July 7-8: Certified Scrum Product Owner Course with ScrumInc

On July 7th and 8th, in New York, there was Certified Scrum Product Owner Course delivered by two co-trainers:  Avi Schenier, representing Jeff Sutherland’s company ScrumInc  and Robin Dymon, CST from Innovel.

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The class (size of about two scrum teams) was engaged in heated discussions, practical exercises and games.   I had the honor of attending and participating in the course and was able to make a series of observations.  Below, is the list of points that either very strongly resonated with me because they are already in-line with my personal views or are going to be leveraged to  enrich my personal training methods and coaching techniques:

  • The Scrum Guide: Scrum Values (courage, commitment, focus, respect, openness) – the latest, very important Scrum Guide amendment
  • Management-Leadership: emphasis on management acting in Servant-Leadership, not Command-Control capacity.  Exposing  most common problems with mid- and first-line management
  • Finding a good Product Owner: common challenges and good vs. bad candidates
  • Brooks law: fallacy beliefs about how to return late projects back on track
    • N(N -1)/2 formula
    • Communication saturation and “Heat of Commutation” gone wild
  • Story Mapping: purpose, techniques, strategic advantages
    • Story Slicing
    • Story dependency discovery
  • “What to build first?”: Value vs. Effort conversation
  • Sprint Interrupts and Emergency Procedures: how to deal with sub-optimal Scrum situations
    • Use of Buffers for Emerging Requirements and Bugs and Customer Feedback
    • Individual/Team Capacity Management
  • Scrumming the Scrum: continuous, relentless improvement of Scrum itself
  • Definition of Ready vs. Definition of Done: importance of understanding and agreeing to what is being delivered (and what is not!)
  • Hardy-Weinberg Principle of task switching impact on productivity and Throughput: a great practical in-class game
  • “Team Happiness is a Leading Indicator of Performance”
    • Measuring Individual/Team Happiness Factor vs. Velocity
    • Using Happiness Metrics as an Analytic Tool
  • Agile Strategy Objectives: Convergent & Divergent design vs. Process Predictability & Adaptability
  • Making story discovery real with Customer Personas
  • “Why is it important for Product Owner to understand principles of Story Sizing and Estimation?”
  • Importance of Business Value estimation in strategic planning (frequently forgotten by POs concept)
  • Creating Executive Action Team – provide support and remove impediments
  • Breaking the Iron Triangle of conventional Project Management
  • Release Management: burn-up/down charts as means of communicating status
  • Agile Metrics/Dashboards – why is it important for Senior Management to rely on empirical data produced by teams to measure progress
  • Three Common Approaches to Release Planning: Deadline-based, Regular-Departure, Value-Based

It was also a great experience to observe (and participate) in a daily scrum call, held by ScumInc folks during the lunch breaks.  Jeff Sutherland and his entire team practice what they preach: every day, around the same time (noon), they meet virtually, from multiple locations, to debrief each other on progress of their sprint-in-flight. Below, is the illustration (collage of different locations) of how they do it (from Avi’s laptop):

Daily Scrum With Jeff Sutherland and ScrumInc Teamdaily_scrum

My Kodak moment with Avi (center) and Robin (right) :avi_robin_gene

 

Additional Kodak moments from the course:cspo_7

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1 thought on “July 7-8: Certified Scrum Product Owner Course with ScrumInc”

  1. The Product Owner has a very important role in Scrum and it is great to see a course designed to help Product Owners understand Scrum better. The key points given in the article are quite useful and important. Thank you for sharing!

    Reply

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