Knowledge Hub

People often say that “Scrum is easy to understand and hard to master.” Yes, the Scrum Framework should be easy to understand, as well as the Scrum Master accountability. But that is not what I have seen. I’ve seen many Scrum Masters think that they’ve “mastered Scrum”, but what they’re doing is purely mechanical. A framework is something mechanical, and unfortunately, what some people don’t pay enough attention to when applying Scrum is to its values, pillars, and empiricism.

“What are people talking about? What are common challenges across the customer and partner landscape? What are people doing to address those challenges? What are new opportunities that people and customers are discovering along the way?” These are just some of the things that Shane McGuire, the Channel Business Development Lead for Jira Align at Atlassian in EMEA, hopes to find out at the RTE Summit at Capital C next month. And, as the hosts of the annual RTE Summit, we here at Gladwell Academy know that Shane and all of our other participants are bound to uncover these answers and so much more! To prepare a little better for the Summit, we decided to have a conversation with Shane, who represented our partners Atlassian & Cprime. During this conversation, Shane was kind enough to offer some insights on what makes the role of an RTE unique, what he sees as the upcoming Summit’s program highlights, and what Atlassian & Cprime are bringing to the table this year (hint: it’s an absolute game-changer in the world of Enterprise Agility!)

“We had an internal discussion with our team about how we found out about the RTE Summit, and I think it was because we saw a LinkedIn post about it,” Seibert Media’s Partner Manager, Yulia Byvsheva, told us when we enquired how they found out about the RTE Summit. And now, Seibert Media is on their way to partnering with us for their second ever RTE Summit, coming to you live from Amsterdam on November 7th & 8th! In anticipation of the Summit, we met with Seibert Media’s Partner Manager, Yulia Byvsheva, and discussed what their organization does to foster growth and aid collaboration, as well as how these integral topics tie into the wonderful networking and learning opportunities brought about by our Annual RTE Summit. “We have only been to one RTE Summit so far,” Yulia told us, “and we see ourselves as very lucky to participate again this year for the second time.” Keep reading to find out why you won’t want to miss out on the Summit this year and what Seibert’s contribution is to this event!

If you are new to Agile, you might be wondering what is the difference between SAFe, Scrum, and Kanban, and how to understand what is better to choose for your team or company. In this article, we described in detail what is each of the terms and how to properly apply them in your business.

This blog is going to be unconventional in comparison to what you’re used to reading in our Knowledge Hub. Instead of deep diving into theories and best practices of Agile and SAFe, this article will describe the personal experiences of an individual who began their Agile journey at Gladwell Academy.

Being a Scrum Master is easy if you do mechanical Scrum, but it’s hard if you want to do it properly. The Scrum Master is an accountability in Scrum and a role in SAFe. And yes, being Scrum Master means you actually master Scrum. This means that you understand and know the Scrum pillars, empiricism, framework, accountabilities, and artifacts by heart. If you’re a Scrum Master in SAFe, as part of a scaled ecosystem, you also have to have a strong knowledge of the framework, cross-team synchronizations, PI Planning, and more.

In 2001, representatives from Scrum (Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland), Extreme Programming (Kent Beck), Crystal (Alistair Cockburn and Jim Highsmith), Feature-Driven Development, and others created the Manifesto for Agile Software Development – aka the Agile Manifesto – which outlines 4 values and 12 principles. Self-named “The Agile Alliance”, this group of individuals who created the Agile Manifesto gave birth to what the world knows as Agile today.

With the 7th RTE Summit around the corner, we checked in with our RTE of the Year 2021, Mayank Khare from KLM. We were curious to find out what his approach is at KLM and asked him to share his biggest learnings with us.

Organizations run business, while business delivers value to customers, clients, and users. Therefore, business is never forgotten. New valuable functionalities and features are always considered, as they are most likely to give us a return of our investment. When talking about hardware and software development, architecture and technical activities play an extremely important role. In many organizations, these are usually forgotten, or at least not treated as part of the business. Value may have a different meaning depending on your organization, team, and business. But the truth is, value is what your customer wants or needs. When you look at software development, for example, value means a new working functionality which is usable and proves a business hypothesis that we – as the customer, product manager, product owner, etc. – had in mind when gathering and prioritizing it in a backlog. Architecture, components, integration, deployment – all of those support the business that sits at the top, where it’s usually forgotten.

When was the last time you encountered something by accident, only to have it unexpectedly put you on the path to discovery? Unbeknownst to us (until recently!) Lisa Lykke Jordan had such an encounter when she first came across our RTE Summit in 2019. “I found out about the Gladwell Academy RTE Summit by accident, actually,” she said. While she was looking up information about SAFe, she encountered a website about the SAFe Summit, which in turn led her to stumbling across our RTE Summit website. As Lisa was a starting RTE at the time, she felt that the RTE Summit would hold more relevance for her than the SAFe Summit. “Because I was not that experienced as an RTE at the time (I had only been an RTE for about a year) and I was the only RTE in my company, I didn’t have anyone to actually spar with,” explained Lisa. As such, Lisa decided it would be good for her to expand her horizons and meet up with fellow RTEs from outside of Denmark who had more years of experience under their belts. Before she knew it, Lisa had her very first ticket to our RTE Summit -- the first of many, as she’d later learn! “All my hopes and expectations about the RTE Summit came true after the first time, so that was a good thing! That’s why I kept coming back,” noted Lisa.

If there is no trust and transparency within your Scrum Team, there is no team – just a group of individuals.

Collaboration is key to any organization’s success. In this article, we invite you to look at the benefits of collaboration in the workplace and the role that Scrum plays in this process. No matter how many members of the team work together, there is always some communication taking place between different departments and individuals within the organization. So, that brings us to the question: why does that level of communication need to be increased?