Barry Overeem
As seen in:
Medium,
Business 2 Community,
HackerNoon,
InfoQ,
DZone,
Product Coalition,
unSafe.,
unsafe.sh
Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Barry Overeem
Why Scrum & Liberating Structures Are Perfect For Students!
Short personal thoughts, ideas, and reflections Barry Overeem · Follow Published in The Liberators · 2 min read · -- A couple of weeks ago, Denny de Waard and I visited Prof. Dr. Daniel Russo at the Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, in Copenhagen. 🇩🇰 We hosted a workshop with Daniel’s students in a week packed with other engagements.
Change The Environment, Not The People
Last week, I was on holiday, and it was a great experience! 🥳 There was one catch: we started each day full of ambitions and ideas for fun activities, but not much happened at the end of the day. It was 35-40 degrees Celsius ☀, which we're not used to and even the local people struggled with. Despite good intentions, all energy evaporated once the sun started shining. Swimming pool it was. I've noticed a similar pattern in some organizations I've worked with.
My super healthy 60-hour workweek!
I have two types of workweeks. One per month, I facilitate a workshop. During those weeks, that’s my primary focus. In all the other weeks, my schedule is pretty straightforward. The mornings are empty, meaning no calls ☎, meetings, or other distractions — time to focus. In the morning, I do my content creation, workshop development, and anything else that requires focus. In the afternoon, I schedule calls, (online) meetings, and occasionally an online meetup.
Strategy Knotworking For Education
Last June, Joanne Wolfert - Drost, Denise Fleck, Matthieu Tournemire, and I facilitated a public 3-hour Strategy Knotworking (SK) workshop in Amsterdam. During the workshop, we explored the 6 core questions of SK, to identify creative solutions for the tough challenges the world of education faces. We used SK, to turn ideas and ambitions into reality, by creating our own unique strategic narrative. A narrative focused on how education should evolve, as the world is evolving.
How To Improve Release Automation Within Your Team?
Teams are more effective when they leverage automation to become more responsive. For example, by automating recurring tasks that are necessary for a release. Several studies have investigated how (release) automation support organizations in becoming more Agile. Kuusinen et. al. (2018) surveyed decision-makers in a large organization and found that automation reduces manual tasks, but requires a cultural shift to encourage investment in proper developer practices and technologies to support it.
The Struggle Of Organizational Overweight
Lose weight and increase agility. That would be a good New Year's resolution for many organizations. In the past year(s), I’ve been in touch with lots of teams and organizations. And although some of them are in good shape, many still suffer from organizational overweight. ⚖️ Interestingly, most of them already pledged to lose “weight” years ago. That was the primary purpose of their Agile transformation. But instead of losing weight, they gained weight.
330 Blog Posts To Learn About Agile
The waterfall approach to handling tasks is antiquated. Embrace rapid application development using iterative task management and Scrum. Planning too far ahead can backfire. It can slow your time to market, reduce flexibility, and increase burn rate. The agile movement is now dead with the final blow dealt by McKinsey recently promoting an “agile transformation office”. How to estimate work efforts that are not well-defined yet, but the business needs them.
How To Lead Scrum Masters With Liberating Structures?
How Liberating Structures and servant leadership create an environment for Scrum Masters to find support, offer help, and draw inspiration Some time ago, I had an interesting conversation with an Agile Coach from a large car manufacturer in Germany. As an Agile Coach, he's responsible for about 50 Scrum Masters. Not in a hierarchical way, but more as a servant leader. For about one hour we talked about how to be a servant leader for such a group of Scrum Masters.
Improve the Quality of your Team's Retrospective!
Teams are more effective when they learn HOW to learn. They focus on small and actionable improvements and make sure to follow up on them until they are completed, before moving on to the next. However, it is not always easy for teams to learn effectively. So, how to start improving? 🤔 👉 First, a good strategy is to vary the practices and formats that are used for learning and reflection. For example, using the same format for each Sprint Retrospective will hardly lead to new insights.
Survivre Au Scrum Zombie
Points Clés Les équipes Scrum zombies se considèrent comme un rouage de la machine, incapables voire sans volonté de changer quoi que ce soit qui pourrait avoir un impact réel. Dans de nombreuses organisations, la livraison rapide est perçue comme un plus, et non comme une activité nécessaire pour gérer le risque et livrer de la valeur plus rapidement. Sans livraison rapide, la boucle du contrôle empirique du processus de Scrum s’effondre.
Surviving Zombie Scrum
Key Takeaways Zombie Scrum Teams see themselves as a cog in the wheel, unable or unwilling to change anything to have a real impact. In many organizations, shipping fast is perceived as a “nice to have”, instead of a necessary activity to manage risk and deliver value sooner. Without shipping fast, Scrum’s loop of Empirical Process Control collapses. In Zombie Scrum, organizations don’t create safety to fail. Teams can’t improve when they experience no room for uncertainty, doubt, or criticism.
Experiment: Diagnose Your Team Together
Overview Pearson Education, Inc., 221 River Street, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030, (Pearson) presents this site to provide information about products and services that can be purchased through this site. This privacy notice provides an overview of our commitment to privacy and describes how we collect, protect, use and share personal information collected through this site. Please note that other Pearson websites and online products and services have their own separate privacy policies.
My seven cents for new product managers
Product manager position is still not very clearly defined in general terms and in some cases, there can be a completely different job behind PM title even in the same organisation. Expectations what PM actually does or is responsible for also depend on the development framework and maturity level of the team(s) and the structure of the company. And then there are Product Owner, Business Product Owner and Technical Product Owner roles that in some cases overlap with Product Manager roles.
The Scrum Master as the Change Leader
On September 27th I provided a presentation at the Agile Leadership Day (ALD) in Zurich, Switzerland. The topic of my presentation was " The Scrum Master as the Change Leader ". In the weeks before the presentation, I already promoted the topic by which I caused quite a few questions/comments. Not wanting to spoil my key message, I promised to explain the title afterward. So here it is, the blog post in which I'll explain my view on the Scrum Master as the change leader.
Using Mad Tea to Engage the Neural Network of Groups
If you are an experienced Scrum practitioner, chances are that you’ve worked with groups of sixteen or more. It could be during the kickoff at the start of a new project, a multi-team refinement session, or a Sprint Review with every possible stakeholder attending it. How do you start such a gathering? How do you close the meetup and give everyone the feeling that it was a valuable investment of their time?
How Do You Know You’re Not Involving Stakeholders?
This post is an excerpt from the book that we, the authors, are writing, the ‘Zombie Scrum Survival Guide’. It’s our way of delivering small increments and involving our stakeholders: you, the reader. So we’d love to hear your feedback, encouragements and wild ideas. The Scrum Framework urges teams to involve stakeholders. But many Scrum Teams struggle to do so. For some, involving one or two internal stakeholders seems plenty.
Liberating Structures - an Antidote to Zombie Scrum
Key Takeaways Scrum is huge! It’s been massively adopted by organizations and has become the software development framework of choice. Many organizations and teams think they’re doing Scrum, when in reality they’re not even close. They’ve got all the Scrum roles, events and artifacts in place, but fail to meet their potential. The number one cause of Zombie Scrum is that most organizations and teams don’t have a clue as to why they are doing Scrum.
Improving the Sprint Review with Liberating Structures (Variant #1)
In this series of posts, we share our favorite strings of Liberating Structures for Scrum Events. In this post, we share the design for a Sprint Review. All the strings are freely available on this board in Trello. For the sake of readability, we will focus this post on the flow and considerations behind the string. For detailed step-by-step instructions and timings, please take a look at the Trello-board.
Improving Sprint Reviews With Liberating Structures (Variant One)
Nothing says liberation like a good sprint. In this series of posts, we share our favorite strings of Liberating Structures for Scrum Events. In this post, we share the design for a Sprint Review. All the strings are freely available on this board in Trello. For the sake of readability, we will focus this post on the flow and considerations behind the string. For detailed step-by-step instructions and timings, please take a look at the Trello-board.
Improving the Sprint Review with Liberating Structures (Variant #1)
A series on how to create more engaging and interactive Scrum Events with Liberating Structures In this series of posts, we share our favorite strings of Liberating Structures for Scrum Events. In this post, we share the design for a Sprint Review. All the strings are freely available on this board in Trello. For the sake of readability, we will focus this post on the flow and considerations behind the string.
Strategy Knotworking: Turning Ideas and Ambitions into Reality
By Barry Overeem, Professional Scrum Trainer, Scrum.org Organizations use Scrum because they hope it can help them become more Agile. Think of delivering value to customers sooner by releasing early & often, decreasing cycle time and lead time, improving team morale, lowering the number of defects, optimizing return on investment and increasing innovation rate.
Strategy Knotworking: turning ideas and ambitions into reality
Strategy Knotworking with Liberating Structures Organizations use Scrum because they hope it can help them become more Agile. Think of delivering value to customers sooner by releasing early & often, decreasing cycle time and lead time, improving team morale, lowering the number of defects, optimizing return on investment and increasing innovation rate. Working effectively with Scrum requires strategy.
The Problem With Scrum Experts
Recently, I stumbled upon the paper “Nothing is Written — Learning is an Adventure” by Johnnie Moore and Viv McWaters. I loved every part of it and felt myself nodding in agreement continuously.
When a Company Culture (Actually) Supports Its Developers
You don't have to have a ping pong table at the office, but you sure better encourage blowing off some steam in other healthy ways. For years, I've fulfilled the role of Scrum Master for many different organizations and Scrum Teams. These teams were mostly focused on software development. I've been in the fortunate position of having worked for some great organizations. These organizations were able to attract the smartest developers and create products customers loved.
Using 'Critical Uncertainties' to Quickly Respond to Future Challenges
Save {{ articles[0].views | formatCount}} Views Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Join For Free Critical Uncertainties make planning for the future a little bit easier. Liberating Structures are a collection of interaction patterns that allow you to unleash and involve everyone in a group - from extroverted to introverted and from leaders to followers. In this series of posts, we show how Liberating Structures can be used with Scrum.
Building TheLiberators.com: Integrate And Release Often
A couple of weeks ago we announced the development of the new website for The Liberators. This week, we'll be teaming up with a web-agency and Laurens Verwijs for a 5-day Sprint to realize this idea. The Scrum Team contains all the necessary frontend, backend, design, test, Scrum Master and Product Owner skills. Because we're also practicing what we preach, we'll be publishing a series of posts to share some of our learnings (and hopefully inspire you).
Trigger Big Change by Starting Small With 15% Solutions
Liberating Structures are facilitation techniques that allow you to unleash and involve everyone in a group — from extroverted to introverted and from leaders to followers. In this series of posts, we show how Liberating Structures can be used with Scrum. If you'd like to experience Liberating Structures first-hand, make sure to join our Immersion Workshop in Amsterdam (December 10 & 11) or one of the other ones taking place in Europe in December.
Create Focus With Ecocycle Planning
How often have you found yourself juggling too many balls? You may start dropping things left and right in a frantic effort to keep everything in the air. You will also find yourself unable to pick up new balls as it will only add stress and chaos. This may happen to you personally. Or in your team. Or in your entire organization. In these situations, we have to rediscover our focus and creatively ‘destroy’ what isn’t valuable anymore.
Creating a New Learning Experience With the PSM II Class
A couple of weeks ago Scrum.org launched the Professional Scrum Master II training. A 2-day advanced Scrum Master class designed to support Scrum Masters in their professional development. The PSM II class helps students to understand the stances that characterize an effective Scrum Master and servant-leader while diving deep into how they serve the Development Team, Product Owner and organization.
About the Professional Scrum Master II Class
This week Scrum.org launched the brand new Professional Scrum Master II class! For the past eight months, together with the Scrum.org staff, we've been turning our "Scrum Master Advanced"-class into an official Scrum.org course. As described in the article "The Making of the PSM-II Class" it was an incredible journey! As new course stewards, we are now responsible (with Stephanie Ockerman and Simon Reindl) for the entire Professional Scrum Master curriculum (both PSM-I and PSM-II).
The Making of The Brand-New Professional Scrum Master II Class
Finally! With the "embargo" lifted by Scrum.org, we can now share with you the incredible journey that Barry Overeem and I have been on for the past months. The bottom-line is that Scrum.org has acquired our "Scrum Master Advanced" class. We've been spending the past eight months turning it into the official, brand new Professional Scrum Master II class (PSM-II) for Scrum.org.
A Retrospective at a Rapidly Growing Startup
Liberating Structures are 33 easy-to-apply structures for interaction in groups of any size. They enhance relational coordination and trust, foster lively participation and give everyone the opportunity to work at the top of their intelligence. What's more, you can easily create strings of Liberating Structures to achieve some greater purpose. In this post, we share the strings we use.
Myth 14: Refinement Is a Required Meeting for The Entire Scrum Team
Scrum is intended as a simple, yet sufficient framework for complex product delivery . Scrum is not a one-size-fits-all solution, a silver bullet or a complete methodology. Instead, Scrum provides the minimal boundaries within which teams can self-organize to solve complex problems using an empirical approach. This simplicity is its greatest strength, but also the source of many misinterpretations and myths surrounding Scrum.
Myth 13: The Scrum Master Can't Remove People from the Scrum Team
Scrum is intended as a simple, yet sufficient framework for complex product delivery . Scrum is not a one-size-fits-all solution, a silver bullet or a complete methodology. Instead, Scrum provides the minimal boundaries within which teams can self-organize to solve a complex problem using an empirical approach. This simplicity is its greatest strength, but also the source of many misinterpretations and myths surrounding Scrum.
Myth 12: The Sprint Review Is a Demo
Scrum is intended as a simple, yet sufficient framework for complex product delivery. Scrum is not a one-size-fits-all solution, a silver bullet or a complete methodology. Instead, Scrum provides the minimal boundaries within which teams can self-organize to solve a complex problem using an empirical approach. This simplicity is its greatest strength, but also the source of many misinterpretations and myths surrounding Scrum.
Myth 14: Refinement is a Required Meeting For the Entire Scrum Team
Scrum is intended as a simple, yet sufficient framework for complex product delivery. Scrum is not a one-size-fits-all solution, a silver bullet or a complete methodology. Instead, Scrum provides the minimal boundaries within which teams can self-organize to solve complex problems using an empirical approach. This simplicity is its greatest strength, but also the source of many misinterpretations and myths surrounding Scrum.
Unleash Local Know-How With a User Experience Fishbowl
Organizations often struggle to tap into the expertise and experiences of employees. It’s often easier to hire external ‘experts’ than to build on the mountains of local knowledge that already exists. The User Experience Fishbowl is one of 33 Liberating Structures by Henri Leipmanowicz and Keith McCandless that is ideally suited for unleashing this kind of local wisdom, to identify patterns and to build on them.
Myth 11: In Scrum, We Spend Too Much Time in Meetings
Scrum is intended as a simple, yet sufficient framework for complex product delivery. Scrum is not a one-size-fits-all solution, a silver bullet or a complete methodology. Instead, Scrum provides the minimal boundaries within which teams can self-organize to solve a complex problem using an empirical approach. This simplicity is its greatest strength, but also the source of many misinterpretations and myths surrounding Scrum.
Stop Counterproductive Activities with TRIZ
It’s all too easy to use continuous improvement as an excuse to keep adding new things to do. Like those Sprint Retrospectives that always result in ‘one more thing’ to add to the task list, one more check to the Definition of Done or one more workshop to an already overcrowded agenda. Often, more can be gained by stopping unproductive activities and behaviors.
Use '9 Whys' to Discover the Purpose of Your Team
Many people know the Five Whys from the Toyota Production System and incorrectly assume that the Liberating Structure Nine Whys is the same with a few extra Whys thrown in. While the Five Whys are used to trace a defect back to a faulty process Nine Whys helps teams identify their purpose. A purpose is the main reason for working together, “an inexhaustible reason for a group to exist”. As such it is absolutely fundamental for collaboration, yet usually opaque or forgotten.
Myth 10 - In Scrum, There is no Planning
Scrum is intended as a simple, yet sufficient framework for complex product delivery. Scrum is not a one-size-fits-all solution, a silver bullet or a complete methodology. Instead, Scrum provides the minimal boundaries within which teams can self-organize to solve a complex problem using an empirical approach. This simplicity is its greatest strength, but also the source of many misinterpretations and myths surrounding Scrum.
Myth: Story Points are Required in Scrum
Today we address the idea that work on the Product Backlog must be estimated in Story Points. The majority of the teams that we work with do this, and there really is nothing inherently wrong with it. The myth begins where people misunderstand the purpose of estimation in Scrum and Story Points become an end in themselves. For those unfamiliar with Story Points; teams that use this technique estimate effort with relative estimates instead of time-based estimates (e.g. hours, days).
Myth 8: The Scrum Master is a Junior Agile Coach
Scrum is intended as a simple, yet sufficient framework for complex product delivery. Scrum is not a one-size-fits-all solution, a silver bullet or a complete methodology. Instead, Scrum provides the minimal boundaries within which teams can self-organize to solve a complex problem using an empirical approach. This simplicity is its greatest strength, but also the source of many misinterpretations and myths surrounding Scrum. Are you a Scrum Master and ready for the next step as Agile Coach?
Shift & Share with Scrum
Shift & Share is a Liberating Structure that helps spread novelty across groups and functions. Innovators showcase their ideas or products and gather meaningful feedback in short cycles. In one hour or less it’s possible to include everyone in a large group and make every voice heard in a structured, constructive way. Caravan is an exciting twist on Shift & Share that blends it with the Liberating Structure Wise Crowds.
Myth 7: The Scrum Master Must Resolve Every Problem
Today’s myth is all about how problems are resolved that are hindering a Development Team in their work. From a broken wi-fi router to a steady stream of meeting-requests from outside the team. And from clarifying unclear work to resolving a conflict between members. We’ve met quite a few teams where the Scrum Master has a full-time job taking care of these kinds of problems, or ‘impediments’ as they are called.
Myth: In Scrum, the Product Backlog Has to Consist Out of User Stories
Today’s myth is best understood by an example from a team we recently worked with. Their Product Backlog featured this item: ‘As a designer, I want to set up a style guide so that all developers can do basic design themselves’. This format – ‘As a [role] I want to [action] so that [reason]’ – is commonly referred to as a ‘User Story’.
Myth 2: The Sprint Backlog Can’t Change During the Sprint
The myth is that the Sprint Backlog is fixed during the Sprint. The Development Team commits itself to implement all the items on the Sprint Backlog. Changes are not allowed during the Sprint; no work can be added or removed. This offers the team the necessary focus to fulfil their given commitment. Why is this a myth? The Sprint Backlog represents the work that a Development Team needs to pull from the Product Backlog to achieve the Sprint Goal.
The Scrum Master as the Change Leader
On September 27th I provided a presentation at the Agile Leadership Day (ALD) in Zurich, Switzerland. The topic of my presentation was “The Scrum Master as the Change Leader“. In the weeks before the presentation I already promoted the topic by which I caused quite a few questions/comments. Not wanting to spoil my key message, I promised to explain the title afterwards. So here it is, the blog post in which I’ll explain my view on the Scrum Master as the change leader. Let me start with a confession.
A Day in the Life of a Scrum Master
What is a Scrum Master actually doing during the day? The most obvious answer can be found in the Scrum Guide itself. It offers a clear description of the services a Scrum Master provides to the Development Team, Product Owner and the organization. Some examples of these services are coaching the Development Team in self-organization and cross-functionality, helping the Product Owner finding techniques for effective Product Backlog management and supporting the organization in its Scrum adoption.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Barry
Contact Barry, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack