At my new company, Telegraaf, we have started running the Speurders project using Scrum last week. So it was excellent timing that Roots in Belgium got Joseph Pelrine over to Mechelen to give a Certificed Scrum Master training. So that’s where I spent the last two days.

Scrum is a nice process - extremely simple to implement, but well-rooted in social complexity science meaning that the first implementation is just a starting point, from there feedback will inform you how to proceed (that is, if you are a good listener…).

Joseph is a very nice trainer. First, he’s a practictioner - I have never ever gotten a decent training from a full-time trainer, especially not on topics as complex as these. Scrum is a system where everyone constantly learns when applying it, and that learning stops as soon as you’d switch to 100% training. Second, he’s experienced enough to use the course schedule as a guideline. Often, he’s just telling stories, illustrating various points with cases from his own experience, and that, I think, is the best way to bring home how Scrum applies to certain situations - there are no rules, and no recipes, to steer a complex system. Everything depends on context, so even if it was frustrating at times that Joseph dodged questions about specific situations at participants’ companies, he was right to do so. All in all, it was a fun and very fruitful event.

Anyway, the next year I can call myself, for what it’s worth, a Certified Scrum Master. It doesn’t mean a lot, but might just help a bit in my evangelization work in my company. We’ll see - but in any case, I created a new category for Scrum on my blog and I’ll report back whenever there’s something interesting to report on…

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 7:39 pm and is filed under Agile/Lean. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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