I am very excited about this post because it represents a new direction and a deeper understanding of what I want to do with my business.  As many of you may be aware, the process to become a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) has been undergoing some change lately.  It has been interesting to watch the process evolve and I wanted to make my intentions public after completing two of the five co-trainings suggested by the process.  It has been a great honor to co-train with Tobias Mayer and Lyssa Adkins and I have learned a great deal about training, communicating effectively, improvisation and being authentic.  Thank you very much for your mentoring, time and sharing.

In 2007, as an internal coach for a large biotech company in San Diego, I was asked to create two-day ScrumMaster training modeled off the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) curriculum.  In this class, I covered the basics of the Scrum framework and some common tools\add-ons used by Agile teams like user stories, estimating and release planning.  Over the course of eighteen months, I trained over forty people on the Scrum framework and coached a number of Scrum internal teams.  While I was able to teach the rituals, roles and artifacts of Scrum, I felt something was missing.  For the longest time I was puzzled why many of the students were just not embracing Scrum in their day-to-day work.  Clearly they had a problem, but it was just not obvious where it originated from.

Recently, I have come to a new understanding of what Scrum means to me and reevaluate what I had considered valuable in the past.  After some reflection I have come to realize the problem did not lie with the students, but with the information the instructor provided them and how they were instructed.  At the time, I had thought Scrum was simply an effective framework for getting things done, just another another bag of tricks for good project management and it was taught as such.  Today, I understand that Scrum is about cultural change and establishing new values in an organization.  If Scrum is about values, then the focus of the education should be about the values and principles of Scrum.

This has been a profound change in my thinking about Scrum and has altered the way I interact with Teams.  In the context of the CSM class, I have revamped the curriculum away from the standard Powerpoint presentation describing the Scrum rituals, artifacts, roles with me as the center of the course to a participatory, collaborative exploration of the Scrum values and principles, making connections to the Scrum framework with the learners at the center.  The result of this change is a CSM course that concentrates on the Scrum values of respect, openness, courage, commitment and focus, generates discussion of how those values are important to the learners and assists the students in making connections of these values to their lives and Scrum.  When the conversation shifts to instruction about the Scrum framework, roles and commonly used Agile tools, they are explained in the context of the Scrum values and as further illustrations of the values in action so they become real and tangible for the participants.

In my opinion, the role of the CST in CSM, or Certified Product Owner, class is to guide the learners through a series of collaborative exercises and discussions to examine what the Scrum principles and values mean to them, why they are important to the framework and begin to connect the participants to the meaning of Scrum.  I feel the students bring with them a great deal of knowledge and life experience to each class and my job as a CST would be to create an environment where they can self-organize around their own knowledge and then guide them into a fuller understanding of how Scrum works based on their needs.  The peer-to-peer learning environment I am trying to create provides students the opportunity to learn from each other, respects and draws upon their years of professional and personal experience and turns them into active participants in their learning.  Essentially, I see myself as the participants’s ScrumMaster in learning.  I feel this learning experience better equips the students with the ability to facilitate and improvise Scrum in their organizations because they operate from a definition of Scrum that matches their own life experience, not the instructor’s.  In addition, this instructional model where the instructor leaves the center and allows the learners to take this space, allows the participants to observe how the role of ScrumMaster is done well.

Passing on some good summer reading.

1. Core of Agile and Scrum – essential principles of Agile and Scrum that transcend the software development.
2. Three Legs to an Agile Transition – George Dinwiddie looks at how teamwork, visible progress and continuous improvement are key to change organizational culture.
3. Why Multiple Product Owners is a Bad Idea – read the article to find out how having multiple people setting priorities short circuits the role.
4. Nobody Can Do Agile – Simon Bennett explains why Agile is about thinking, not doing.
5. Agile Requires Cross-Functional Teams – Johanna Rothman discusses why cross-functional teams are essential for Scrum and other Agile processes.
6. Sir, Please Step Away From the Team – common the changes in management style for managers when Agile teams start in your organization.
7. Story Time! The hidden Scrum meeting – ever wonder when the requirements and the analysis happens on a Scrum Team?
8. How Does a PM and SM Coexisit? – a reader asks Michelle Sliger how the role of the project manager changes with the introduction of ScrumMasters.
9. Truly Agile CMMI – a short blog and video about a company that gets both Agile and CMMI.
10. Millennials and Scrum, Made for Each Other – Lyssa Adkins talks about how the Scrum values and principles align with a new cohort entering  the workforce.

Just wanted to share a bit of my personal Scrum journey for those who might be interested and why I find Scrum to be very compelling.

I became a CSM during 2005 after attending an early CSM course provided by Ken Schwaber, Paul Hodgetts and Tobias Mayer.  Before that experience, I had been using Extreme Programming (XP) to write and deliver software for three years.  Ken’s CSM class helped me understand that while interesting, XP is mostly an internal conversation among developers about how to build great software.  Scrum, on the other hand, is about creating cross-functional, collaborative Teams to deliver astonishing results to the business.  What most impressed me about Ken’s description of Scrum was the importance of providing transparency and the role Scrum can play in raising the professionalism of our community.  It was with that vision that I became more interested in how I could practice Scrum and I was on the lookout for experiences that would allow me to see Scrum in action.

New stuff to read and learn before the holiday

1. The Zen of Scrum – Jurgen Appelo provides a 70-minute video overview of Scrum, roles and philosophy.
2. The Difference Between Waterfall, Iterative Waterfall, Scrum & Lean (in pictures) – Visual representations of these various processes.
3. Company Culture Affects Your Code – A short examination of influence of Conway’s Law and culture on your software projects.
4. Explosion of Agile Practices – A list of 50 or so common practices used on Agile teams.
5. My Progression Toward Kanban – Brian Doll provides a good overview of Lean software development techniques and his personal journey there.
6. Post Agile Companies – Cory Foy looks at three Agile organizations and explains why understanding the Agile principles and values is more important than doing the Agile practices.
7. How Great Leaders Inspire Action – Simon Sinek describes a simple model to inspire others in this 18-minute video from TED.
8. Iterative and Incremental Development – Explanation of the difference between incremental vs. iterative software development (IID) and the history of IID.
9. Why Estimate Twice? – Good overview on the common practice of estimating the size of features, while estimating the duration of tasks.

A few month back, we applied for a stadium pack of tickets during the upcoming Rugby World Cup in New Zealand.  This week we learned that our Eden Park application was accepted.  We’re going to New Zealand, baby!!

Our pack includes tickets for the opening match of New Zealand vs Tonga, Australia vs. Ireland, New Zealand vs. France, Fiji vs. Samoa and England vs. Scotland.  Now we have to figure out what matches we want to see.

A colleague of mine, Deb Hartman Preuss (@deborahh), tweeted “I have a strange job: getting things to happen in other people’s minds, bodies, hearts. Kind of like the faith healer who doesn’t touch you.” and it struck a chord with me.  A lot of what I do as consultant is help open people’s minds to new ideas and look at their actions, which is why I use a lot of games and simulations.  In my experience, games and simulations help people get into a safe space where they can reflect on their behaviors and understand why they might want to change.

One of my favorite games to help people understand the corrosive effect of push systems and working in silos is the “Invitation Game” created by Chris Sims at the Agile Learning Labs.  In this game, participants are asked to make three invitations to a party with six steps to complete (see below).  The game is played in two rounds and they are timed.

1. Fold the paper in half
2. Put a smiley face on the front
3. Write “You’re invited!” on the inside
4. Add your signature
5. Put a sticker\stamp on the back
6. Deliver the invitation

In the first round, individuals are teamed in groups of six and each person is given one step to do.  When they complete ALL their work, they hand-off their eighteen unfinished invitations to the next station; i.e. after folding all 18 sheets of paper, the next person makes 18 smiley faces and then passes along to the third person on the team.  Normally, the completed invitations look something like this – all look the same and are sloppy.

In addition, as an observer what you see is a lot of waiting around – due to the constraints of the game only one person can work on the invitations at a time and all the rest are waiting for their handoff – and not a lot of value being generated until the very end.  Another interesting observation is what inactive participants are doing while the active person is doing their task.  Sometimes they are giving helpful, unsolicited advice to the active person on how to do their job.  Things such as “Hurry up”, “You can fold six of them at a time”, “You don’t need such fancy face”, etc., etc.  Sometimes the inactive people are just waiting around with nothing to do or talking to another inactive participant.  If you ask the participants about the experience, they normally say it was stressful and they felt a lot of pressure.  The term “fun” is not mentioned at all.  IME, teams usually deliver their invitations somewhere between 12 to 15 minutes.

In the second round, we change the rules of the game a bit.  Each person is responsible for making three invitations, they have to make a complete invitation and deliver it before moving on to the next one.  We also time when the first invitation is delivered as well as the when the last one is delivered.  Here are the typical results from the second round.

What you see here is a really interesting and creative stack of invitations.  During the entire game people are relaxed and enjoying themselves.  You also see individuals looking at other people’s work for inspiration and drawing on new ideas.  People experiment more.  Many times, while waiting for the entire team to finish other team members will start additional invitations and deliver extra value to the customer.  Finally, if you look at the statistics, i.e. the timings, you see the second round really shine.  The customer gets value within the first two minutes and all the invitations for all teams in delivered 8 to 10 minutes – a productivity increase of nearly 50%!

When both rounds are complete, I lay out all the invitations on the table and ask the participants which invitations a customer would want.  The answer is always the same, the invitations from the second round.  The second round invitations are just so much more interesting and creative than the first.  In addition, by delivering the items one-at-time when completed, the customer gets more opportunity to provide feedback to the team on what they really want (or don’t want) in their invitations.  If the customer finds an interesting variation – they can sell it right away, show it to their stakeholders and\or ask the team to make more (“I need more invitations with stickers of ponies.”).

I also ask which round is more like everyday work and the answer is again very predictable – the first round.  In the first round of typical batch\handoff work, the customer is obligated to accept the invitations delivered even if they are sloppy, low quality and don’t meet their needs.  What would their management and stakeholders say if the customer asked for the resources (12 to 15 minutes) to make another batch of crappy invitations?  They already spent 12 to 15 minutes of six people’s time.  They can’t go back and ask for another set.  In the batch\handoff work, there is so much waste of time where people sit around doing nothing.  Fortunately, people display a great degree of ingenuity and find something to occupy their time – criticizing and interfering with the work of the people who come after them.  A very typical behavior in most organizations.

Some new links to share and idea to learn.

1. What Does an Agile Coach Do? – Considering an Agile\Scrum Pilot?  Don Gray talks about what you might expect from your new Agile Coach.
2. Should the ScrumMaster Also Be a Member of the Team? – Clinton Keith provides his perspective to a common question\scenario many Scrum teams face when starting out (with good dialogue in the comments).
3. Pathologies of the Daily Scrum – Experience report from a session at Agile Ottawa identifying ways daily standup meetings breakdown and some suggestions to improve your daily meetings.
4. Institutionalized Agility – Rob Myers discusses some of the common obstacles when your organization decides to “go Agile”.
5. Balancing Agile – Special guest poster, Alan Shalloway, talks about the role of management in an Agile process.
6. Do You Need Iteration Zero: A Case Study – Jim Shore examines a common practice when starting up new Agile teams and critically evaluates how necessary it is today.
7. Why Your Agile Project Cannot Be a Success – List of 32 items that increase the risk of failure for your Agile project and point to signs that you do not understand Agile.
8. The Dangers of Agile Development – Jeff Anderson takes a humorous look at some of the real risks posed by Agile projects.
9. Making Change Stick – Steve Denning looks at the ten practices\principles to understand when leading a change effort.
10. The Myth of Utilization – If your computer slows down at 100% utilization, then why do we ask our team members to do the same?

In order to succeed with Scrum, one needs to know, understand and experience the essential principles which are the foundation for all the practices, rituals and tools of the Scrum framework. Unfortunately, most training today focuses on the mechanics of the process, excluding the essential conversation of why these principles are important and how each element infuses the day-to-day activities of Scrum teams. As a result, most students are only able to mimic what their instructors do and are unable to improvise and adapt Scrum to the unique constraints of their environment. Ultimately, they become frustrated by their inability to drive change in their organizations and Scrum is abandoned without producing any lasting effects.

In this two-day class, Carlton Nettleton and Tobias Mayer will examine, illustrate and play with the essential principles of Scrum – commitment, collaboration, visibility, respect, focus and accountability – in a series of exercises, games and creative activities. When you leave this course, you will come to know and understand the Spirit of Scrum and how this spirit of collaboration and change embodies each and every activity in Scrum. Most importantly, you will have learned how to facilitate Scrum among your peers and be successful with this new way of working. Scrum is not a bag of programmer and management tricks to increase productivity, but it is a transformative re-imagining of our relationship with our work and our peers.

Come join us on the journey. It is going to be a lot of fun!

There has a been a bit of a date change for the Welfare CSM class I am co-teaching with Tobias Mayer.  We still have plenty of openings in the class, so please sign-up today.