I had the pleasure of training both product managers and project managers at a highly successful Sydney-based company who export software to over 50,000 customers in over 160 countries. It was exciting and affirming for me to find that everyone who participated in the Certified Scrum Product Owner and Certified ScrumMaster classes were fully supportive of Scrum and couldn't wait to get stuck into using across as many of their projects as possible.

Feedback from the Product Owners indicated that user stories are a big step forward as a tool for discussing features with customers and orchestrating development work. There was also considerable interest in techniques for prioritisation and calculating Return on Investment.

We had a lot of fun on the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) course with the group exercises. The self-organisation exercise was particularly impressive with the team of 8 collaboratively unravelling their knotty software problem in less than 20 seconds! The Ball Points Game (pictured) hit the mark with the actual velocity matching estimates as well as with the teamwork.

We finished the CSM course with up with a certification exercise that the participants customised to answer real implementation questions direct from their own organisation's environment. I think we all left the class with a lot of new ideas about how to benefit from Scrum. One ScrumMaster  actually reported some return on investment from day 1 when he adjusted the way he facilitated Daily Scrums at the start of day 2 of the course with very pleasing results.

Congratulations everyone and all the best with your Scrum implementation!