Blog on Agile principles, practices, and project management tools
Meaningful Agile
The Only Slovak Agile Conference, ScrumImpulz, Is Happening Again This Year!
In recent years, I have observed many easily solvable anti-patterns in practice that cause resistance and reluctance to implement Agile within companies. Statements such as: "Scrum Master, team assistant," "Let the Scrum Master log it," "But the board belongs to the Scrum Master," and "Why should I pay for a Scrum Master?" "Do I really have to attend standups as a Product Owner?" "Does there need to be [...]
Project Team Space Wiki for your Product
About Spaces 📚 Elevate Your Documentation Game with Team Spaces in ScrumDesk! Team Spaces, the dynamic Wiki module within the ScrumDesk application, is here to transform the way you handle project-related documentation. It's all about providing a unified platform where your teams can effortlessly organize and access essential project information, seamlessly integrating it with other project assets. In the fast-paced world of agile project management, not everything [...]
New Agile Management Metrics
Themes Overview Chart Understanding Themes in Agile Project Management Before we delve into the Themes Overview Chart, let's take a moment to understand the concept of themes in agile project management. Themes are a vital element used to track business initiatives, purchase orders, or any other significantly important areas within your projects. They help you categorize and group related backlog items, providing a clear view of how [...]
ScrumDesk v. 9.73.0: AI, better editor, metrics, improved OKR and themes
Project management with the help of AI The latest version of ScrumDesk, the Scrum project management tool, brings the help of AI into your daily life. We focused on highly practical features that speed up and simplify the work of Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and Agile teams as well. Generate new projects with AI Our initial inspiration was simple yet powerful: "How can we revolutionize [...]
Breaking Free from the Traditional Approach: Agile Estimation Techniques for Better Project Management
How to break free from the traditional way of estimation in projects with the help of Agile estimation techniques and principles? Estimation is a widespread practice that businesses impose a significant emphasis on. Businesses include the estimation in their processes as a must-have part. Typical reasons for the estimation include the following: To understand the cost of the implementation. To identify necessary capacities for future effort. To identify possibilities [...]
Checklists
Why should you consider Checklists? Agile is a systematic approach to product development. Great agile teams are very disciplined and follow structures that help them build products of high quality. Instead of dealing most of their time with bugs, great agile teams make new and valuable features. This is enabled by consistency in the development. Agile teams used to have multiple agreements, i.e., Definition of Done or [...]
Roadmap Lists
Manage your mid-term plans Product Owners should plan for more than just one sprint ahead. The mid-term planning increases the transparency for business stakeholders and teams regarding what should be completed next. Roadmaps in the timeline are excellent visualization of complex plans. But at the same time, they might be too complicated to care for. Modern agile project management framework introduced an alternative approach to managing the [...]
How to choose the project management tool
How to choose the best project management tool today? The project management practices are changing and adapting thanks to complexity, need to focus on customers, the speed of a business and, of course, thanks to Agile. Preparation of detailed plans for the next year doesn't make sense at all. The complexity of markets, products, technologies, legislation, and teams dependencies. All of that establish fundaments to the change of [...]
ScrumDesk 9.42.2: Share Business Context with Team
What is new in ScrumDesk? In the newest ScrumDesk version, our main focus was to bring agile teams closer to the context of their business which is the reason why teams are needed. Why this topic? Working with dozens of agile teams, our Agile mentors recognized that agile teams are too much focused on processes. Yes, processes even we know that collaboration should be over processes, right [...]
Tips on helpful resources for Retrospective
From our personal experience, we are all aware that with a lot of work and outside pressures, working on your personal development, trying to unite and move forward a team of people can be quite tricky, especially as we share our personal challenges. That’s why at ScrumDesk, we decided to gather a number of valuable tips for your Retrospective. All of the resources are used by our mentors, [...]
ScrumDesk 8.47: Retrospectives, Objectives and Key Results, Root Cause Analysis
Retrospectives Retrospective Sessions Does your team like the retrospective format and use it even for non-retro brainstorming workshops? Create a retrospective session to keep all session ideas in one place. Every session might have a retrospective theme assigned so the team knows what to focus on in their brainstorming. Retrospective filters Great agile teams are able to provide hundreds of ideas after a couple [...]
Training Leading SAFe®, August 2020, Bratislava
According to State of Agile, Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe®) is by far the most popular agile scaling method. While Agile is excellent for smaller teams and simple solutions, SAFe helps you manage complex systems. During this course, you will gain the knowledge necessary to lead a Lean/Agile enterprise by leveraging SAFe, and its underlying principles derived from Lean, systems thinking, Agile development, product development flow, and DevOps. Attend the [...]
Scrum Master’s Daily Checklist
Is everything ready for the daily stand-up? Is the taskboard updated? What about the virtual taskboard? Are too many tasks work in progress? Is someone dealing with the impediments? And many more questions Scrum Masters asks themselves every day. It’s difficult to remember everything a Scrum Master should pay attention to on a daily basis, especially for the ones new in their role. That is why [...]
Agile mentor Barbora Moravcová about her work: We enter the working life of people and business organisations
Barbora Moravcová started at ScrumDesk whilst she was still studying at university. After gaining valuable knowledge from other mentors, she decided to gain practical experiences from the other side, the perspective of being a client. Later she decided to return where she belongs and began working in ScrumDesk as an Agile mentor focusing on organisational culture, relationships, and mentality. In this interview, you can read about how she [...]
Online training Product Ownership Meaningfully
About the course A product is born from questions, but comes alive with parental care. Product Owner is one of the most demanded roles. This key role isn't only there to ensure the success of an agile team, but most importantly to ensure the success of the product and the company. Do you want to know how to lead product development using agile processes and include the [...]