When forming a new Scrum team, it’s crucial to look beyond the foundational aspects of Scrum and consider the broader ecosystem of practices, mindsets, and collaborative tools that contribute to a team's long-term success. This article focuses on just a few of the many topics that can be crucial for a team's growth and sustainability.

In my experience, teams are often simply taught what Scrum is, but many essential elements are overlooked. This can happen due to the inexperience of the coach or Scrum Master; lack of time to properly prepare; or, unfortunately, a lack of buy-in from managers who push for training to be completed as quickly as possible. 

Addressing these additional areas can make a significant difference in setting up a team for success:

1. Team Culture and Psychological Safety

Creating a positive team culture where members feel safe to express their ideas, take risks, and provide constructive feedback is essential. Psychological safety fosters innovation and allows the team to learn from failures without fear. Establish ground rules for open communication and active listening to build trust from the start.

2. Defining Team Values and Working Agreements

Aligning on shared values helps guide the team’s interactions and decision-making processes. Establishing working agreements ensures everyone is clear on expectations for behavior, availability, and participation. These agreements should be reviewed periodically to adapt to evolving team dynamics.

Examples of working agreements include:

• The preferred days for team members to work on location versus remotely
• The agreed times for key Scrum events like daily stand-ups, sprint planning, and retrospectives
• How peer reviews of work will be conducted, such as dedicated review sessions or integrating feedback within daily work

These agreements create clarity and foster a shared commitment to team practices.

3. Effective Use of Collaboration Tools

Remote and hybrid teams need strong digital collaboration practices. Introduce collaboration tools to facilitate brainstorming sessions, create visual artifacts, and document shared learnings. Training the team on how to use these tools effectively can greatly enhance communication and efficiency.

4. Backlog Management and Prioritization Techniques

While backlog refinement is a core part of Scrum, diving deeper into prioritization frameworks like MoSCoW, the Kano Model, or Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) can help teams make more strategic decisions. Ensure that product owners are equipped to guide these practices effectively and that the team understands how to contribute.

Additionally, emphasize the importance of properly splitting backlog items vertically so that each item delivers incremental value. This approach ensures that each piece of work completed adds real user or business value. Define a clear definition of “done” to establish a shared understanding of completion criteria and maintain high-quality standards across the team.

The importance of story points should also be highlighted. While story points can aid in planning, their main strength lies in triggering discussions and helping the team share a common understanding of the complexity and scope of backlog items. This practice fosters better alignment and clarity across the team.

5. Agile Mindset Beyond Scrum

While Scrum is a popular framework, embracing the broader agile mindset—focusing on adaptability, continuous learning, and iterative improvement—helps the team apply principles flexibly. Introduce Lean concepts, Kanban practices for visualizing work in progress, and DevOps principles for fostering collaboration between development and operations.

Conclusion

Building a Scrum team involves more than simply implementing the basic rules of the framework. By focusing on these additional areas—team culture, working agreements, collaboration tools, and advanced backlog management—teams can develop a more holistic approach that supports sustainable growth and long-term success. Investing in these practices sets the stage for a resilient, collaborative, and high-performing team.

What other topics are important for you when you train new teams?
 

Kevin Korterud

Life is full of surprises…they always seem to show up unexpectedly. As project managers, we rely on our PMI certification training—as well as our experiences—to both detect and mitigate the effects from surprises, such as missed milestones, new regulatory requirements and quality issues.

But what happens when the surprise turns out to be a short-term outage of the project manager? This can come about for a variety of reasons, including family, health and other personal matters. A recent health issue that took me away from a project for a few weeks got me thinking about how to address this special type of surprise.

In my early career days on projects, the short-term loss of a project manager meant the project was typically put on hold until the PM returned. In today’s complex, high-speed technology delivery environment, stopping a project is less viable due to market needs, dependencies, specialized domain knowledge, engaged suppliers and many other factors.

So, in addition to all of the usual risk factors, one has to consider a risk mitigation plan for the project manager should a surprise occur (this plan also applies to other key roles such as the delivery, test and PMO leads).

Let’s look at a few questions to help you prepare for surprises when they occur to the PM role:

1. Who could be a backup PM? The process of finding a backup project manager usually falls into two categories: easy…and not so easy. If there are project track leads with prior PM experience, rank order them as to the size and complexity of the prior projects they have managed. Discuss the project(s) with them and create a plan for the areas that you look to build out as part of their duties in being a backup.

If nobody on your project has any prior PM experience, another option could be to consider an existing program management office lead. With today’s complex program office operations, it’s common to have program management office leaders with prior project management experience. They could assist as a backup PM.

2. When should you have a backup PM? As one never knows when surprises will occur, the best time to identify a backup project manager is during mobilization of the project. By having a person identified early in the project life cycle, it better positions the backup PM to be successful should a surprise occur.

If it’s not possible to identify and develop a backup at the start of a project, consider an approach that takes advantage of the upcoming or current phase of the project. For example, if the project is headed into the design phase, consider your functional lead as a potential backup. Just be cognizant of the additional burden the backup PM role places on an existing team member; consider additional program office resources to help with the execution of project operational processes.

3. How do you make someone a backup PM? After selecting a backup, create a list of topics to educate them in the many facets of the project. This can start with operational topics such as risk/issue reporting, status report and work planning, and cross-training. From there, they can start to be immersed in domain-related topics with the project (e.g., how does a month-end financial close work?). The domain-related topics may require some specialized training if they have not been exposed to them before.

Keep in mind that the backup PM still has their core project duties to execute, so they should not be overburdened with immersion activities. Keep the window for these activities to a few hours each week, and continue them through the life of the project. It is also helpful to bring the backup PM along to attend key project meetings to make them aware—as well as to make other project team members aware of their provisional role in the event of the unexpected.  

The days of having a project being placed on hold due to the short-term loss of a project manager are long behind us. In particular, with the highly integrated technology project ecosystem that exists today, the stoppage of one project can impact several others—thus affecting the overall progress of a company portfolio.

Knowing who your backup project manager is offers a mitigation path when surprises occur. In addition, it’s also an essential form of career building by exposing the backup PM to the next level of delivery stewardship.

How have you selected and groomed a backup project manager for your delivery efforts?

By Peter Tarhanidis, Ph.D.

One of the impacts artificial intelligence has had is prompting a reconstitution of project management. Here I look to leading industry experts to explore the benefits to project management systems due to matured AI software; and the maturity of the project manager as a data- and fact-driven champion of business outcomes and innovation. This combination of advanced project systems performance and leadership competence will significantly transform project success rates.

As a background to the current state of project management, HBR states that $48 trillion is invested annually in projects. The Standish Group notes that only 35% of projects are successful, and 65% of projects waste resources and have unrealized benefits.

Additionally, Proofhub attributes project failure to firms that lack project management delivery systems; they are prone to miss targets and overspend. It noted that 67% of projects fail because project management is undervalued; 44% of all managers do not believe in the importance of project management software; and 46% of firms place a high priority on project management. Also noted: Utilizing a good software program reduces failure by 10%, and scope creep by 17%.

More specifically, a PMI Learning Library article noted some reasons for project failure:

1. Unclear goals and objectives
2. Lack of resource planning
3. Poor communication across the organization
4. Inadequate stakeholder management
5. Poorly defined project scope
6. Inaccurate cost and time estimates
7. Inadequate risk management
8. Inexperienced project managers
9. Unrealistic expectations

Maturing Systems
An HBR article suggests that poor project success rates are due to a low level of available mature systems. Many firms continue to rely on spreadsheets, slides and other applications that haven’t matured current practices. While the current tools are adequate in measuring project performance, they do not allow for the development of intelligent automation and collaboration across the portfolio of projects. The opportunity to apply AI to project management could improve the success ratio by a quantifiable 25%, or trillions of dollars of newly realized benefits for firms and society.

Gartner Inc. analysts predict that by 2030, AI software—driven by conversational AI, machine learning and robotic process automation for gathering data, reporting and tracking—will eliminate 80% of all project management office tasks. Gartner identifies project management disruption in six aspects:

1. Better selection and prioritization
2. Support for the project management office
3. Improved, faster project definition, planning and reporting
4. Virtual project assistants
5. Advanced testing systems and software
6. A new role for the project manager

PwC envisions AI-enabled project management software will improve a project leader’s decision-making process across the following five key areas crucial to success:

1. Business insights improvements by filtering better data for relevant knowledge
2. Risk management assessing scenarios that offer mitigation strategies
3. Human capital in allocating resources more appropriately to meet the business priorities
4. Integrating various technologies and specialists to improve project outcomes
5. Active assistance by enhancing administrative tasks and stakeholder progress communications

PwC posits the advancements in project management software are an opportunity for firms and leaders that are most ready to take advantage of this disruption and reap the rewards.

PM Competence
PMI’s Project Manager Competency Development (PMCD) Framework provides an assessment and development of a project manager’s competence. It is based on the premise that competencies have a direct effect on performance. A project manager’s competence can be categorized in terms of project management knowledge, project management performance and their accomplishments, and personal competency in performing the project activities and personality characteristics. This combination is the stated success criteria for a competent project manager.

AI’s capability to assess disparate sources of big data to obtain actionable insights arms project managers with improved decision-making competence throughout the project lifecycle. However, a challenge noted by PwC’s recent analysis of OECD data (covering 200,000 jobs in 29 countries) warns that AI’s job displacement effect will automate 30% of jobs involving administrative manual tasks by the mid-2030s. This indicates a clear need to upskill project manager competence in order to thrive in the future.

In order to succeed, a firm’s culture of adaptability and lifelong learning is a cornerstone for shifting today’s project management roles into the future. They will need to expand competence in soft skills, business and management skills, technical and digital skills—all working in concert with each other.

IAPM states project managers will face fundamental changes over the next 10 years with job descriptions and roles. It suggests AI will make logical analysis and decisions, allowing the PM to focus their main area of responsibility on creativity, resolving conflicts, and innovation.

Lastly, with any transformation or disruption, one must consider the actions and obstacles—whether financial, management support, or workforce ability—to embrace and enact change. Here are some key considerations to reflect on:

1. Does your firm value project management?
2. Is your firm a quick adopter of intelligence-based project software?
3. Will your firm invest in your competence development?

Post your thoughts in the comments!

References

1. PMI: Project Management Competency Development Framework—Second Edition
2. PMI: Why do projects really fail?
3. HBR: How AI Will Transform Project Management
4. Gartner Says 80 Percent of Today’s Project Management Tasks Will Be Eliminated by 2030 as Artificial Intelligence Takes Over
5. IPAM: Will project managers soon be replaced by AI?
6. PWC: A Virtual Partnership? How Artificial Intelligence will disrupt Project Management and change the role of Project Managers
7. Proofhub: Top 10 Reasons Why Projects Fail (And How to Solve Them)

By Christian Bisson

Within the realm of agile project management, the composition of a team greatly impacts its success. While all team members play a vital role, the inclusion of an external product owner (as opposed to an internal one) poses challenges that can hinder teams’ potential to deliver value to users. 

In this post, I will highlight four potential pitfalls of having a product owner external to the team, with real-life examples underscoring the benefits of an integrated team approach.

1. Misalignment and Unclear Vision

When a product owner is external to the team, misalignment and an unclear vision can arise. The absence of direct day-to-day collaboration stifles the shared understanding of project goals, priorities, and user needs. This lack of alignment makes it difficult for the team to make informed decisions and deliver a product that meets customer expectations.

Example: Imagine a software development project where the product owner is external and has limited interaction with the team. This separation hinders effective communication and prevents the product owner from gaining in-depth knowledge of the project domain. As a result, misaligned priorities and a fuzzy vision emerge, leading to a disconnect between the team's efforts and the desired outcomes.

2. Inefficient Prioritization and Decision Making

An external product owner often leads to inefficient prioritization and decision-making processes. Without a direct line of communication, the product owner's expertise and insights may not reach the team effectively. As a result, crucial decisions regarding scope, timelines and trade-offs may be delayed or misinterpreted, leading to project inefficiencies and missed opportunities.

Example: In a marketing campaign project, an external product owner who lacks real-time interaction with the team may struggle to grasp the evolving market trends and user preferences. Consequently, delays in decision making occur, preventing timely adjustments to the campaign strategy, ultimately impacting its effectiveness and return on investment.

3. Communication Gaps and Feedback Delays

With an external product owner, communication gaps and feedback delays become commonplace. The limited availability and reduced involvement of the product owner hinder continuous communication and the timely exchange of information. This results in a slower feedback loop, preventing the team from promptly addressing concerns, adapting to changing requirements, and delivering high-quality increments.

Example: In a mobile app development project, an external product owner may have competing priorities and limited availability for sprint reviews. As a result, feedback on delivered iterations may be delayed, preventing the team from incorporating valuable insights—and potentially leading to inefficient use of development resources.

4. Detached from User-Centric Mindset

When the product owner is external, the team risks losing touch with a user-centric mindset. The direct contact between the product owner and end users diminishes, inhibiting the team's understanding of user needs, preferences and pain points. Without this critical insight, the team may struggle to develop solutions that truly resonate with the target audience.

Example: Consider an e-commerce project where an external product owner has limited interactions with actual customers. The team, lacking direct access to user feedback and insights, may fail to anticipate user behavior, resulting in an e-commerce platform that falls short of meeting customers' expectations and inhibits business growth.

Conclusion

In the agile realm, the inclusion of an external product owner introduces several pitfalls that can hinder project success. Misalignment, inefficient decision making, communication gaps, and a detached user-centric mindset are among the challenges an integrated team approach aims to mitigate. By recognizing the drawbacks of an external product owner, agile teams can foster collaboration, transparency, and a deep understanding of customer needs, ultimately leading to more successful project outcomes.

The above points assume there is one external product owner for the team. However, if there are multiple external product owners in a team, all the challenges mentioned earlier become even more significant. It not only amplifies the existing issues, but also adds to the tension and confusion within the team.
 

By Peter Tarhanidis, Ph.D.

There is a dramatic increase in the strategies corporations implement to meet the needs of their stakeholders. Driving value from all parts of an organization and its functions may seem like repetitive exercises—and even feel more like a medieval gauntlet with only a few successful programs. HBR (2021) wrote that by 2027, about 88 million people will be working in project management—with economic activity reaching $20 trillion USD. Also noted: Only 35% of projects are successful, leaving immense waste of resources.

There are many reasons projects fail. HBR (2021) states of the 70% of failed projects, and after exhaustive root-cause analysis across all industries, one can identify common themes such as undervaluing project management skills and methods, and poor performance. Yet organizations that apply project management methods recognized their performance had a 2.5 more times chance to be successful, and organizations can waste 28 times less resources. As such, when applied, the implementation of PM methods works.

Yet in a world filled with a variety of project taxonomies, many organizational boards are now contemplating the need to implement environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs. Forbes states the benefits of ESG and CSR initiatives include:

1. Advancing organizational culture, empowering staff to do social good, and welcoming diversity.
2. Encouraging partners and investors who are interested in long-run strategy to manage risks and opportunities by emphasizing the organization’s ethics.
3. Raising an organization’s staff confidence and productivity, creating a workplace that achieves the business mission.

Therefore, to ensure success for ESG and CSR programs, an organization’s top leaders need to prioritize and align across all the organization’s businesses. Leaders can use the balanced scorecard to achieve this alignment, and can extend its use across the entire project portfolio.

This theory was developed by Kaplan and Norton, which state the balanced scorecard method converts the organization’s strategy into performance objectives, measures, targets and initiatives. Linking the concept of cause and effect, the balanced scorecard covers four perspectives:

1. Customer: How do customers see us?
2. Internal: What must we excel at?
3. Innovation and learning: Can we continue to improve and create value?
4. Financial: How do we look to shareholders?

Marr (N.B.) reported over 50% of companies have used this approach in the United States, the United Kingdom, Northern Europe and Japan. One clear benefit has been to align the organization’s structure to achieve its strategic goals.

In conclusion, applying project management methods and aligning an organization’s performance through the balanced scorecard can unlock ESG and CSR benefits that can supercharge a company’s efforts to achieve its mission.

References

1. HBR: The Project Economy Has Arrived
2. HBR: The Balanced Scorecard—Measures that Drive Performance
3. Project Management Statistics: Trends and Common Mistakes in 2023
4. Forbes: Three Reasons Why CSR And ESG Matter to Businesses
5. Balanced Scorecard: How Many Companies Use This To