Facilitate great working agreements sessions with the Working Agreements Canvas for High Performing Teams.

Many teams I work with like the idea of sharing their burnup charts at sprint reviews but are not sure how to create one or get the information needed to populate it. In this article, we’ll cover both how to create a burnup chart and how to populate it.

Start impressing your customers, stakeholders and executives with beautiful burnup charts at your next sprint review. All you need is your Scrum team’s velocity and the number of story points required to reach your next goal.

Many challenges faced by Scrum teams can be traced back to poorly written and poorly maintained product backlogs. A key ingredient to product backlog health is that every user story is kept up-to-date with accurate estimates. Finding the time to estimate the full product backlog and keep those estimates current can be daunting for Scrum teams. Here are some tips on estimating your full product backlog like a pro.

We’ve all been there…scope and schedule have been planned, work has begun, time has passed and now your leaders are asking for an update, but what they really want is for you to tell them that everything is on track and exactly as originally planned…

Let me guess - you're in a coaching engagement right now with no clear agenda or timeline. You hang out at the back of team meetings and try to add value by interrupting with powerful questions. There's no rhyme or reason to when you intervene, and the team is making little visible progress. The sponsor is frustrated in your weekly check-in because she doesn't see progress. You try and convince the team to work in the way that the sponsor wants by winning each person over one-by-one. Eventually, you're kind of just...there; no one really knows why and everyone, including yourself, wonders when you'll leave.

A healthy product backlog is a necessary requisite to a healthy Scrum team. Rather than focusing only on refining user stories for the upcoming sprint, prudent Scrum teams invest in refining the full product backlog to increase transparency, stay focused on their vision, and keep the full organization aligned. Achieving transparency consists of much more than simply making information available, interested parties have to be able to get the information they're looking for in a matter of seconds.

You’re leading an agile software delivery team in some capacity - maybe as a ScrumMaster, product leader or manager. Your team has worked hard to align with the Agile Manifesto and you're proud of their ability to build and ship software at regular intervals. You believe the business is better off as a result of your team’s ability to learn and adapt to changing market conditions faster than before. Unfortunately, your work becomes more and more challenging as the differences between agile and the status quo become apparent. The more agile your team gets, the more you rub the rest of the organization the wrong way.

No Agile coach is immune to moments where their coaching powers sputter and they feel a little less than a superhero. Self-limiting beliefs, impostor syndrome, difficulty taking the next-step or being unclear about what we truly want can all send our inner heroes back into the shadows. Keeping radioactive spiders or cans of spinach handy might help, but what does it really take to transform a Peter Parker into someone so confident and fully actualized that they're compelled to use their powers to save the world? The fact is, we're all brimming with the potential to make this transformation and the best way to unleash our Agile coaching superpowers is to enlist a coach of our own.