressing. By following some essential patterns, your team will learn how to spot the warning signs that lead to regression and ensure that everyone stays productive and happy.

In classic Scrum textbooks, the Product Owner (PO) permanently hangs out in the agile team room, churning out a stream of user stories, regularly prioritizing the backlog, deciding color schemes for screen design-all while keeping the team focused and making coffee. In an enterprise agile project, it is physically impossible for one person to do everything the PO role requires. Elena Yatzeck believes the enterprise PO must be a team role, where the different people move in and out of their PO responsibilities in a disciplined and predictable way. To illustrate, Elena leads a simulation that takes you through a full enterprise agile project, providing shared PO resources to help you with each aspect of the project. She offers PO advice on organizational change models, team design techniques, extended story templates, and tips for backlog grooming.

Even though team collocation is strongly recommended in agile methodologies, a distributed team is often required in the real world today. What is so important about collocating anyway? Can you overcome the challenges of a distributed Scrum team and still remain agile? What are the solutions? Brian Saylor tackles these important questions and more. While Brian realizes that implementing Scrum and agile practices in a distributed team is not easy, he found that it is possible if you understand the inherent problems and work hard-every day-to overcome them. Brian walks you through the reasons collocating is important for agile teams and the extra challenges distributed agile teams face. Then he dives into practical, real-world tools, tips, and techniques that organizations should research and consider before jumping into distributed waters-and don’t forget your life jacket.

You're familiar with agile and, perhaps, practicing Scrum. Now you're curious about Kanban. Is it right for your project? How does Kanban differ from Scrum and other agile methodologies? From theory to practice, Gil Irizarry introduces Kanban principles and explains how Kanban's emphasis on modifying existing processes rather than upending them results in a smooth adoption. Instead of using time-boxed units of work, Kanban focuses on continuous workflow, allowing teams to incrementally improve and streamline product delivery. Explore how to move from Scrum to Kanban with new, practical techniques that can help your team quickly get better. Discover the use of cumulative flow diagrams, WIP (work-in-progress) limits, and classes of services. In a hands-on classroom exercise, you'll help create a value stream map, determine process efficiency, and experience techniques from the Kanban toolset.