Ralph Maria Jocham's Blog, page 24

Using Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) in Scrum

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) act as goal-setting framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes. OKRs are often misunderstood and are a powerful practice to create razor sharp organisational focus. Isn’t Scrum about goals and focus as well? There is the Vision, the Product Goal, the Sprint Goal as well as the Sprint Review.

These elements of Scrum can be very well combined with OKRs. Actually, you might want to turn it around, start with OKRs and map your Scrum implementation to them. In this Scrum Pulse webinar Professional Scrum Trainer Ralph Jocham with Agile Actors #learning  gives a quick intro to OKRs, and you then you will learn how Scrum can benefit from using OKRs to create a network of responsibility from the vision down to individual Sprint Goals. This responsibility network offers a transparency most corporations long for.

Get the presentation here

Deciphering Goals

Grand ideas, visions are everywhere. Governments, businesses and NGOs have aspirational goals. However, the larger the goal, the higher the chance that the original intention gets lost while being passed through the structural layers of the organization. Risks, politics, personal agendas often subvert the original goal either by design or unwittingly, turning high impact outcomes into mediocre outputs. The mere act of decomposing an organizational goal into department and team goals can also cause the essence of the strategic organizational goal to become lost. This blog aims to shed some light on the underlying forces at play and how good goal setting with well-chosen metrics can help. I hosted a webinar on this topic on April 14. You can watch here. You can read the full blog post here

AgileByExample 2020 – Product Owner Demystified

Keynote—Product Owner Demystified

Vision, Value, Validation – The 3Vs

There is a vacuum between the company vision and the final outcome, causing late validation and low value. This vacuum is present in pretty much all companies, caused by a wrong and ill conceived product delivery approach. This vacuum is filled with meaningless busy work and extensive task management resulting in being busy without a clear direction. As a Product Owner, it is your accountability to fill and manage this vacuum to help your company to get out in front of this problem and maximize value.

Read more in AgileByExample website

Get the conference presentation here

Scrumday Deutschland 2019, The Product Management Vacuum and the 3 V’s

Get the conference presentation here

Scrumday London 2019, The Product Management Vacuum and the 3 V’s

Get the conference presentation here

Agile 2018, The Product Management Vacuum and the 3 V’s

Get the conference presentation here

Project vs Product Mindset

What is Backlog Refinement?

Release Burndown Charts

Sarajevo Special Scrum.org Product Owner Training

Studies* show that certain memories help us learn and remember more effectively. Combine a course with a team building exercise, an appraised movie, and you have something amazing – a training with lasting impact.


This is exactly what we wanted to achieve with the first Bosnia Agile organised Scrum.org Product Owner training.

The PSPO (link) training was build around two events, the Sarajevo Film Festival  and a rafting team building exercise. It does not come as a surprise that this event was sold out 6 weeks ahead.




Between watching a great movie ‘The Railway Man‘ and rafting in this beautiful region, the students where also learning everything important about Scrum, value, lean and agile product ownership. Since I was the trainer it might sound pretentious from me to say how awesome this training was, but in all modesty, it truly was. It was an outstanding and new experience not just for myself. I made many friends and shared many great moments with my fellow students. I am sure that Sarajevo played a big part in this. Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, is a very dynamic and friendly city surrounded by beautiful nature and with good reason was the host for the ’84 Winter Olympics. I for myself cannot wait to go there again.

25 happy Product Owners and a happy trainer cannot be wrong. We have been so pleased that the organisers and I decided to repeat this setup once again next year.

If you live somewhere in the EU you should consider combining education with worthwhile memories. More training content will stick and even better, you will have more fun learning. Consider this: even with budgeting in the costs of transportation and accommodation, it is probably still cheaper than your near-by training provider.

See you next year at the 21st Sarajevo Film Festival …








*)
http://brainbasedteaching.wikispaces.com/file/view/Caine+114.pdf
http://pratclif.com/brain/neurons.htm