7 Ways Managers Can Support Self-Managed Teams

Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes

One of the cornerstones of Scrum is the self-managed team, and managers often struggle with this change in thinking.  Here are a few tips I have picked up on how to best deal with this issue.

A common question I get asked is:

“How can I support my teams in doing a better job of self-organizing and self-managing?”

Well, there are actually several things you can do to support your teams as they learn these new self managed behaviors and get better at them.

Straight up, don’t manage your Scrum team.  I will repeat that…

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Is your company infected with SCRUMBUT?

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

If you’ve been around SCRUM long enough you will be familiar with the term SCRUMBUT. SCRUM what? SCRUMBUT.

First off it makes me chuckle, it’s a great name.  Then my stomach churns.

“We use SCRUM… but…”

Memories of bad senior stakeholder initial meetings come flooding back… “We run Agile here, so we don’t create requirements”, “The guys just build whatever I tell them too” – OMG, SCRUMBUT.

So, what is SCRUMBUT, how can you identify it and what can you do to clean it up?

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Why Happiness Is The New Productivity

Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

This is the best video I have watch in a long time.  This is how all leaders should be striving to lead.  It wont take you long to realise that I am a big fan of Vishen Lakhiani and his leadership ideas… they fit with Agile so well.

In 2009 Vishen Lakhiani was asked to speak at Engage Today in Calgary along with such luminaries as Sir Richard Branson, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Stephen Covey, Nobel Prize Winner F.W De Klerk, Tony Hsieh, the founder of

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What to do if your teams continually miss their commitments

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

What should you do if your teams continually miss their commitments?

That’s a question I get all the time and it is a serious problem. Interestingly, though, the answer to this problem might not be what you think it is.

Sometimes people naturally think my teams are terrible at estimating or maybe they just don’t take commitments seriously. That might be true but there are some other things I suggest you investigate first.

By far the most common reason for a team continually missing commitments is they are being Continue reading What to do if your teams continually miss their commitments