Certified ScrumMaster

ScrumMaster Workshop with Greg Smith in Chicago

All CSM courses are taught by Certified Scrum Trainers. Taking a CSM course, passing the CSM test, and accepting the license agreement designates you as a Certified ScrumMaster, which indicates that you have been introduced to and understand the basic concepts you need to perform as a ScrumMaster or team member on a Scrum team. This course also satisfies two elements of the CSD track: Scrum Introduction and Elective.

Scrum is simple, consisting of a small set of practices you can implement yourself right?  Wrong!  That’s why as many as 75% of internally driven Scrum adoptions struggle to realize the full spectrum of benefits promised by Scrum.  Gregory Smith, Senior Consultant with ThoughtWorks, shapes his 15 years of technical and project leadership expertise into a Certified ScrumMaster course crisply focused on enabling you to lead or participate in a successful Scrum adoption.

This course offers the pragmatic guidance needed to understand and realize the holistic organization shaping power hidden within the simple Scrum framework.  Like every other ScrumMaster course this one will teach you the Scrum basics.  You will also gain a broad understanding of the Agile movement, the transformational values it expresses, and learn tips on driving their adoption through even the most challenging and resistant organizations.  No amount of Agile values and Scrum practices will allow your teams to embrace change however if you do not also focus on lowering the cost of technical change.  This Course also highlights the key software engineering practices you will need to understand in order to truly realize all of Scrum’s promised benefits.

Greg will teach you how the 3 key aspects of a Scrum adoption program; Scrum project/product management practices, XP software engineering practices and fundamental Agile software development values, must be combined to allow you, your teams and organization to truly realize the transformational power of Scrum.

Every participant will receive the following:

ScrumAlliance ScrumMaster Certification
1 year membership in ScrumAlliance (a $50 value)
Includes access to additional ScrumAlliance resources and articles
Printed version of all course materials.
PMPs: You can receive 14 Project Management Institute PDUs for this course.

All registered participants will receive detailed instructions for accessing the AON center 1 week prior to the course.  Email Greg for questions in advance of that date.

Agile Scrum Foundations
 The ideological relationship between Agile, Scrum and XP
 Putting fundamental Agile, Scrum and XP values into practice
 

Scrum, an Aerial View
 Iterative and Incremental development
 Scrum adoption success and failure indicators
 Empirical and predictive process controls
 Scrum’s origin, direction, cycles and cadence
 

Talking the Talk
 Scrum and agile terminology demystified
 Scrum roles, responsibilities and commitment levels
 

Continuous Improvement exercise
 

Walking the Walk
 Self organizing, self directing teams
 Before-during-after sprint activity cycle
 Focus and purpose of each Scrum meeting
 Net present value and the definition of “done”
 

Metrics that Matter
 Delivery vs. activity based tracking
 Applicability of metrics vs. diagnostics
 Burn-ups and Burn-downs
 Commitment based planning vs. capacity based planning
 

Daily Scrum dynamics (exercise)
 
User Stories
 User story basics and format
 Thin slicing stories
 Acceptance criteria and format
 Stories, requirements and use cases
 

Agile estimation techniques
 Estimation variance
 Estimation units and scales
 Coping with uncertainty
 

Release planning in Scrum
 Plan a release (exercise)
 Discovery, inception and Sprint-0
 

Distributed Scrum Simulation exercise
 

Selling Scrum, adoption models
 Bottom up and top down models, Adoption barriers and overcoming themAgile Scrum Foundations

Agile Retrospectives

While this course provides a necessary foundation for anyone aspiring to personally become a Certified ScrumMaster and build successful Scrum teams the applicability is much wider than ScrumMasters alone.  A successful Scrum adoption program is “change” writ large, so everyone with an interest or stake in adopting, tuning or running a Scrum practice in their organization should attend.

This course is highly recommended for everyone in an organization who might be asked to perform any part of their responsibilities differently in support of a Scrum team or program.  A successful Scrum adoption program should include some changes for a wide variety of roles and all are highly encouraged to participate in this course, some examples including

• software developers
• quality analysts
• business analysts
• line managers
• project managers
• program managers
• application and enterprise architects
• IT budget managers
• IT budget approvers
• CTOs, CIOs or other executive managers with a stake in a smoothly running software production effort