It was quite instructive to hear about the games and how they work from Luke.  From the different case studies discussed, we really illuminated the dynamics involved with selecting the right game for problem.  In addition, a few of my misunderstandings about the purpose of the games and how they are played from reading the book were cleared up as well.  What I liked most about the class was in addition to talking about the games, we played a lot of them in the course of two days.

1. Remember the Future (played)
2. Prune the Product Tree (played)
3. Speed Boat (played)
4. Product Box (played)
5. Buy a Feature (played)
6. 20-20 Vision (played)
7. Show and Tell (played)
8. The Apprentice
9. Start Your Day
10. Spider Web
11. Me and My Shadow
12. Give Them a Hot Tub

Below are pictures of the Product Box I created for Look Forward Consulting announcing the new service available.  I look forward to using these games more and helping Scrum teams with improving prioritization and collaboration with their customers.

Related posts:

1. Best Links of the Week – Christmas 2009
2. Without a Product Owner…
3. Focus on Adding Value, Not Features

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.

Related posts:

1. Best Links of the Week – July 2nd 2010
2. Best Links of the Week – July 30th 2010
3. Best Links of the Week – August 13th 2010

An excellent ScrumMaster has a real presence with the Team.  To become an excellent ScrumMaster one must go beyond the simple transactional elements of Scrum and focus on the transformative aspects of the work.  As ScrumMaster you need to focus, really focus, on the needs of both the Team and the individuals as you work to improve the environment they work in.  You need to be both physically and emotionally there for them in a profound way.

Scrum’s great promise is that it reconnects people to each other work through empowerment and true collaboration.  As ScrumMaster it is your responsibility to facilitate collaboration, to help people feel comfortable and willing to take both professional and personal risks.  This does not happen in a fifteen minute Daily Scrum, or a two-hour Sprint Planning meeting or during a Sprint Retrospective.  Those rituals have very specific goals and individual coaching is not one of them.  The moments where one-on-one coaching happens and trust is developed are the times when the people are doing the work.  It is those moments when one notices a Team member’s joy, disappointment, frustration, happiness and anxiety.  You catch them being real and experience the moment with them.  This only happens when you share physical proximity, observe and be present when these moments happen.

In Scrum, we strive to give the Team members slack and ask them to limit multitasking to preserve their focus.  We expect the same from the ScrumMaster and that is why I recommend new ScrumMasters only focus on one Team.  If as a ScrumMaster you are lurching from fire-to-fire, meeting-to-meeting, team-to-team you are still operating in the old project management paradigm and it needs to stop.  People on the Teams need your help.  Stop being so busy and focus on what the Team needs for a change.

Related posts:

1. Best Links of the Week – Christmas 2009
2. Importance of the Definition of Done
3. Are Microteams Valuable?

Beat the summer heat with these engaging posts.

1. Lean Software Experience Report – detailed discussion of how XP and Lean were combined for GlaxoSmithKlein IT projects to support new drug development.
2. Making People Before Making Products – great article highlighting the import role management plays in developing & mentoring knowledgable workers; watch out for the funky scrollbar.
3. How to Succeed With Scrum When Your Company is Anti-Agile? - Rob Diana talks about how to recover from previous failed Agile attempts in your company with time-honored values such as lies and entrapment.
4. How to Do Agile When We Only Have 50 Crap Developers? – a short rant on the importance of having good people on your Agile team; the comments are very interesting, too.
5. Pair Programming Interviews – an experience report from Rob Bowley on how to use pair programming in your interview process.
6. The Secret Sauce Recipe to Agile Coaching – Rob Myers talks about what it takes to become an excellent coach for an Agile team.
7. A Coaching Toolkit – a collection of principles to keep in mind when coaching Agile teams.
8. Scrum Adoption #1: Awakening – Tobias Mayer examines the concept of awakening as a prerequisite for making inroads with Scrum in your company.
9. How to Screw Up Agile – great mind map on the factors which inhibit (and help) Agile grow in your organization.

Related posts:

1. Best Links of the Week – Feb 22nd 2010
2. Best Links of the Week – Mar 13th 2010
3. Best Links of the Week – July 30th 2010

What is Lean? Is Lean the next “big thing” I need to learn — or is Kanban enough? Is Agile still relevant? To add to the confusion, there seem to be several different interpretations of Lean Thinking in the Agile community! In this panel, four Agile/Lean thought leaders and practitioners will discuss the essential elements of Lean and its relationship to Agile. Our panelists will share their ideas about Lean, show similarities they see between Lean and Agile, and help attendees understand (and perhaps reconcile) any differences.

This panel came about during last year’s conference in Chicago where Gil and I discussed what does our community really know about Lean.  Are we trying to reinvent the wheel?  Are there misconceptions about Lean in our community?  In our conversation, it became clear we were really passionate about hosting a conversation between members of the Agile community and thought leaders on the Agile and Lean communities on this topic to help everyone get a deeper understanding of both.  We also wanted to make sure that the experience is very interactive with the audience members giving the panelists feedback on how well they communicated their ideas.

Related posts:

1. It’s Just Lean, No Hyphen Please
2. Agile is Lean for Software Development
3. Culture Changes for Agile Transitions

More great writings gathered from far and wide.

1. Scrum at Mind Candy – brief video of a task board in action over a three month period.
2. Confessions of an Agile Project Manager – PMI sponsored a video contest among PMP using Agile – check out the results on YouTube!
3. Thoughts on two months pairing - Sarah Mei reflects on her experience pair programming and the benefits it has provided her professional & personal life.
4. Can Agile Learn Anything from PMBOK? - Dennis Stevens looks at how the PMBOK supports, compliments and impedes Agile and proposes some solutions to make the two synchronize better.
5. Multitasking Gets You There Later - Roger Brown discusses a common paradigm in project management when dealing with too many projects and too few people.
6. Waterfall, Lean\Kanban and Scrum – Ken Schwaber, co-creator of Scrum, discusses why Scrum relies on empirical process control theory and why they did not choose Lean or a defined process.
7. The Role of Middle Management in Toyota or a Lean System – special post on the new focus of management in Agile organizations.
8. Team Room – want to get increased focus, quality and retention from your Team?  Check out this team room article by Martin Fowler.
9. Agile + UX: six strategies for more agile user experience – how Comcast is combining good user experience (UX) practices with Scrum.
10. June 2010 CSM class – very cool visualization of a Certified ScrumMaster class taught by Tobias Mayer and Bachan Anand.

Related posts:

1. Best Links of the Week – July 2nd 2010
2. Best Links of the Week – July 16th 2010
3. Best Links of the Week – Feb 1st 2010

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.

Related posts:

1. How I Became a Certified ScrumMaster
2. Scrum in a 100 words or less
3. Why do you care so much (about Scrum)?

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.

Related posts:

1. Best Links of the Week – July 2nd 2010
2. Best Links of the Week – July 30th 2010
3. Best Links of the Week – Jan 12th 2010

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.

Related posts:

1. Why I Want to be a Certified Scrum Trainer
2. The Scrum 50000 Mile Maintenance – April 28th
3. XPSD Call for Speakers

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.

Related posts:

1. Best Links of the Week – July 30th 2010
2. Best Links of the Week – July 16th 2010
3. Best Links of the Week – Feb 1st 2010