The course ended with lots of energy. As one person commented “I had fun and learned a lot”.

Attached are the evaluations from the class for review.

Evals_El_Segundo_California

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!

Student Evaluations of the course

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.

This course was a Certified Scrum Product Owner as recognized by the Scrum Alliance and sponsored by 3Back LLC, VersionOne and Normandale College.

The challenges of a Product Owner is to recognize the sustainably rate of development that a team can maintain and then to use that predictable core to determine what can be successfully delivered to market. Successful Product Owners are empowered by their organizations to find a way to maximize delivery on ROI by realizing a product in complex adaptive market situations. Great Product Owners see the team as an extension of themselves and augment their ability to think creatively by leveraging that greater social intelligence to solve complex problems.

This was our 3rd time running this course and it was a successful outcome for students. Please leave comments or thoughts on our Certified Scrum Product Owner training event. If  you are interested in a private or public course just contact us. 

You can follow Doug’s daily thoughts as a Scrum Coach at twitter or read deeper thoughts at Advanced Topics in Scrum.

“Agile / Scrum is not about memorization of explicit knowledge but, rather the application of that knowledge to an in-flight challenging problem.” – Doug Shimp Daily Twitter Thought

We ran our second ScrumMaster training event. The class size was small and favored my preferred style of andragogy training (small group guided learning). Typically I start these courses with just enough instruction to strike a dialog driven process of exploration and unfolding . The small sizes are always favored since it enables a small group guided learning approach. Traditional instructional (pedagogy grounded theory) design is for larger groups >20 students who sit in a student/lecturer arrangement. This requires less responsive guidance for the lecturer and encourages an adherence to a scripted course delivery. These styles of training are to be avoided if real mastery of Scrum  / Agile is to be achieved.

Learning Agile / Scrum is not about memorization of explicit knowledge but, rather the application of that a mind set to an in-flight challenging problem. It is a learning process of using the scrum framework to move as a team to understand. Learning Scrum / Agile can be setup as such a challenge and the group present rose to the occasion to create their own learning experience as a team.

This trip was a real exposure to the varied and subtle tastes of Hawaiian culture. No where in the country have I seen “East meets West” be as pronounced as in Hawaii and that makes it all the more beautiful.

Coffee Question:

• Do you like your Kona blended or pure?

A Hui Hou

- Doug

Both events were a blast and did much to continue raising awareness of Agile / Scrum in the community.

The Certified ScrumMaster course was run by Michele Sliger and Douglas Shimp. The event was delivered on a Saturday and Sunday just before the Gathering and was a success for the students.

Feedback on the Scrum training class was great.

• read the hand written evals to see what our students had to say
• Watch the Scrum Ideas Developed During Class  

The product owner course was a small size class with 4 participants. These size classes are great and always become the most valuable and interactive for the participants.

Video About the Course Certified Scrum Product Owner Overview Chicago

Read the hand written evaluations from the course .

- Doug Shimp

VersionOne and 3Back offered their first co-hosted Certified ScrumMaster training event in San Mateo, California. This was the first time these two companies co-hosted a joint public event. The event was nothing short of spectacular and continued to show a proven track that these two agile oriented companies are leaders in their complementary market niches. Both companies continue to raise the bar of what passes for excellence in Scrum (Agile) training, tools and implementations. Applied scrum is where the rubber meets the road and scrum coaching is how this happens.

“It was an awesome course with great feedback from the students. The explosion of energy and questions in this course clearly placed this event as one of the best courses we have ever run. This course offered a foundation in Scrum training that exceeded expectations and showed up clearly in the evaluations.” said Doug Shimp Senior Consultant

There were 11 folks in attendance and each person provided an evaluation.

See for yourself Handwritten Scanned Evaluations

The newest topic that has been emerging with increased regularity is Agile Contracts. How do we avoid the pressures of big waterfall contracting models in and increasingly aware agile client world. Our old methods of contracting and working are becoming irrelevant and clients are no longer buying into the big bang waterfall contracting model. You can’t wald in with your big in house methodology and expect clients to be amazed at how smart (overly complex) your process is.

 Thank you for a wonderful 2 days together.

- Doug