In 2009, I got a chance to see my beloved New Zealand All Blacks play England in Twickenham Stadium.  I was thrilled at the prospect of seeing in person the players I’d watched on TV so many times.  It cost a small fortune to get decent seats but I managed to do it, midfield about 35 rows up.  At last, I was going to get the see the sweat drip off Richie McCaw’s brow up close and in person!

Of all the Scrum meetings, the daily Scrum is the one I am most likely to see done out-and-out wrong. I think this stems from the fact that many people learned what to do in the daily Scrum, but never learned what a daily Scrum is supposed to produce.

Some of my clients grow frustrated with their disengaged, unskilled Product Owners. In an effort to get the work done, they create a new Scrum role called “Proxy Product Owner.” This person’s job, in a nutshell, is to do the “real” Product Owner’s job for them, particularly the less glamorous parts: meeting with stakeholders, writing user stories, attending Scrum meetings.

One question I receive fairly often from harried ScrumMasters is: how do I help a poorly performing Scrum team member improve? What can I do to make that person perform better? To answer this question, you must decide if you agree with a key foundational belief in Scrum: the power of intrinsic motivation. People who have internalized Scrum values believe in intrinsic motivation.