#156. Drawing on the book "Mastering Professional Scrum" by Stephanie Ockerman and Simon Reindl, I outline critical areas for team success, such as creating valuable products and understanding organizational influences. I emphasize five core capabilities needed for continuous improvement: teaching, facilitation, coaching, technical excellence, and servant leadership.

I discuss the continuous improvement process recommended by Ockerman and Reindl, which includes self-assessment questionnaires and root cause analysis to address team issues. I highlight the importance of the Scrum pillars—transparency, inspection, and adaptation—and shows how sprint events like planning and review foster a culture of empiricism, allowing teams to run experiments and refine their practices based on real-world outcomes.

Celebrating the traits of high-performing scrum teams, I underscore the significance of being cross-functional, self-managing, and collaborative. I touch upon practices that bolster collaboration within these teams, such as backlog refinement and pair programming, while also stressing the freedom scrum teams have to define their workflows within Scrum guidelines.

You'll also learn about common challenges, such as the absence of key roles during refinement sessions, and recommends using the Five Whys technique to tackle root causes. I provide practical tips like conducting multiple short refinement sessions to prevent release delays.

RESOURCES

• Simon Reindl on LinkedIn
• Stephanie Ockerman on LinkedIn
• Mastering Professional Scrum from Amazon (affiliate)
• Mastering Professional Scrum audiobook on Audible (affiliate)
• Stephanie Ockerman's site, Agile Socks
• Mastering Professional Scrum on InformIT