Training Exercise: Scrum Simulation

Recently while co-training a CSM (Certified ScrumMaster) class with Peter Hundermark we found ourselves with a polarised class of people who had only just heard about Scrum and people who had been practicing for months or years . Inspecting and adapting as we do, Peter and I decided to split the class. I invented a new exercise during the lunch break for the beginners, to help them grasp exactly what all the Scrum meetings are about, how they fit together and how the artefacts are used. It turned out to be a very successful exercise for teaching the concepts to newbies, and took about 90 minutes. I have given timings below of what I would time box each section to in future, being a new exercise I didn’t timebox well, as I had no idea how long it would take, and so we ran out of time near the end.

Training Exercise: Scaling Scrum

It’s been a while since I blogged, but I have a good excuse… I have been working hard co-training CSM (Certified ScrumMaster) and CSPO (Certified Scrum Product Owner) classes with Peter Hundermark. I am hoping to become a CST (Certified Scrum Trainer) myself, and the best way to learn is co-training with other trainers.

Over the last few weeks I had the pleasure of co-training with Gabrielle and Robert Benefield. During a discussion about sharing different training exercises I thought it would be great to blog about some of the exercises we use in training; to share them with a larger audience and get some feedback from how they work for other people.

I’ve already had great feedback on my estimation techniques post which explains a session you can run with teams to help them understand different estimation techniques. It seems likely that more training exercise posts would be helpful. The first topic is an exercise Gabby used to teach Scrum scaling patterns.

Workshop: Estimation Techniques

This week I ran an estimation techniques workshop to help my teams understand different ways of estimating. I’ve run it once before at my previous company and people found it useful. This time Sam and I prepared together, and she ran the same workshop with her teams. We agreed to blog about the results to see how it compared.

The Scrum Penny Game – a modification

I attended Peter Steven’s Open Space session at the Orlando Gathering which offered a modification on the Scrum Penny Game. Last week I ran Scrum training for 12 new hires in our company and decided to try out a variation of the game. Below is my version of it, and the results and learning the team had.

In preparing for the session I was chatting to my husband and fellow Scrum coach, Carlo. He was asking how long each round took, and I told him that there was no fixed time, it was just how long it took to process the coins. We discussed this, and his comment was that to truly represent Scrum the game should have fixed length iterations, and we should measure how much value the team delivered in that time. So I decided to fix the rounds to 2 minutes each. If the team finish processing a batch of coins and it is accepted by the customer, it can be processed again to earn more value. I did limit the number of coins to 20 though, so they sometimes had to wait to finish processing coins before continuing.