Along with a mere 15 or of my closet coworkers, I am now a certified Scrum master.
Thanks to the Jeff “Father
of Scrum” Sutherland, our team learned in 2 days how to do well what we have
been poorly attempting for a year.
After
struggling to refine our own Scrum implementation, we decided to
engage Jeff to come set us all straight and provide us with a Scrum prescription.
While the basics of Scrum are easily understood, the details can be hard to close
in on. Estimation techniques, structure of a Scrum board, anatomy of a story
card, backlog structure, and planning for releases and iterations were all things
Jeff improved for us during his visit.
He kindly tailored the class for our particular implementation of Scrum.
The best part was his willingness to use our actual backlog items in the class exercises.
We used our own user stories to mock an iteration from planning to review. That
process alone easily made the classes worth the price of admission.
After a week of applying the lessons learned in our two day certification class, I
can honestly say that this training was worth the price of admission. Bottom
line: There is a right way to do Scrum, and it works.
Today we applied Jeff’s recommendations to our planning and estimation processes
and had the best planning sessions in our experience. For an excellent source
of details on this process, read Mike Cohn’s Agile
Planning and Estimating. Our favorite techniques from Mike’s definitive
book on the subject include Fibonacci Sequence Points and Poker Planning.
We combined these techniques and made a genuinely fun process of estimation.
I look forward to the true cohesion that will obviously be coming our way thanks to
the investment we have made resetting everyone’s expectations of Scrum.
Thank you, Jeff.