Mastering ScrumMastering

‘I am playing a bear attacking ‘poor Tsanko’ (while he is pretending scared), Georgi is a hunter to hunt the bear. The rest of the trainees improvise on different roles: a pickpocketer is trying to rob Tsanko at the same time and another tourist is taking photo of us to complete the picture… It’s all part of the improv ‘Still picture’ game, included in the ‘Thinking outside of the box module’… and we had so much fun, creating scene after scene, after scene…’

It’s been amazing six weeks. Together with Bogoy Bogdanov we delivered ‘Mastering ScrumMastering’ training @EPAM BG

The training (in workshop format only) is complete focused on improving the skills of the participants and consists of 95% practice to 5% theory. No lectures, no ppts, no long and boring talks – just gamified challenges to improve skills in the following areas:

• Communication
• Coaching & Mentoring
• Agile team dynamics
• Delivering talks

Our main goal was to innovate a training encouraging everybody to practice:

• Body language & paraverbal communication
• Soft skills, building emotional connection & rapport
• Coaching and mentoring
• Organizing Scrum events and ensure they run smoothly + facilitation skills
• Removing impediments efficiently
• Influencing decisions
• Presentation skills + teaching techniques (engage the audience)
• Creativity and thinking outside of the box

Each training day, a different topic was covered:

• Starting a new team & persuasion
• Coaching. One-to-One coaching
• Team level coaching & mentoring (Daily standup)
• Team level coaching & mentoring (Scrum events)
• Talks: deliver to engage
• Improvisation in Agile (Thinking outside the box)

And it worked amazingly well. The participants outdone themselves, had a lot of fun, and performed on top of their abilities in each session.

The feedback was also very positive (hopefully we would be able to share the video feedback too):

• 'Fun, engaging, different points of view, a lot of practice'       
• 'Very interactive, full of funny moments, very dynamic & interesting approach'
• 'We covered different topics but not strictly following a traditional way of training. We were put into different situations, where we had the chance to challenge ourselves and improvise'

To enjoy more pictures check the EPAM post.