Certified Scrum Master Resources

Congratulations on your completion of the Certified ScrumMaster course!  This page provides some of the resources discussed in class for your ongoing use on your Scrum journey.

Scrum master Resources

• ScrumMaster Checklist!
• I also recommend the Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making
• I find The Oz Principle immensely valuable as a leader seeking individual and group accountability.  I hope you do, too.
• The ScrumMaster is an agent of change in organizations.  This is hard, really hard.  While there are many models for organizational change such as Kotter and ADKAR, Switch from Chip and Dan Heath introduces a straightforward, powerful model for anyone to enable change when change is hard.  I highly recommend it.

Development Team Resources

• I constantly field questions about responsibility, team conflict resolution and what to do when things go wrong.  Christopher Avery’s book on teamwork provides thoughtful guidance with exercises you can do and exercises for whole teams.  I highly recommend it (and just about anything from Christopher).
• I highly recommend the 2nd Edition of Liftoff to start or relaunch teams successfully.  Invaluable reference.
• In a recent class, we talked about cross-team dependencies preventing progress for one team waiting on another team.  See how Spotify solves this problem and others.
• See Google’s research to understand team effectiveness!
• The course workbook includes a few ideas from the Core Protocols contained in Software for Your Head. Check it out here. You can download the whole book for free.

Product Owner Resources

• You may find Richard Lawrence’s Story Splitting Cheat Sheet useful to help your Product Owner and Development Team to decompose product backlog items.
• I recently found the User Story Primer in my files and hope you find it valuable.
• Innovation Games

Sprint Planning Resources

• If you absolutely need to play Planning Poker with remote team members.
• For a review of the Innovation Game 20/20 Vision.

Daily Scrum Resources

• Listen to my podcast about Daily Scrum.
• Check out Gil Broza’s Daily Scrum Revitalizer for new techniques and tips to help your team create a plan for the day!
• See my blog post to remedy low energy Daily Scrums that are focused on tools like VersionOne, Rally, Jira, TFS, etc.

 Retrospective Resources

• Plans for Retrospectives (aka Retromat)
• Tasty Cupcakes
• Retrospective Wiki

Definition of Done Resources

• Additional information about the Definition of Done and a sample.
• Here is another article about the Definition of Done.