Back to Basics turns from frameworks to accountabilities, starting with the Scrum Master. Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith explain why the Scrum Guide’s switch from roles to accountabilities matters: if you do the work, you are the Scrum Master, whatever your badge says. Many org charts give the Scrum Master two lines, while the Scrum Guide gives it the longest list of the three. The hosts cover the four hats (coach, mentor, facilitator, trainer), plus the protector who says “not right now.” Anu admits she failed as a Scrum Master because she missed having authority. Kate shares the client that dropped Scrum Masters because they weren’t billable, and the experiment that brought them back. The hosts get honest about the hard parts, from cameras-off events to being the lonely voice defending Scrum. They close on what to look for in whoever holds the accountabilities, and why a great Scrum Master is the reason the team doesn’t need one in the room.

We have done Scrum. We have done Kanban. This week Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith take on everything else, starting from one question: did anything else survive the evolutionary process? Plenty did, depending on where in the world you work and what you build. The list runs from XP and Lean to Crystal, DSDM and Scrumban. Next comes DevOps, and why two week Sprints with six week deployments made it inevitable. Then XP, the software-only framework that gave everyone else user stories and velocity, plus the person who wrote “As a, I want, so that.” It is not who you might think. Then the case for Lean as the root of every agile framework, and why cutting waste beats faking Scrum. “Agile in HR” gets retired in favor of HR agility. Then scaling: SAFe, LeSS, Scrum@Scale, Nexus and Disciplined Agile, why leaders love them, and what happens when you scale a team-level mess. It closes where every framework choice should start: what problem are you trying to solve?

Last week was Scrum. This week Kate Megaw, Anu Smalley and Ryan Smith turn to Kanban, the framework most teams think they already know because they have a board. They trace it back to Toyota and just in time manufacturing, then walk through the part that usually gets skipped: the three change principles, the three service delivery principles, and the six general practices behind the board. Ryan explains why work in progress limits are the practice people blow past first, and how he uses Kanban to calm a chaotic team. Anu orders a pizza to show why no organization has only one workflow. Kate shares the client board that showed a client it had the wrong mix of roles, and all three take on the practice everyone forgets: making policies explicit. Along the way: the theory of constraints, Kanban for refinement alongside Scrum for development, and why your teams do not all need the same process.