Agile Advice - Working With Agile Methods (Scrum, XP, Lean)

It seems that Berteig Consulting is blocked from China, so I’ve made a new site called Scrum Beijing to promote the ScrumMaster training I do there.

Also, the price has been reduced on the Scrum Study Guide and the web site now includes screen shots and a bit more useful information.

Berteig Consulting is starting to formally market OpenAgile as a method for helping small businesses manage their work (in any industry).  Heck, we’re using it ourselves.

And of course, a reminder about the Agile 2008 conference happening in Toronto in August - don’t miss it, it’s going to be fantastic!

After a rigorous submission process, a total of five presentations by Berteig Consulting staff and affiliates are accepted into the program for the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto. The five presentations are:

Meta-Agile: Using Agile Methods to Deliver Agile Training (3 hours, workshop format) - Mishkin Berteig

Extremely Short Iterations as a Catalyst for Effective Prioritization of Work (30 minutes, experience report) - Mishkin Berteig

The Learning Circle: An Evolution of Agile for Learning Environments (30 minutes, experience report) - Garry Berteig

Using Agile Engineering Tools and Practices to Achieve Organizational Change (90 minutes, talk) - Christian Gruber

Maven and Continuum - Building an Ecosystem for Agile Builds and Testing (3 hours, workshop) - Christian Gruber

Berteig Consulting is also using the vendor talk slot to provide additional value to conference goers with an introduction to using OpenAgile to run a small business.

OpenAgile: A Method for Business Development (30 minutes, vendor talk) - Paul Heidema and Mishkin Berteig

Thanks to some quick feedback from Tobias Mayer, we have made a trimmed-down demo version of the Scrum Study Guide available for free download.

Scrum Study Guide, “The Best Tool for New ScrumMasters”, is now available at Scrum Study Guide. This guide is designed to be an editable tool for helping ScrumMasters do their jobs effectively. With the Scrum Study Guide you are able to keep track of the rules of Scrum, to keep structured notes on your own job as the ScrumMaster, to maintain a list of online reference material, to assess the progress of your team, and to organize the obstacles you are working on.  It also contains a wealth of reference information for learning along the way.

This is the project I’ve been working on for the last several months that has reduced my output here on Agile Advice.  It represents a huge investment of my time as well as several other people who have assisted me in this including Paul Heidema and Garry Berteig.  Purchasing the Scrum Study Guide, aside from its usefulness as a tool itself, will also give you substantial discounts on other services offered by Berteig Consulting Inc.  Finally, if you like it, you can help to share it by letting us know who should get a discount on their purchase of the Scrum Study Guide.  Enjoy!

Our earlier post saying that it was available was a mistake.

Sorry for the mistake.

Berteig Consulting with the help of some partners is now offering a new service called The Agile Clinic. This is not a typical coaching or training session. The entire clinic has a duration of just one day. During this day there are short 30 or 60 minute appointments made by managers, executives, and staff with two experienced agile coaches. These coaches listen to problems presented to them, consult, discover, facilitate, diagnose, and offer solutions. These appointments are designed to be intense and high-impact sessions. Visit www.agileclinic.com to see how this service can add great value and provide fantastic results to your company with a small time cost.

Berteig Consulting is a Silver Sponsor for Agile 2008.  Hopefully our logo will show up on their home page sometime soon :-)  We also have several proposals for sessions in and we are planning some really fantastic stuff for the conference.  Make sure you attend if at all possible!

This course offers ScrumMaster Certification in Toronto. The training is hands on, interactive and highly effective. By the end of the course participants will receive a professional certification in Agile Software Project Management. The dates of the course are January 16 - 18, 2008.

Click here to sign up!

The complete winter and spring course list is available here.

I had some problems with Feedburner, but they seem to be fixed now.  Hopefully everything works and you all can enjoy a reading experience without too much cruft.  Just for what it’s worth, all the old urls point to the same stuff from the old AgileAdvice web site.  Any links you have to stuff here still work.  However, all that stuff has also been imported into the new blog software so actually there are two copies of every article.  This is a temporary condition!!!  If you have linked to stuff here, please consider re-linking to the the new version of the article.  It won’t always be easy to do, but the handy-dandy search box on the right should help you out

Agile Advice is changing hosting providers and blogging software. This change will be complete in approximately 2 hours.

…. well, it’s mostly ready.  Still lots to do, but it’s almost beddy-bye time for me!

Berteig Consulting Inc. is introducing a two day course for team members. The first run of this course is occurring in Toronto on Jan. 21 and 22. This course is a slimmed down version of the four-day intensive training that we often deliver in-house to teams. It is an inexpensive option for teams that want to bring a new team member up to speed, who need to get a few people to understand how Scrum works and then share it with the rest of the team, or for any team member who would like to learn how Scrum works in the hopes of intelligently convincing other team members to try it out. Since there is a strong experiential component to the course, it is also ideal for managers and other stakeholders who would like to try out an agile process.

We are also offering our three day Agile Project Management / ScrumMaster Certification course in several locations: Toronto, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Beijing. Right now, there are special prices for the first team member training course as well as the course being delivered in Beijing.

For more information, please check out the Berteig Consulting listing of agile and Scrum training.

Time for an experiment! I have heard from many people that I have trained (ScrumMasters primarily), that there is a need for the members of the teams they are working with to have some systematic training as well. So, I’m announcing a new team member training course designed to cover some of the same material as the Certified ScrumMaster course, but focused more towards the needs of a team member who might be new to Scrum or struggling with Scrum, or just wants to get a more in-depth understanding of “ideal” Scrum. Now here’s the experiment part: I’m accepting pre-registration on FaceBook only! Because this is the first time this course will be offered, I need to get a sense of actual interest in the course. Here is the event url for FaceBook: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=5901567765. If you are interested, please go to the event page and indicate your interest in attending. If you know anyone who might be interested, please share the event with them! If you aren’t on FaceBook, I highly recommend it for both personal and professional networking, and I would encourage you to sign up. The FaceBook event page has more details about the course, but here are a few: it’s 2 days long, its going to be in Toronto in late January, and it’s only $800 (Canadian, which is an introductory price).

Just in case there is anyone out there in China who is looking for a community of people doing agile, this Yahoo group, Scrum China, might be a good place to sign up! Make yourself visible, and find other people. Also, for what it’s worth, I’m running a course in Beijing in February: check the course listing for Scrum Training in Beijing.

Hi everyone! I’m currently extremely busy with a Scrum-related writing project. The lack of new articles here is mostly due to that fact. I should be done with the project in a few weeks, but it might take me to the end of the year. I will try to continue to post interesting links or small articles until the new year, but I won’t be posting substantial articles until I am done this other writing project. Sorry for the lighter content, but I hope you will all be patient. I will, of course, make an announcement about my other writing project once it is ready! Thanks!

I don’t often write non-agile entries on this blog. Nevertheless, I thought this would be an appropriate change. A couple days ago I invited all 454 of my LinkedIn contacts to re-connect with me on FaceBook. I’m going to stop using LinkedIn after over two years of building up my network there. Here are my reasons:

(more…)

A sister site to Agile Advice has been moved into “pre-official-launch” stage: Agile-Support.com. This is a site for individuals to discuss agile methods, for downloads of various resources, and, if you register, to host blogs and other content development by individuals wishing to do so in an online community setting. Think of this as the “beta” launch: there are probably still many kinks to be worked out.

The Toronto class coming up in one week still has spots, the Ottawa class in November is nearly full, and the Beijing course pre-registration discount is almost over! Please sign up for a course today!

I’m organizing a 3-day ScrumMaster Certification course in Beijing to occur on the 19th-21st of December. I need several more people to express interest in the course before I can confirm it. For those who “Save a Spot” early, there is a 20% discount available. This discount is only available until Oct. 20th. At that time, I will see if the required number of people have signed up and then make the final decision if the course should go ahead. If you or someone you know is interested and would like to receive this training in Beijing, please “Save a Spot” right away so that I can count you towards ensuring that the course does go ahead! Please sign up here!

This looks interesting: Agile Daily. This is an aggregator site like technorati or Agile Planet (seemingly defunct now), but with some interesting twists described in more detail at SocialRank.com. Apparently, SocialRank.com is setting up aggregator sites that are meant to also be community sites… maybe a little like InfoQ? Interesting experiment: it’s quite new so we’ll see what happens.

The 15% discount offered by Berteig Consulting Inc. on its fall courses is almost expired. If you “Save a Spot” or “Register” for a class on or before Sep. 15th, you will still get the discount. Courses are filling up quickly! Courses are being offered in Toronto, Beijing, Fort McMurray and Ottawa. (UPDATED: guess I missed that link when I first posted this… probably most of you figured it out anyway, but still DOH!!!)

Joe Little has created a yahoo! group called agile-ann. It will be used for all types of announcements for agile events, conferences, meet-ups, courses, seminars, calls for papers, etc. etc. It will probably become fairly high volume with all the agile stuff that goes on! I strongly encourage everyone reading this site to sign up for the list.

The fall schedule is up for Agile/Scrum training. For Canadian training, prices are currently discounted and will be raised on Sept. 15th. For Beijing, the course date is tentative based on pre-registrations up to Oct. 15th. Pre-registrants for the Beijing course will get the pre-registration price of 8000 RMB and after Oct. 15th, the price will go up to 10000 RMB.

I’m pleased to see that Agile 2008 conference is in Toronto! I’ll be there the whole time… The web site doesn’t have any information yet except the hotel.

I apologize to everyone for the lack of articles over the last few months. I’ve been traveling like crazy including India, England, the US and China! I _think_ life is settling down a little so I plan to start writing again.

Thanks for your patience!

This is a “last call” for people to register for the ScrumMaster certification course I am holding in Beijing on June 7th and 8th. At this time, I need only a few more people to be able to confirm the course (it is tentative at this time). If you are interested please save yourself a spot. If you know someone else who might be interested, please send along this link:

http://www.berteigconsulting.com/secure/a.php?h=042

I will be making my final decision on the course on April 22nd.

Thanks! - Mishkin.