I will tell you some of the secrets you need to know to become a great ScrumMaster. Create a high-performing collaborative environment at your organization, which makes your organization more than competitive in the current complex globalized world.

This session is targeted to all leaders of Agile transformation, Agile Coaches, and ScrumMasters who understand the Agile basics but have the dream of achieving significantly better results with Agile/Scrum.

The session is based on my book The Great ScrumMaster, published by Addison-Wesley, Signature Series (Cohn) on Jan 2017.  The Great ScrumMaster - #ScrumMasterWay.

We’ve all been there… having to sit through painful meetings and workshops that leads to more confusion, lack of clarity and frustration with a poor use of everyone’s time.

But, we’ve also been to those sessions that have been well facilitated where you think and say, “wow, I can’t believe the day has gone by so fast” and “that was a fantastic session, it really helped..!”

I want to help people and organisations have more of the latter by sharing my principles and practical tips on how to improve yourself to becoming a master facilitator – this is based on taking a human-centred approach by valuing every individual, including yourself. I’ll be using my “facilitation tree” to help everyone visualise what’s needed to always produce fruitful outcomes where value is created and people are valued.

We all have read the definition of the Scrum master role in the Scrum guide. However different organisations implement the role differently. Few companies have a "pure" Scrum master position. Others implement it as a "hatted" or "mixed" role, where the responsibilities are added to people who already have other duties and creating position titled as "Agile BA/SM".

While there is no right or wrong answer, we will look at a few different definitions, also looking at a few job advertisements - and then have a group activity discussing what the participants about how think the Scrum master could serve more effectively their organsation in their particular context.

Maybe in their context Scrum masters both coach agile values to their team(s) and are also responsible for delivery. Maybe they think that the SM should be both a BA and a SM - what would be the trade-offs then? Can a Scrum Master help the organisation with capability improvement (beyond their assigned team)? While there is no silver bullet to solve these issues, we will think together how we can answer these questions and what are the risks we should be aware of. 

When growing an organisation it is easy to follow established patterns for the organisational structure and end up with a situation with line managers, middle managers and executives.

But when we did a comprehensive review of our organisation and culture, we found that most of our line managers loved mentoring and growing people, but struggled balancing that with the more administrative and managerial tasks like leave, reviews, recruiting and assigning work.

And so we set out to overhaul our organisational structure into one where we have people dedicated to growing team members through mentoring and coaching and people solely responsible for organising and delivering work.

This session is about sharing insights in why, what and how we did this change.

A fundamental and critical skill for any agile coach or leader is the pursuit of the fine art of "Zero F***s Given" ZFG. In contrast to how ZFG is often described on the interwebs, ZFG does not mean "I don't care"! ZFG is a mindset that embraces a myriad of concepts: fear, empathy, objectivity, neutrality, bias, drama, emotional intelligence, and more! Understanding the philosophy of ZFG will empower you to embrace this powerful skill so that you can become a more effective agile coach and leader. 

Have you ever walked into a meeting and wished it won’t be boring and people will talk to each other? If your answer is “yes”, then maybe you could be the person who lightens up the environment with some appropriate and impromptu jokes. In this session we are going to learn what a sense of humor is, the benefits, the similarities between a stand-up comedian and an Agile coach, how stand-up comedy teaches us to be socially aware, and develop better EQ. Can a good sense of humor be the x-factor to build a resilient culture? Are you curious now? Come and explore the answer!