Facilitating Professional Scrum Teams

Unlock the true power of collaboration within Scrum Teams and beyond with this practical guide packed with tips, tools, and real-life scenarios to elevate your facilitation skills.

Scrum requires healthy collaboration, not just between the members of the Scrum Team, but also between the Scrum Team and its stakeholders to gather feedback and input. Collaboration is the heart of thriving Scrum Teams, but most available resources on collaboration focus solely on meeting formats and neglect to show how Scrum Teams truly harmonize their efforts and make informed decisions effectively.

This book bridges the gap by not only providing effective facilitation techniques but also delving into the how and why of facilitation–all geared toward improving effectiveness, achieving impactful outcomes, and helping Scrum Teams work through challenges.

• Obtain tools and insights for Scrum Teams to better facilitate team interactions to leverage group diversity.
• Learn from real-world scenarios that illustrate common Scrum Team challenges and how they can be overcome with effective and timely facilitation.
• Discover comprehensive facilitation approaches accompanied with effective guidance on when to use them, how they can be combined, and how they can help to achieve desired outcomes.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Facilitating Alignment

Chapter 2 Facilitating Sprint Planning

Chapter 3 Facilitating the Daily Scrum

Chapter 4 Facilitating Team Dynamics

Chapter 5 Facilitating Product Backlog Refinement

Chapter 6 Facilitating the Sprint Review

Chapter 7 Facilitating the Sprint Retrospective

Chapter 8 Facilitating Beyond a Single Scrum Team

Conclusion Moving Forward

Appendix A: Facilitation Principles

Appendix B: Adapting for Virtual

Appendix C: Facilitation Checklist

About the Author

Patricia Kong helps organizations thrive in a complex world by focusing on enterprise innovation, leadership, and teams. She is a people advocate and fascinated by organizational behaviors and misbehaviors. She is co-author of both The Nexus Framework for Scaling Scrum (Addison-Wesley, 2017) and Facilitating Professional Scrum Teams (Addison-Wesley, 2024).

Glaudia Califano is an agile and lean practitioner and mentor, working with and within teams. She loves to be hands-on, coming up with new ideas, and learning from those around her. Glaudia divides her time between the UK and Spain with her partner and her two dachshunds.

David Spinks is an experienced software developer, Scrum Master, and accredited trainer of Scrum and The Kanban Method. He believes in creating environments where empowerment, autonomy and flexibility enable teams to do the best work possible. David is based in Buckinghamshire, UK.