Can you use breakout rooms in Microsoft Teams? You actually can!  AUTHOR: Malene Marie Bendixen Jacobsen, Agile Coach I have always been a fan of Zoom and it’s breakout room functionality for my virtual sessions, and I must admit I was always skeptical when working on Microsoft Teams as I hand a long list of “issues” with what they could do for remote teams. Breakout room functionality was at the top of this list. How

AUTHOR: Darren Bekker, Agile Coach & RTE ‘’We should never waste a good crisis’’ Winston Churchill With Covid-19, most of the world in lockdown and a pending global recession, it has never been more important for businesses to transform. Many companies have ceased projects and programme’s and have moved into survival mode. It is now, more important than ever for organizations to accelerate digital transformation initiatives or face potential extinction.  The last global recession in

AUTHOR: Greg Banach, Agile Coach I have used this quote before when selling the concept of PI planning to clients, “We bring everyone together so that people can have quality, face-to-face conversations”. I have stressed that it is was vital to bring everyone together – that the cost of flights and travel were worth it as quality conversations were vital in ensuring that all members of the team were clear with their deliverables, tough conversations

AUTHOR: Vanessa Martens, Agile Coach I was reflecting on the Business Agility conference we went to about a month ago and the talk that really resonated with me was lessons from an Agile Transformation Coach….I have kept the lessons but put my own flavor to it, I hope she doesn’t mind:) These lessons humble me as I quickly forget where people are in their Agile journey, I may have done this many times over the

AUTHOR: Vanessa Martens, Agile Coach Over the last 3 years we have worked with organisations across South Africa that are realising the benefits of implementing an agile approach to transform their business. The most cited reason we have encountered to embark on a Digital Transformation is improved speed to market. Today’s successful companies innovate on the fly and recently we have been coaching an AI-powered Chatbot division at a Telecommunications company that has successfully embraced an

AUTHOR: Kevin Shine SAFe is an excellent framework for bringing more agility to teams as is breaks through the glass ceiling between development teams and the rest of the business. This leads to improved delivery and less frustration at all levels of the organisation. Sounds amazing, but unfortunately it’s not all as easy as it sounds on paper. You can easily end up cargo culting or having bad scrum practices. Let me explain why. Some

AUTHOR: Malene Marie Bendixen Jacobsen, Agile Coach Happy New Year and welcome to 2020! 2020! Wow, time flies. How was your 2019? Was it hard? Successful? Challenging? Take a moment to think about it. What word would describe your 2019? Maybe you are sitting with a thought of why should I look back? 2020 is already here and I am ready for it, let’s get going… With the agile mindset of inspecting and adapting, it

AUTHOR: Malene Marie Bendixen Jacobsen, Agile Coach Firstly, as a point of clarification, we are talking about Sprint Planning in Scrum. As a coach and trainer, I get exposed to a lot of teams and it surprises me how many of these teams still do Sprint Planning 1 (SP1) and Sprint Planning 2 (SP2). Scrum is all about inspection and adaptation, so it should not come as a surprise that even the Scrum Guide gets

AUTHOR: Malene Marie Bendixen Jacobsen, Agile Coach Have you ever been part of or facilitated a session where the energy felt low? Where some of your participants were half asleep or struggled to stay focused? Or do you have teams that feel they are ALWAYS in meetings, indirectly saying it is boring and they would rather be coding. You are not the only one. The problem with these sessions is that when the attendees have

AUTHOR: Malene Marie Bendixen Jacobsen, Agile Coach Should Project Managers be Scrum Masters? Well, it depends… I often get met with the view that someone in the team, be it a project manager or a team lead should “just fulfill the Scrum Master role”. For me, it seems like many have not fully understood the role of the Scrum Master, and I can see why. The pattern I’ve seen emerge more often than not is