Wow!  I have read a LOT in the last six months!  I guess that is one of the advantages of being on the road for about six months.

1. Understanding A3 Thinking – excellent description of how to use and create an A3: a Lean tool for executing Plan-Do-Check-Act (the Deming cycle).  This is the definitive source on A3, Henrik Kniberg has an Agile example and template on his site.
2. Getting the Right Things Done – good description of the concept of True North, developing strategy from True North and the respectful nature of Lean, the rest is kinda dull.
3. Pedagogy of the Oppressed – unique perspective on the characteristics of oppression, the oppressed and the oppressors; liberation for both the oppressed and the oppressors originates when the oppressed become fully engaged in the human dialogue of being, not simply exchanging roles with the oppressors.  Interesting connections to corporate life in the 21st century.
4. Project Retrospectives – discussion on the importance of making a deep-dive examination of a software project when it finally is complete with detailed exercises and agenda.  This is great book if you want to know more about retrospectives.
5. More Secrets of Consulting – just brilliant!  If you liked the first book, this one has so many practical gems for the consultant.  The only tedious parts of this book are the references to his other books.  My favorite tool: the Wishing Wand.
6. The Future of Management – this book was a favorite of the CEO at my last client.  There are many Scrum concepts in the case studies provided.  Too bad that many of the principles of self-organization and empowerment supported by the executives never filtered down to the teams
7. Coaching Agile Teams – WOW!  This is an awesome book, deep and rich with many profound insights on the various roles of an Agile coach.  In addition, Lyssa provides practical tools to improve both the coach and the individual.  This is definitely a book to return to again and again.
8. Training From the Back of the Room – this is my favorite book from the last six months since it has had the most impact on my personal performance.  It has changed my perspective on how to train adults with its sound theory of education and myriad of exercises which bolster learning.  Share this book with anyone who trains adults (thanks to “Agile Bob” Hartman for tweeting this book title!)
9. Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development – comprehensive companion book to Scaling Lean & Agile Development (which is very good on Lean and Scrum).  This book is full of good stuff, but just too long.  Unless you are a guru (or wanna be), stick with the first book.
10. Succeeding with Agile – Mike Cohn has put out another great book based on his years of practical experience with Scrum.  This book is also pretty long, but not tedious.  A great read if you have some experience with Scrum, but want to improve the overall experience, apply targeted improvements or figure out how to expand the reach of Scrum in your organization – it covers it all.
11. The Back of the Napkin – provides a framework on how to apply visual thinking tools to explain and sell ideas.  Since most of the work I do is conceptual, being able to draw a powerful picture is a useful skill.  A nice addition to my consultant toolkit and I look forward to sharing it with others (I didn’t find the companion book that useful, so skip it).
12. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series (not pictured) – these books were consistently entertaining, surreal and light; most were less than 200 pages.  The pace slows down around book 3 (Life, the Universe and Everything), but delightful nonetheless.  I cannot believe I just discovered them in my mid-30′s!

Believe it or not, there are a few books I did not get a chance to read.  I guess these will have to wait until after vacation.

• Leading Out Loud – about finding your authentic voice in business.  I bought this to get some ideas about leadership and self-organizing teams.
• Hope is Not a Strategy – I need to understand the sales process better and improve my ability to sell.  This looked interesting.

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.

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.

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.

I am pleased to announce a new and exciting Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) class I created with Tobias Mayer being held in San Diego on June 7th and 8th.  This class will be operating under the Welfare CSM model.  I am very honored to take part in this effort and help people who want to learn about Scrum but their organizations will not pay for the training, individuals who are unemployed and want to use this time to add to their skills or for people outside the software industry.

For me, this CSM class is a significant departure from previous (uncertified) ScrumMaster classes I offered in 2007-2008.  At the time, I was not satisfied with the results, but could not put my finger on what was bothering me about the curriculum I was teaching.  The men and women I was training were competently trained on the pieces of Scrum, but were struggling with applying it to their environment.  In 2009, I came across this interview from Tobias and was both intrigued and inspired by Tobias’s model.  After reflecting on his interview and my experience, what was missing from my trainings became visible.

In order to succeed with Scrum, one needs to know, understand and experience the essential principles of Scrum which are the foundation for all the practices, rituals and tools of the framework.  Unfortunately, the training I provided (which mirrored most of today’s commercial CSM offerings) focused on the mechanics of Scrum, 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 were only able to mimic what I was teaching and were 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 was abandoned without producing any lasting effects.

In this two-day CSM class, Tobias and I will examine, illustrate and play with the essential principles of Scrum – commitment, collaboration, visibility, respect, focus and accountability –  through 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!

Merry Christmas to you and yours.  2009 was a great year and I am looking forward to 2010.  Next year, make sure you stay off Robot Santa’s naughty list.

I have had a lot of fun working on my Spanish at Pura Buena Onda and listening to podcasts from the folks at Notes in Spanish in 2009.  Today, I met with Carolina – who is an excellent, excellent instructor – to check on my progress and make some new goals for 2010.  In 2009, I just wanted to get better at conversation; improve my listening comprehension and pick up my pace and confidence speaking.  In 2010, I want to get to the next level and begin using Spanish in my work.

These are my strengths:

• Excellent comprehension.
• Good vocabulary (actually she said “great”).
• Great pronunciation of the letter “j”.
• Passion for the language, dedication & willingness to use it.

These are the areas I need to work on:

• All verb tenses.
• Ser & Estar.
• The use of haber.
• Pronunciation w/random words…often words with accents or many syllables.

The good thing about all these things?  They are all grammar related.  ”All I need to do” is to study grammar more and I can bump up my Spanish to the next level!  Of course, easier said than done, but certainly achievable.

Wow! What an incredible movie! This is a story about two brothers who take up arms against the British during the Irish War of Independence and how they then become involved in the Irish Civil War that follows. It is a very sad movie and I imagine quite representative (I don’t know – I’m not Irish) of the repression the Irish suffered under the British. A truly a griping film that shows us how regular people can be driven to commit great acts of cruelty and violence to achieve an end that many people would consider “good”.

To me, war is a force of nature like a hurricane, earthquake or a tornado. We have no control over its destructive power, where it goes, how many lives it will ruin or how long it will last. War corrupts and destroys everything it touches. I hate war with all my fiber because it is so evil and terrible. This movie shows these effects on the lives of the characters and how twisted everything becomes as a result of the war.

This was a ridiculous movie, but in a good way.  The plot, acting and special effects were so over-the-top.  It is the sort of movie you have to watch when you are in the mood for big explosions, silly costumes, stilted dialogue and want to kill some time with mindless entertainment – like flying over the Atlantic Ocean at 33,000 feet.

If I told you a movie would have more robots, more explosion and more fighting, you’d say “sequel”.  But what if I told you the movie also dropped all the affable charm, humor and innocence of the first movie?  You’d probably skip the film.  Or you’d probably be like these stars wondering where their movie went?

I wanted to like this movie since I really liked the first movie a lot.  So many things came together in the first movie to make it an enjoyable summer entertainment.  Unfortunately, some producer decided the sequel needed more robots and less people, so the movie ended up flat like a can of Coke left out over night.

I guess what really irked me were the dumb Skids and Mudflap robots.  Why would an alien species of machines talk like 13-year-old boys complete with homophobic posturing and putdowns?  It is hard to be entertained when animated things are putting you down in a not funny way.