Based on some questions and answers from our student coaching calls, I thought it’d be good to share some quick wins from the conversations about Scrum and agile that we’ve had with students.

1. 
   Does leadership know what agile is and how Scrum works? If you’ve been to Scrum Master (or Product Owner) training, than you easily know enough to give a short description. Or you can use my 1 hour online course: An Introduction to Scrum and Agile. I’ve been surprised at how often management doesn’t understand much of agile, even though they are asking for it. This helps get everyone on the same page and ease conversations about change.
2. If you have more than three teams, look into approaches to how to scale agile. My preference is LeSS (Large Scale Scrum), but SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) is the most commonly used (and abused). I’ve found it highly useful to look at how other people have solved problems (such as communication between teams or clear prioritization across teams) and try those best practices out first.
3. Empower the teams. This could be as simple as having a bi-weekly agile round table discussion, a lean coffee morning, or other conversation starter for team members.
4. In the spirit of empowering teams, double check what’s happening with the Team Retrospectives – are they going well, what’s happening with the results of them, does management have a list of what’s been asked by the teams? Are decisions made that affect the teams without asking the teams first what they think?
5. Finally, do team members have opportunity for training? Of course, we have opportunities for training for Scrum Masters, Product Owner training, Certified Agile Leadership programs, and for baselining teams in what it means to be agile and do scrum that you can look into.