Certified Scrum Master Day 2

Well day 2 of the Certified Scrum Master course is now completed and I am sat here in the Oslo executive Lounge and very nice it is indeed although the view is naff. Scandinavian chic at its best within the lounge. I was lucky enough to share a taxi to the airport with  a nice Lady from the North of Norway - just above the arctic circle whose English can only be described as superb.   The total price for the taxi was a ‘cheap’ £65 split two ways. I am told that it can often be £110 for a one way trip depending on Taxi Service. Access to Wi-Fi in the Airport costs an arm and a leg and Norway has had enough of my money so I am doing this offline J Before I tell you more about the course I will discuss the Indian restaurant I ate at last night.  Very good food indeed was to be had at the Jewel in the Crown in Oslo. However the prices – my gosh – about £27 for a main meal – and that’s before you start adding Nan Bread at £5 etc –Oslo must be one of the most expensive cities in the world and I am reliably told by the locals that it keeps getting more expensive. A pint of Cobra was £7 and then they add a suggested 25% gratuity to the bill that they hint should be spent. And you’ve guessed it – there were several other British guys in there away on business eating our favourite food! Enough!

Day 2 started with everyone changing seats to be in new groups. Today was again a period of lectures, anecdotes and exercises. “Scrum is full of holes” we were told by Ken. Ok, in the context of what he was talking about it made sense and I am not into quoting people out of context! SCRUM is a wrapper for engineering practices – and the ones you choose to implement are up to you. We created a product backlog, prioritised it, ordered it, worked out our capacity to do work, fitted it into a sprint within a release and generally agreed that recording historic estimates at a requirement level to come up with future estimates was so prone to error that it was pretty much pointless.  We lightly touched upon team psychology, implementing scrum within an organisation, the concerns about Scrum Masters also working as developers etc and the new roles for Project Managers. We also discussed Sprint retrospectives and so on.   Nothing was new to me as I had used or come across this stuff over and over again over the last 20 years but once again it was the perspectives from the participants that made you think hmmmm that’s a bit different! Many came from organisations that had implemented SCRUM in different ways, different flavours and so on – I wondered if anyone was actually using SCRUM as it is supposed to be (whatever that means!). “It’s all about common sense and we need to look to the Sprit of SCRUM for guidance”. Thanks Ken! That last bit might be a hard sell to hardnosed CEO’s so – note to self – do not mention spirit of SCRUM   to the CEO just mention the hard numbers that you know about, and fortunately there were some hard numbers I can use linked to from within the course material! I feel a much needed business case coming on to support the implementation of Agile!