Agile & Scrum foundations (business edition)

(image by EPAM Bulgaria)

“It was very useful, and I had quite a lot of fun… please keep it this way”, I was told after we completed the Agile & Scrum foundations training for business and administration edition. And I felt happy… really happy for delivering the training in a way I believe every training or talk should be delivered. To tell the full story - it is one of the few things I remembered clearly from WEBIT ’11, until today. The mantra was constantly repeated by Marvin Liao (Yahoo) “useful + fun = valuable”, and it became something I truly believe in.

It was challenging, but also interesting to adapt the training for the business team so they, not only understand what Agile and Scrum in software development is, but also get something useful to implement in their work and even everyday life.

So, they got a game to create product backlog, and learn how to write user stories and acceptance criteria. Followed by prioritizing, estimating and committing to items from their backlogs for the week (sprint).

We taught them simple relative estimation (by sizes) techniques, but also the folks experienced the ‘entire joy’ of playing planning poker and how difficult it could be to agree on a simple ‘5’ :).

In the middle of the training we did (my personal favorite) sprint simulator game where the experience included some random / real-life events, which could happen during the sprint and the teams had to adjust and adapt to.

And we ended up with review on the last day of the training, where the teams had to present if they managed to complete their sprint goal and demo the results of the completed user stories, followed up by retrospective session to inspect and adapt. As a trade-off the topic of XP and some of Kanban was kicked-out, but all for good.

It was so much fun, and the vibe and energy were amazing. It’s really cool to train folks not involved in software development in Agile & Scrum.

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Here is some of the feedback, as usual:

‘The idea of involving non-tech people in such a training was pretty cool in general. I liked a lot the way, the additional sessions were presented. It was very useful not only to learn the general information about Agile/Scrum but also to see it in practical exercises and examples’

‘I liked the most the part with creating our own backlog (product) where everyone should focus on defining epic, user stories and AC / tasks for them. It helped a lot to have better idea of additional tasks and how to prioritize in a good way’

‘The training gave me the opportunity to understand that flexibility is important, as well as change, during project management’

‘It should have been a little bit longer – there are many other useful practices, which we could learn. I am waiting eagerly for e second edition of the training’

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And yeah, it was privilege and real joy to train such enthusiastic and energetic group of people.