Learn the essentials of working as a ScrumMaster or Scrum team member in this course. While the Scrum Alliance provides a list of core concepts that must be covered in the class, each instructor creates his or her own material, allowing courses to differ based on the strengths, interests, and experiences of the instructor.

Certified ScrumMaster Course

June 14 & 15, 2010. Vienna Austria

This course will be taught in English

€1350 Regular Pricing, €1200 Early Pricing (before 17 May 2010), €1080 Super Early Pricing (before 1 April 2010). All prices exclude VAT.

In this course, participants will learn how to stop thrashing and start executing along with everything necessary for getting started with Scrum. There are very few rules to Scrum so it is important to learn its fundamental principles by experiencing them directly from those who have implemented the best Scrums in the software industry.

Upon course completion, students will be Certified ScrumMasters and will be given a one year membership with the Scrum Alliance ($50 USD value).

Participants gain hands-on practice through exercises including:

• How to plan and run Sprint Planning Meetings
• Daily Scrum Meetings
• Sprint Reviews
• Sprint Retrospectives
• And more.   

The course format consists of multiple lecture topics, group exercises and group discussion.  Ample time will be devoted to analysis of the “real-world” industry experiences of the ScrumMaster Course instructor based on case study examples and experiences managing Agile projects and coaching Scrum teams.

Upon completion, you will be able to answer questions like these:

• When should I use Scrum and agile methods?
• How can I get management on board with Scrum?
• What are some common mistakes teams make when they adopt Scrum?
• What are the roles in Scrum and is it OK to mix them?
• How should we structure our teams?
• How does Scrum work in an offshore model?
• What is agile?
• How does our team know we are "done"?
• And more...

What People Are Saying

1. "Though I knew much of the material, this reinforced the NEED to review and reflect with more knowledgeable people"

2. "Enjoyed the examples from real life"

3. "Best I've attended"

4. "Really liked the exercises and found Scrum to be inspiring"

5. "Really liked the pragmatic no BS presentation style. Greatly appreciated the messages and focus on the human factor side of Scrum"

6. "Great course, very good teaching, will recommend to my peers"

7. "This was a great course and I am super excited to implement"

About the Instructor - Mitch Lacey, PMP

Mitch Lacey is an agile practitioner and trainer. Mitch has been managing projects for over twelve years and has numerous plan-driven and agile projects under his belt.

Mitch honed his agile skills at Microsoft Corporation, where he successfully released core enterprise services for Windows Live. Mitch's first agile team at Microsoft was coached by Ward Cunningham (creator of the wiki and co-creator of Extreme Programming), Jim Newkirk (creator of nUnit) and David Anderson (Kanban advocate).

While at Microsoft, he transitioned from Program Manager to Agile Coach, working hand-in-hand with groups throughout their transition to Agile practices. After Microsoft, Mitch was the Agile Practice Manager at Ascentium Corporation where he practiced agility on the projects he ran every day while coaching customers on  agile  practices and lessons on agile adoption worldwide.

As a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) and a registered Project Management Professional (PMP), Mitch shares his experience in project and client management through Certified ScrumMaster courses, Agile coaching engagements, conference presentations, blogs and white papers.

He is the author of “Adventures in Promiscuous Pairing” presented and published at the Agile 2006 conference, “Transitioning to Agile: Key Lessons Learned in the Field” presented and published at the Fall 2007 PMI Global Congress in Atlanta, Georgia and "The Impacts of Poor Estimating - and How to Fix It" presented and published at the winter 2007 SQE Agile development conference in Orlando, Florida.

He has presented at Agile Alliance Agile 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 conferences, the 2008 Better Software Conference and the 2008 and 2009 SQE Agile Development Practices conferences. He was the stage producer for the Organization and Culture stage for Agile 2009 and is continuing that trend by producing the Leadership and Organizations stage for Agile 2010.

Mitch is currently authoring a book targeting new Scrum teams on how to survive the first year of Scrum. The book will be published by Addison Wesley and is scheduled for publication in 2010.

The course format consists of multiple lecture topics, group exercises and group discussion.  Ample time will be devoted to analysis of the “real-world” industry experiences of the ScrumMaster Course instructors based on case study examples and experiences managing Agile projects and coaching Scrum teams.

Overview of Agile & Scrum

• What is Agile
• What is Scrum
• Origins

Roles: The ScrumMaster

• Description and responsibilities
• What makes a good ScrumMaster
• ScrumMaster as team member

Roles: The Product Owner

• Description and responsibilities
• Vision & the Product backlog
• User stories on the product backlog
• INVEST in your backlog

Roles: The team

• Description and responsibilities
• Composition and cross-functionality
• Organizing

Meetings & Artifacts

• Planning
• The daily scrum
• Sprint review
• Sprint retrospective

Sprints

• What is potentially shippable?
• How does architecture fit?
• Sprint length and release sprints
• Abnormal terminations

Sprint planning

• Prioritization and the sprint goal
• Sprint planning meeting

Release planning and Progress tracking

• Estimating the product backlog
• Release planning meeting
• Burndown charts & task boards

Scaling & Offshoring

• The scrum of scrums
• Shared vs. specific product backlogs
• Getting started & common pitfalls

This highly interactive certification course is appropriate for software team members, including:

• Project Managers
• Team Leads
• Development Managers
• Product Managers
• Software Architects
• Systems Architects
• Testers
• CIO
• CTO