Cause Change by Learning & Growing Together as Scrum Masters

Scrum Masters are often understood mostly as "team coaches," Yet, their role is vastly more important. The Scrum Guide emphasizes that Scrum Masters are responsible for leading and coaching organizations in the adoption of Scrum and causing change that increases the productivity of the Scrum Team.

And this makes sense; Scrum Masters are in a perfect position to see how missing skills, red tape, external dependencies, and other organizational impediments impact the ability of Scrum Teams to deliver working software every Sprint. Like car mechanics who try to fix cars by only looking at the tires while ignoring the broken engine, Scrum Masters who only focus on the team will miss the bigger, more important changes.

Innovation Accounting in Scrum [Video]

A couple of years ago, I blogged on Innovation Accounting in Scrum, and the bringing of empiricism to product ownership. On Tuesday I gave a presentation on this topic to the Agile Northants UK meetup. There was a pretty good Q&A afterwards. The session was recorded and is available here.

Abstract: In Scrum a Product Owner can be described as a "value maximizer"...but how is value calculated? In this presentation we consider how empiricism ought to underpin any assessment, and at how the discipline of "Innovation Accounting" can challenge predictive value assumptions.