Iterative/Incremental Development with Scrum

Note: This is not a Certified Scrum Master workshop. It’s cheaper and better. But you won’t get a CSM from it. You will learn to use Scrum from beginning to end on a project. Most especially, you will learn where your organization’s potential weaknesses are if you want to move to Scrum.

Workshop Objective: This workshop provides you with an intensive taste of how to use Scrum to manage projects. The topics we’ll address are how to have the customer drive development; how to help the customer identify their ROI for each feature; how to empower the development team; improve the productivity of the development team; improve the team’s practices and tools to make every increment of functionality potentially shippable.

Workshop Overview: Moving to Scrum as a project management framework looks like it should be simple—but it’s harder than it looks. In this workshop, we’ll review how to plan for a release, how to plan for an iteration, how to monitor progress through an iteration, and how to use retrospectives to inspect and adapt.
In this workshop, we will work through a project, both planning and implementing it. We’ll debrief how the project proceeds and what you perceived worked well and what was not quite what you expected. We’ll also talk about how to get started and how to address the issues of corporate change.

Target Audience: Project managers, program managers, functional managers, technical leads product owners, all technical staff on a project. Senior managers are also welcome.

Prerequisites: Experience on a project

Workshop Duration: 2 days.

Workshop Outline

1. Introduction
1. Review goals of Scrum and potential problems moving to Scrum
2. Elicit problems participants are dealing with now
2. Planning a release
   1. Organizing a release
   2. Organizing how to choose which features for which iteration
   3. Prioritizing the product backlog
   4. Reviewing the risks involved in your release
   5. Activity
3. Planning an iteration
   1. Estimation and planning poker
   2. How estimation can change the product backlog
   3. How to integrate everything you need in one iteration so you can finish whole features
   4. Choosing which practices will allow you to resolve risks in an iteration: standup meetings; continuous integration; automated smoke tests; automated testing, implementing by feature, and more.
   5. When to not choose those practices
   6. Activity
4. Review major goals of Scrum with a project
   1. Helping customer drive development
   2. Help customer identify the ROI for a feature
   3. Empower the team
   4. Improve productivity of a development team
   5. Making every piece of functionality shippable
   6. Activity: do the project
   7. Debrief the project
5. Summary and Wrap-up

Contact me for the extended description.

If you’re new to Agile, I recommend a couple of days of project jump start to make sure you can make these ideas work.

If you have geographically distributed teams, I recommend this workshop followed immediately by another workshop, especially for managers: Making Geographically Distributed Agile Projects Work.