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!