Empiricism is built by 3 pillars, Transparency, Inspection and Adaption. People used to talk about how to inspect and adapt, but did not stress on transparency. It likes you can't stand on the three-legged table while it lost one leg.

Transparency is important! No transparency, no data. How do we inspect and adapt? How do we have continuous improvement? It like walking in the darkness.

"Scrum is easy to understand but difficult to master."

Yes! It likes when you play chess, the rule is easy to understand but difficult to win. It needs practice again and again to be master. When I hold a Scrum class, I got the same problem with how can I help my trainees become Professional Scrum Master, not how to help them understand Scrum but also practice as well.

I spent my time to research about Simulation Scrum Games. There are some games like Lego4 Scrum, Scrum Card... but they were not what I'm looking for. I need a game helps my trainees to practice Scrum likes the real situation. They need to face with something happens in real Scrum team everyday and whereby, they can improve and know how to handle this situation.

In December 2018, ScrumViet holds a Workshop with very unique idea: “Simulation game to build an auto driven car with Scrum in 30 minutes”.

During our workshop, we introduced to participants about Agile, especially how to apply Scrum framework.

Through this interesting game to simulate an auto car from Lego, participants experienced a lot of practical situations with 5 Scrum Events based on 3 Scrum Artifacts and Definition of Done.

The simulation game not only supported the participants to get an overview about how to apply Scrum to build a “working product”, but also gained the experiences of Scrum team to face and deal with issues could happen in reality.

Let’s enjoy our amazing moment with ScrumViet family and looking forward to our next Workshop!

Definition of Value
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Human always follows and find Happiness. Although it's very difficult to find, everybody has different happiness. Some people think money is happiness or a happy family, others think happiness is the peace of the soul (like a monk)... So we can say "what makes people happy is value for them".

The company is the same. Of course, every company has an ultimate purpose is revenue (except you are running a non-profit company). So, values of them are making the customer happy, good culture, good processes. over that values is assumed to have more money or save more money.

Imaging about After 8 hours of training, Participants left the room, as a trainer how many percents of knowledge you think trainees took? How can they apply a piece of knowledge to their real work and transform it into an experience?

To master a skill. Learners need to keep doing repeatedly or practice again and again until they perform it well. Like Shu Ha Ri, to reach to Ha or Ri level, you need to go through Shu level - It means "repeat" and "Practice makes perfect".

Did you feel tired with your Scrum Board which has over 20 columns and the flow is too complicated? If yes! It's the right time for you to look back and remove the complexity. The reason we apply Scrum is dealing with complexity, not making it bigger!
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From my old post about "Definition of Workflow", some people asked me to write more detail about "how to build a workflow" and "how to apply it" to maximize the value of a team.

Just start this post with a few questions: Is your product (#Noproject) roadmap working? How much time and effort you take to update it but it's still far away from reality?

If your roadmap is still well and value can be created to the end user, this post is not for you. This post also does not share how to have a good roadmap, just show some common issues when you build a roadmap to make your plan is useless.

As Product Owner, how do you deliver Values to your Customer/End-User? To know what is value, you need to validate it. To validate your value, you need to know who is your Customer (End user).

I asked that because identifying your end user is very important. If you don't know who is your real customer, how can you build a product to make them happy? Or you will make no-one happy, no customer happy is no business, right?

Let go through 3 Situations below:

Why Rhythm is important?
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Empirical Process based on Transparency, Inspection, and Adaptation. Therefore Rhythm of Inspection, and Adaptation is very important. It will help your Scrum team have Time-Box and circle of Focus, Learn and Mature.

"Rhythm helps team to focus and reduces the complexity"

I always say Definition of Done is simple: It is just a common language/ understanding about "What done means" of Scrum Team and stakeholders.

But why is it very important?
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Well! Let's go through events inside a Sprint and see how DoD support Scrum team.

1. At Sprint Planning: Definition of Done helps and guides Development team forecast about how many Product Backlog Items they can do within this sprint to achieve a sprint goal.

I got interesting questions about Daily Scrum and would like to share it today. Some people asked me a question about "hold Daily Scrum at the beginning of the day", let’s go into the details of this case:

- Scrum Master asked the team to have daily Scrum at the beginning of the day.

- The reason he wants to have Daily Scrum at beginning of the day is: He thought Daily Scrum must be held at early of day and it also brings one benefit that people go to office right time, and people can start to work right after the meeting.

Are we really a Team?Looking back a couple of years ago, I had a chance to work with the great team. Yes! They are a great team, but not from the beginning…that was a broken team when I came.
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– The team used Scrum but the Transparency was lost. Developer hid issues from Product Owner when he came to ask. They said: “All good!”, but actually, they were deep in Bugs & Impediments and couldn’t deliver working software.

​Why we are here?

Last week I had a short discussion with some fellows, one of the interesting topic is about "Human Resources", and most of them had an issue with how to align Scrum with HR department:

• Most of concerns we discussed: Scrum is applied and team start to perform/collaboration well but when Annual Review comes Scrum team is broken. While Scrum is over team success, collaboration where is "our goal" important than "my goal". But current Tracking Performance is based more on the individual.

• Team member starts to concern how could they be assessed? and how about their career path?

• They have personal KPIs and focus to finish that first then the goal of the team. If not they will get a bad review this year.

Hold Back! Do we have any gap here?​