Done!

Well, I guess it's done in the fullest sense of the word: the scrum master training is over and it's been an exciting couple of days with Jeff Sutherland and great participants. There was theory, there were facts (many) and there was also practice, where I got an opportunity to play with nice fun people like Nicolas and to benefit from the creative ideas of Denis, two team mates in a practice sequence that we blew away. One of the missions was to build a four story house of cards (that's where Denis creative use of post-its came in). Great fun. Here are the pictures.

The team's achievement (OK, the fourth level of the house is minimalistic, but on the other hand that was the description of the requirement in the story point, so why go beyond and take the risk of send everything crumbling down?) with Denis trying to hide behind a bottle of water ;-)

Nicolas, who's given us a great tip to properly achieve estimates: make sure you are absolutely clear about what "done" means... and that makes a world of difference both in terms of quality of estimates and in terms of making the interaction between team members really productive and uplifting:

The team's achievement with Laurent at the right hand side in the background. Laurent works for CRP Henri Tudor, Luxembourg's public research center, which means that Luxembourg had some serious proportion of the audience in this session of scrum master (there were 4 people from Vanksen Group, Laurent and myself - I count at least 50% from Luxembourg given the amount of time I spend there!).

Comments

[Nicolas Martignole]

Thanks Alex for the pictures
You'll find an article in french on my blog.
Cheers

Nicolas

http://www.touilleur-express.fr/2008/03/26/im-now-a-scrum-master/

[alex]

Your post is a great account of these two days and should give people incentive to go follow the training with Jeff. That would go a long way in improving the quality and performance of 95% of product development projects... and it's not only about IT IMHO.

[sylvain]

I wish I could have joined the fun, unfortunately the session was full (with Luxembourg people ;-). We will strive to organise more agile-related events in Luxembourg this year and beyond. Expect more opportunitîes to share knowledge and real-world feedback. May the fun be with you!

[alex]

Thanks Sylvain. I too wish you could have joined. No doubt that would have fueled Paris paranoia about the imminence of a Luxembourg invasion... not. Anyway, may the fun be with you and the Agile Partner team too!