This class is taught by a Certified Scrum Trainer but is not a certification course.

Jeff Sutherland invented the first Scrum in 1993 and began working with Ken Schwaber to deploy Scrum worldwide in 1995. He is currently CEO of Scrum, Inc. powered by OpenView Labs, a venture capital group. As Senior Advisor to the venture group, he is Scrum coach, mentor, and consultant to 20 portfolio companies. The senior partners in the venture group run their busines by Scrum and only invest in Scrum and XP companies. The venture partners want to know the secret sauce that propels development teams and whole companies to the highest level of performance. Jeff will bring 15 years of experience doing nothing but Scrum to this course and outline the secret sauce for achieving hyperproductive teams. Anyone can beneft from applying these strategies no matter what their stage of Scrum implementation.

Jeff is an expert on distributed/outsourced Scrum (see his papers on the SirsiDynix project and Xebia distributed Scrum) and on implementing Scrum in a CMMI Level 5 company (see his recent submission to a CMMI conference on his web site). He has has scaled and distributed Scrum using his last five companies as laboratories. His entire company at PatientKeeper is run by a MetaScrum, and is one of the most advance implementions of Scrum worldwide. Mary Poppendieck, in her latest book on Lean Software Development, comments: Five years ago a killer application emerged in the health care industry: Give doctors access to patient information on a PDA. Today there is no question which company won the race to dominate this exploding market; PatientKeeper has overwhelmed its competition with its capability to bring new products and features to market just about every week. The sixty or so technical people produce more software than many organizations several times larger, and they do not show any sign that the size of their code base is slowing them down.

Course Summary

1. Bring your own experiences, issues and problems as a case study for the group. And bring your success stories.

2. Learn how the highest performing teams implement Scrum.

3. Understand how Lean practices can be used to optimize Scrum performance.

4. At the conclusion of the course, you should be able to write a Certified Scrum Practitioner

application that would be accepted by the Scrum Alliance review team.

Areas of interest are likely to include:

* Scrum adoption: phases, players and levers * The goals of Scrum * Starting a Scrum Team * Building the Product Backlog and initial Estimating and Planning * Developing better Product Owners and better Business collaboration * Review of values and first principles * First Few Iterations — best practices in Release Planning, Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Work, Sprint Review, Retrospectives * Developing better team flow; moving the definition of Done * Use of Release and Sprint Burndown Charts * Other metrics related to Scrum Teams * Release Planning during the life of the effort * Impediments Management: Identifying, prioritizing and acting on Impediments (again and again) * When Push comes to Shove * Better Engineering Practices * Business Value and the integration of Scrum with the Business side of the firm * The problem of getting the coder to know what the end-customers really want, and only provide the top value features * “Ba”: Why, what and how? * More Useful Information Radiators * The winning spirit of a Scrum Team * Developing better Teams and better ScrumMasters and better Product Owners * How much is a ScrumMaster worth? How much is a Product Owner worth? * Selling Scrum: Why, when, where, and how * Better applications of the Scrum of Scrums concept * Where do Managers and Stakeholders fit in? * Moving from 2x improvement to 10x improvement * Spreading Scrum throughout the organization * Scrum center: why it matters and how to return there * Leadership and “Making It Happen Now”; Patience * Scaling Scrum * Scrum and legacy systems * The problems of Success * Success stories from imperfect companies * Scrum and… (Six Sigma, CMMI, XP, RUP, Lean, ITIL, COBIT, SARBOX, Offshoring, Distributed Teams, etc.) * Addressing risk (in its several flavors) and risk management * Scrum: Riding your Character and Emotions to victory * When will I be done learning Scrum?

It is NOT expected that all these topics can be addressed in each class, but many will be.

We will have an adaptive curriculum; each course will be adjusted to the needs of its attendees. The attendees will be expected to activity participate in describing possible solutions to the problems and questions asked. No perfect answers are expected.