Archive for April, 2009
Extended Mind And the Scrum Pathway
Posted by Doug Shimp in Feedback on April 22nd, 2009
This was not your typical scrummaster training course. We raised the bar by bringing the Scrum Framework home in applied context to the classroom and helping each other understand it better through simulations that encouraged participation and responses from each of us. It focused on the truely adaptive nature of great teams and how the class over the course of 2 days stared to jel and move faster. Each person became a member of a close knit team and helped each other extend our ability to think about more complex and challenging issues of Scrum. This would be the same pattern of thought for teams building product.
Simple Rules For Emerging Collaborative Behavior Focused On Complex Demanding Business Drivers
- No heads work alone
- Let the product lead
- One bite at a time
- Make it visible
- Avoid and eliminate confusion
- Start with the end in mind
What an awesome course. Each attendee recieved a free identity boost with the course and we will work to build a community to grow from. The community will be focused on Collaborative Skills for and will help each open more doors by improving our connectedness through applied effort the driven by our passion. Coaching others is a reward and a skill we all need to polish.
We will be running this course again in San Mateo and creating another extended mind.
Brillant and Informative 
Read the hand written evaluations
and see if you agree!!
Agile Architecture Pilot Class Evaluations
Posted by david.bernstein in Feedback on April 16th, 2009
The pilot Agile Architecture class by David Bernstein at Techniques of Design was held on January 27-28 for a client in Boston. There were seven students in the class, all senior architects, and they loved it. Read the evaluations.
Learning Via Experience in Chicago
Posted by derek.wade in Feedback, Workshop on April 7th, 2009
Our session in Chicago focused on experiential learning.
The class elected to do 2 sprints on our “build a brochure” activity and learned by doing on each. The general consensus was that it’s all very well to ask and answer questions, but when you try to put theory into practice is when you really discover the challenges you will face with Agile.
Just to make things harder, the second sprint included some real-life waterfall challenges like budget-tracking and advance commitments. The discussion afterward focused on how these forces can easily drive us away from collaborative, visible behavior… even if “all” we are doing is building a brochure in class!
Scrum Workshop for Busy Teams – Effective Agile Development
The Scrum Workshop for Busy Teams Workshop is a jumpstart for teams or individuals in Scrum and Agile software development.
The main exercise is a team project where the teams work together to create at game to teach Scrum. This team developed a board game similar to “Candy Land” called Scrumopoly.
This course was the equivlent of a 2-day coruse delivered in four evenings. The goal was to help teams wanting to learn about scrum without impacting their schedule. Two guys actually flew up from California to Seattle to take this course. They were able to attend meetings by phone in the day and do the workshop in the evenings.
All of the students in this course had a strong background in the waterfall process on large teams. We had great discussions about how to move an orginization to be more agile. The student’s concsnsus was that the role of Product Owner is critical. I agree 100%. Without a strong and effective Product Owner to create the vision and separate the required from the incidental, teams will build the wrong thing or bild the most important thing too late.
See evals and comments from students.
