A sobering investigation of scientific evidence on scaling frameworks, particularly SAFe®. — How do you feel about the Scale Agility Framework (SAFe®)? I don’t know about you, but I’m skeptical of SAFe and I’m very skeptical of scaling in general. I’m not alone in this. My sense is that the professional community doesn’t like SAFe®. It is easy to find scathing opinion…

An exploration of what scientific studies and a large dataset of Scrum teams tell us about the benefits of agility — What is the business case for Agile teams? Is it really that important that they are autonomous, able to release frequently, interact closely with stakeholders and spend all that time on continuous improvement? Or is all that just hype? Or maybe even counterproductive? Yes, we believe all these things are…

Or how to get the most out of the mountain of articles we’ve written over the years — Welcome to The Liberators! Our mission is to unleash (Scrum/Agile) teams all over the world. As experienced Scrum Masters, facilitators, trainers, and team members, we’ve seen how powerful teams are. Our hope is that we can help you experience this too. We do this through our online tools, our webshop…

If you’ve been following Barry Overeem and me for a while, you know that we love facilitation at The Liberators. We have always enjoyed bringing groups of people together to discover important patterns and uncover big insights. It’s a bit like archeology. But rather than unearthing historical artifacts, you’re inviting…

A cautionary tale about leaders and leadership — When you work enough with teams, sooner or later you run into one that isn’t receptive to your guidance. They are not buying your ideas about Scrum, Agile, pair programming, or whatever you want to bring them. Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Agile Coaches, and other change agents often see themselves…

Scientific insights into what creates stress, and how motivation can buffer it. With 5 practical ways to reduce stress and increase motivation — How sustainable is your pace as a developer? This has always been a huge struggle for us and most of the teams we’ve been part of. We’ve often found ourselves working late into the night, or during weekends. Unfortunately, many developers and development teams still burn more hours than are…

Things to keep in mind when you create your own survey or questionnaire for your team or organization — Have you ever set up a survey to assess how people feel about something? Perhaps tried to assess maturity, experience, or growth? If so, this post is interesting for you. While tools like SurveyMonkey and Google Forms make it easy to set up a questionnaire, setting up a proper survey…

What science tells us about how work agreements create high-performing teams. And five practical areas to focus on. — A while ago I was taking a walk with my partner Lisanne. A noisy flock of geese flew overhead in a messy V formation. We laughed at the amount of noise they produced. It all looked very chaotic. Then another flock flew overhead. It was a similar number of birds…

An investigation of scientific research into what motivates teams, and how many of these insights informed the Scrum framework and other Agile methodologies — You can also listen to a podcast of this article When people first look at the Scrum framework, they often see the roles and the events first. They see only the structure of Scrum; who wears the hats and when. And that makes sense. …