A Scrum course with a view - that's what 15 of us experienced on Monday and Tuesday. The class was held on the edge of Lake Burley Griffin in the nation's capital. The room itself contained not one, but six video screens that could be rolled up to reveal the vista across the lake to a line-up of national institutions including the National Library, Questacon, the High Court and Parliament House.

I believe that this was just the second Product Owner course ever to be held in Australia. Perhaps even more significantly, overnight it has more than doubled the number of CSPO's in the country from 10 to 24! That's not a lot compared with our 738 CSMs. Hopefully this is just the start of a lot more CSPOs to come. The current tally of Certified Scrum Product Owners globally is just over 2,250 compared with the rather impressive total of 52,000 Certified ScrumMasters!

It was an interesting two day exploration of product ownership with a number of participants having significant experience in exactly this sort of work. We had a good deal of fun with the visioning and role modelling exercises which brought out some very interesting business ideas and some rather off-beat classes of user. Identifying what would create value and determining the minimum releasable feature-set brought out some interesting observations.

All participants were from government organisations. It is very encouraging to hear about people succeeding with Scrum implementations in organisations that are often seen as highly bureaucratic and very conservative. I wonder if such cases might provide CMM expert and researcher Dr Mark Paulk with evidence on where Agile is up to on Geoffrey Moore's technology adoption life cycle.

Well done guys on more than doubling Australia's CSPO certified population and all the best with your Product Ownership endeavours.