Posts tagged: SCRUM courses

Scrum Simulation Game – The Product Box

A new amazing SCRUM simulation, inspired from both the brochure game and Sanjiv Augustine book ‘Managing Agile Projects’

In a previous post ‘SCRUM Simulation, the Resort Brochure Collaborative Game‘ I described a possible SCRUM simulation playing the Brochure Game collaborative game.
During my last class I used a variation of that collaborative game, taking suggestions from Sanjiv’s book and arranging better the timing of that simulation.

The main scope of the game is to create a Product Box of a hypothetical software product, using SCRUM and its rules, roles and ceremonies.
First of all, form groups of no more than six people.
You, the coach or the trainer, are the sponsor of the software that must be created. Initially you held a short briefing of the software the company is going to create.
What I choose is the creation of a social network application completely dedicated to marathon athletes and their coaches.
My explanation was something like this.

 

The athletes should be able to create their profiles inserting general and physiological data, information regarding their training session plans, the results attained to the races they run.
The coaches, after the profile creation, should be able to ask the friendship to the athletes they train and create plans, verify results achieved, inspecting on improvement area and suggesting new actions and tasks.
This new software should be compliant and integrable with the most important social networks.

 

Then, the teams were asked initially, to imagine and visualize the product box of that software and to think about an attractive elevator pitch.

 

A five minute speech was enough.

 

I asked each team to choose one person to be the product owner.
Then, some magazines with amazing pictures and drawings were supplied, together with scissors, rulers, glues, cardboards, coloured markers paper masking tape.

 

I asked the teams to start thinking about how to use that material to realize what they thought about the product box and the elevator pitch.

 

In the meanwhile, in another room, I met the product owners, explaining to them better my idea about the product and what really was important about it in order to give them some more information about the stories they should create, having some more details o how to prioritize them.

 

Then the simulation started following this timetable.

Preparation

  • 5 minutes: room preparation
  • 5 minutes: information about the product and seleciton of product owners
  • 5 minutes: briefing with POs
  • 5/10 minutes: writing user stories and prioritization

Iterations

Three iterations as follows:

  • 2 minutes: Daily/Planning Meeting
  • 5 minutes: Sprint
  • 2 minutes: Demo Meeting
  • 1 minute: Retrospective

When finished we had a 10 minutes debriefing.

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categories Advanced Skills, Agile PM, SCRUM | | datetime 31/03/2012 23:22 | comments Comments (0)

A SCRUM lesson delivered using….SCRUM

How to arrange any kind of training using SCRUM? Read below!

Last week I had the pleasure to teach Agile and SCRUM. The class was quite challenging because the attendees were all PMP certified, with a deep experience in managing ITC projects. The class was also quite heterogeneous because of the different types of projects they manage and because of the different expertises.

In a class like that, teaching agile could be tricky because the experience and the approach of the attendees is such that topics like Planning, estimating, risk management are paramount and you will be challenged for sure when explaining how agile embodies those topics.

This is the reason why in courses like that one, I make huge use of games, exercises and confrontation sessions (a little bit of coaching never hurts) in order to facilitate the learning process of the participants letting them to consolidate the knowledge just aquired.

 

Knowledge is only a rumor until it’s in the muscle (Papua New Guinea proverb)

One another trick I use when teaching SCRUM is to arrange the lesson using SCRUM itself.

First of all, I arrange a fantastic taskboard with three columns: Backlog, Running, Done.


The backlog column contains the topics I’m going to cover, as post-its. In every post-it I write the name of the topic and on the left or right corner I write also an estimation in story points.
This estimation is a blend of these factors: number of slides covering the topic, importance of the topic, difficulty of the topic and finally how much space I should left, to let the attendees to reason, talk, discuss, confront about that.

Then arrives the calculation of the total story points I muyst deliver in that session, summarizing the points of each topic.

Good, now it’s time to draw the burndown chart.

I decided that the duration of my hypotethical day is one hour.
The burndown chart is a standard one: on the Y axis I report the total story points just calculated; the X axis, however, is divided into the N days available (the number of hours available for that teaching session).

 

The preparation is finished, now it’s time to work, explaining the contents of the lesson.
Every time I start a new topic, the relative post-it is moved from the Backlog column to the Running column. On the other way round every time a topic is completed it goes from the Running to the Done column.

Every hour I check the status of the work delivered (topics covered), how much work is again in the backlog, the time remaining and I say to myself and to the class what we are going to do in next hour and if we are on track or not. Think of this as what a team does every morning conducting the SCRUM Daily Meeting.
Then, the burndown chart is updated with the story points left.

I found this approach very usefull.
Visualizing what topics are still in the backlog, helps you to remain focused and to decide to slow down or accelerate.
Visualizing the burndown chart reinforces what just said in the point above.

The class sees how many topic must still be covered (taskboard), it sees what this does mean in relation with the time available (burndown chart).
This actually, allow the class to automatically regulate the way the attendees ask for questions, the need of any break, the way how they discuss: they obviously want to cover all the topics, maximizing the value and reducing any waste of time.

I think, however, that the most important point here is to let the class see how SCRUM works.

This helps the attendees in the process of digesting the SCRUM knowledge, transforming it from a only rumor in their brain into an abilities they can train and use soon.

What I hear, I forget.
What I see, I remember.
What I do, I understand.
(Confucio)

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categories Advanced Skills, Agile PM, SCRUM, Tools & Techniques | | datetime 15/03/2012 22:03 | comments Comments (0)

A video of a SCRUM course in collaboration with ESPM

Here it is a second amazing video (the first was “Video of one of my course with ESPM“) of a SCRUM course in collaboration with the European School of Project Management.

 

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categories News | | datetime 28/02/2012 00:41 | comments Comments (0)

Video of one of my course with ESPM

Promotional video of the European School of Project Management that indirectly promote me as one of its teacher.
Many thanks to ESPM.

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categories News | | datetime 14/02/2012 11:58 | comments Comments (1)

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