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.