Well, the end of the year is coming very soon now. There's only one more opportunity to gain certification as a Certified ScrumMaster on a public course in Australia this year. The details are as follows.

Act now to avoid disappointment. Registration close this week.

The year's final opportunity to gain or consolidate Product Owner skills is coming up very soon. I will be delivering a Certified Scrum Product Owner course in Sydney on November 17-18.

The course will be substantially updated to incorporate some of the latest tools and activities that I have learned about during recent trips to the USA and Germany.

Remaining places on the course are strictly limited to a very low number so if you or a colleague are interested, please act now to register via the course listing at the Scrum Alliance website.

I arrived back from the European Scrum Gathering in Munich, Germany less than one week ago. I brought back a custom-printed rugby ball as a souvenir from the conference courtesy of primary sponsor VersionOne (and a quick pass from Scrum Alliance President, Tom Mellor).

As well as replays of a couple of the best sessions I went to at Agile 2009, I attended some excellent sessions on social objects and Product Owner tools for which presentation slides are yet to be made available. Sessions that I enjoyed for which slides are currently available are...

• A case study of Scrum implementation in a games company: Harvey Wheaton - Growing Self-Organising Teams
• Risk in a Scrum envirnonment: Mark Summers - Redefining the Traditional View of Risk
• Scrum for lawyers: Regina Mullen - Raising the Bar, Iteratively

I delivered a presentation on day 1 of the conference with the title "Kicking ScrumBut" on the topic of ScrumBut anti-patterns that I have observed on a variety of Scrum projects along with advise as to how to avoid such situations. It was similar to the "Agile Mistakes" presentation (PDF) that I delivered at the Agile Australia conference the Friday before but substantially extended since I had twice the ammount of time. We also found a little time at the end to discuss a couple of the most significant ScrumButs that members of the audience had seen.

My presentation slides available below. As usual, if you have any questions or comments, please post them below.

The inaugural Agile Australia conference is looming large and coming fast - this week in fact! Late announcements include talks by Scrum Trainer and author Jean Tabaka as well as master of controversy, Dave Thomas. Whilst I expect their sessions to be top-notch, what is even more interesting to me is that we are set to hear from many large corporates and innovative Australia companies who are speaking about their agile transitions publicly for the first time. These include Westpac, BT Financial, Swann Insurance, Cochlear, Pickles Auctions, realestate.com.au. A real coming of age for Agile in Australia as well as a coming out of the closet for some perhaps!

I'm talking about "Agile mistakes and how to avoid them" - a session that will go under the (somewhat more punchy) name of "Kicking ScrumBut" at the Scrum Gathering in Munich at the start of the following week. No rest for the wicked!

I hope to see you at Agile 2009. For details see: agileaustralia.com. If you are interested in a special deal on your registration, please contact me.

I had a lot of fun in Brisbane two weeks ago exploring Scrum with an interesting and diverse class. We had a significant number of participants from two Queensland Government agencies as well as a few from private companies. One topic of interest to the former was how Scrum can work in a PRINCE2 environment and we managed to find a little time to discuss that.

Particularly memorable for me was a particularly creative presentation from one of the teams at the close of the course. They say that metaphor is a powerful communication tool and the team used this to the full by explaining Scrum using the metaphor of a boat cruise. The traditional project approach was characterised as a big cruise ship packed with people. Slow moving and difficult to maneuver. This contrasted with the Scrum approach in which a small speedboat took a small number of passengers at a time to various islands. Using the Scrum approach, the journey was flexible and the decision could be made to visit different islands or points of interest. Such decisions were arrived at the end of Sprints based on a review with passengers (stakeholders) of the journey to that point.

According to the presenters, the speed boats would zip between the points of most interest to the passengers whilst the monolithic old cruise ship was destined to suffer a fate similar to the Titanic! I'm thinking that the speed boats could start setting out sooner than the big cruise ship and would be able to start delivering value and happy passengers to their destination sooner.

So... could Scrum be useful for tour operators?! At the very least, it was a nice metaphor that made for a very memorable presentation.

Well done to everybody who contributed to what turned out to be an entertaining course. All the best with Scrum!

I had the pleasure of training a Certified ScrumMaster class at the University of Sydney at the end of last week. I felt a really positive energy from the group who appeared to really enjoy the group exercises. The photo to the right shows the class holding hands to figure out the flight path of the balls in one such exercise: the Ball Point Game.

Holding the course at the University provided us the opportunity to do a 'site visit' to the team room used by and agile development team at the University. We had a look at some burn-downs and status indicators on a plasma screen and a CSM from one of my previous classes was good enough to talk us through their tools and processes. Thanks very my to the University staff involved for showing us their workspace.

Another highlights for me was the 'Twister-style' self-organisation exercise involving a large group of 10 which unravelled so rapidly and fluidly when the team collaborated on it that I wished I had a video camera at hand to capture it! I think that such exercises explain the dynamics involved in self-organisation and contrast it with traditional Big Design Up-Front (BDUF) much more effectively that words can.

We discussed a number of characteristics of self-organisation in the debrief but I would like to expand on that with some additional characteristics of self-organisation that I have observed when watching the exercise unfold.

• A shared goal - the whole team has a common goal around which to self-organise. No pulling in different directions (well perhaps sometimes literally but not metaphorically).
• Empowerment - the team is empowered to decide on its actions and shape its own destiny.
• Collaboration - No refusing to help out because "the hole is in your side of the boat" because "we're all in the same boat".
• Multiple interactions - solving the problem involves a large number of interactions amongst participants. In this exercise, these interactions are both verbal and physical.
• Seeing the whole - the team operates in an environment of transparency and the whole team has visibility on its progress and the state of the whole solution and can make decisions to govern the whole team outcome on that basis.
• Worker insights - the people at the 'coal face' able to understand the problem and make tactical execution decisions more effectively that outside analysts.
• Distributed intelligence - whilst the 'traditional' (BDUF) attempt has the Project Manager and a small number of design consultants attempt to 'mastermind' a solution, the self-organising approach leverages the intelligence of all team members.
• Interchangeable leadership - there is no one leader through the whole exercise, different people take the initiative to step forward and take leadership at different points in time - usually when an individual has an idea about the next move to try.
• Distributed control - there is no single locus of control, control is distributed amongst team members.
• Idea generation - important in a complex environment, team members actively generate and communicate new ideas, quickly decide which to take, execute a move and inspect.
• Positive and negative feedback - team members collaboratively decide when to do more of a certain move and when to stop, inspect and decide in another move.
• Experimentation and learning - sometimes the group tries a move that doesn't work out and responds by identifying this, unwinding the move and trying a different approach.

The self-organisation exercise also provides nice demonstration of:

• The Art of the Possible - the 'knotty problem' the team is challenged to solve looks virtually impossible and results in the BDUF attempt to fail due to 'analysis paralysis'. The empowered team realises that there are moves that are possible and by taking these, the team raises the visibility of new possibilities.
• Emergent design and learning by doing - we come up with the design as we go and validate and revise it in incremental steps. Interestingly, in this example, teams usually conclude that designing the solution convincingly up-front would actually take more than getting in and solving it with the design emerging as we go.

Well, I must apologise... it has been a long time between posts here. You can't say that I have been idle more generally though. I have been out of Australia and on the road for almost 6.5 weeks. First in New Zealand for the second half of July and then the USA for all of August.

In New Zealand I delivered 5 training courses involving over 100 participants in addition to two speaking engagements! Thanks very much to my good friends at Equinox for pulling it all together. If you are in New Zealand and interested in Agile / Scrum, you can find the Agile course schedule on the Equinox site. This includes a wide variety of offerings from introductory to advanced level and covering all Scrum project participants. Equinox also offer Agile consulting services to assist you beyond the classroom as I also offer in Australia.

My time in the USA was also Agile-focused - this time spending time with some of the world's most recognised names in Agile and Scrum. Highlights...

• "Effective User Stories", "Certified ScrumMaster" and "Agile Estimating and Planning" courses - with Mike Cohn in Boulder, Colorado;
• "Passionate Product Owner" course with Agile User Experience guru Jeff Patton in Salt Lake City, Utah; and
• Agile 2009 conference - 1 week with approx. 1,300 members of the global agile community in Chicago, Illinois.

This was a very valuable trip as it helps me to ensure that my services continue to incorporate the latest thinking of the world's foremost Scrum trainers and practitioners.

If you didn't make it to Agile 2009, there's no reason to miss out entirely. Presentation slides from many of the Agile 2009 sessions are available via the conference program and I'll be posting my thoughts about certain sessions here very soon.

A new financial year of Scrum training in Australia kicked off last week with a public CSM course in Sydney. Numbers were up on the previous week with 11 participants putting a big effort into their Certification Exercises and being awarded the CSM accreditation. Almost all participants were currently or expecting to soon play the role of ScrumMaster and several were PMPs or PRINCE2 Practitioners.

Partly because of the ScrumMaster-heavy audience, we spent a good deal of day 1 discussing the ScrumMaster role and techniques for avoiding "command and control". Another change is that I have recently added a "Daily Scrum from Heaven" role-play exercise to the course to compliment and contrast with the "Daily Scrum from Hell". We had a good deal of fun with these exercises on this course. I'm always impressed at how readily participants can slip into character and ad-lib quite believable dysfunctional and functional behaviours.

The self-organisation exercise was particularly impressive this time around with the self-organising team solving the problem in an unbelieveable 15 seconds after the Big Design Up Front approach got nowhere. Whilst playing the Ball Point Game, the group came up with a lot of good process improvement ideas and tried one of the most effective configurations that I have seen in the last sprint to score a very good number of points for a team of that size.

Just as the course was wrapping up we were visited by Lachlan Heasman - convenor of the Sydney Scrum User Group - who gave everyone a run-down on the user group and how to get involved.

All the best with Scrum everyone and I hope to see you at a user group meeting in the not-too-distant future!

Contrary to my initial expectations, the class for Australia's last CSM course for the 2008-09 financial year turned out to be small. It was made smaller still by a suspected case of swine flu. Melbourne has borne the brunt of the epidemic in Australia with 1,560 confirmed cases at the time of writing. I would like to wish everyone who is suffering symptoms in that city a swift recovery to full health.

The course was held in what is now one of Australia's most environmentally sustainable office buildings: 500 Collins Street. You can find some key points on the building at the greener buildings site. Interestingly, increased productivity is cited as a major benefit of refurbishment. That certainly aligns well with what are seeking to achieve through Scrum.

To quote the case study...

A productivity study commissioned by Sustainability Victoria found that the refurbished office provided:

• 39% reduction in average sick leave days per employee per month
• 44% reduction in the monthly average cost of sick leave
• 9% increase in the typing speed of secretaries
• 7% increase in lawyers’ billings ratio, despite a 12% decline in the average monthly hours worked.

Perhaps there's a future Scrum case study in the hyper-productivity achievable through effective application of Scrum in work environments that also help to increase staff health and wellbeing! Just a thought.

The size of the class meant that discussions during breaks tended to involve the full class in something of an extension to the course focused on specific topics of interest. We were also able to find time to drill into options topics such as Agile Contracts, Scaling Scrum and some basic guidelines for distributed development.

Amongst the participants last week we had a good deal of prior experience with Extreme Programming (XP) and Feature Driven Development (FDD). This made for some interesting and mutually beneficial discussions. I learned some things too and came away with pointers to several useful references.

Towards the end of the course we played the Ball Point Game which saw me roll up my sleeves and join in for a change. Following that the Certification Exercise saw a very small number of people generate and present outstanding presentations in very little time. Whilst some may claim that the building contributed, I think we can attribute the exceptionally high level of productivity evident purely to the enthusiasm and focus of the participants.

Well done guys and all the best with Scrum!

It seems quite fitting that the Old Parliament House was the venue for the first ever Certified ScrumMaster course in Australia's national capital which concluded yesterday. On a sunny winter's morning we assembled on the spot on which one of Australia's most dramatic political events - the dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam - was announced in 1975. The above photo was taken a short time later just across the road so as to get more of the building in-shot.

It was great to involved with another Federal Government agency embracing Scrum during this in-house course. A topic of particular relevance to this organisation was not how to scale Scrum up, but rather how to scale it down to very small teams of only two or three members. After discussing a number of alternative options, we arrived at a solution that appears promising and is more in-line with Scrum's guideline of optimal team size being between 5 and 9.

Our discussion of the Product Owner role brought to light the fact that some participants had had project experiences involving someone playing a role similar to the Scrum Product Owner. Apparently these projects had proved to be particularly successful.

We had a particularly memorable moment during the self-organisation exercise. Somehow the class managed to get into a particularly difficult-looking set of knots. It did not appear to even be possible to solve the problem for a while and I was on the verge of calling it off. The team did not give up however - even after trying some experiments that appeared to make the situation worse rather than better. The self-organising team encouraged each other on and collaborated effectively to solve a problem that appeared to be unsolvable. Well done everyone.