I have now just returned from Day 1 of the Scrum Gathering in Seattle. This is my first Scrum Gathering and it is turning out to be great!

This is what I did throughout the day and some take-aways and learnings that I have gathered:

The Business Case for Agile: What Every Executive Needs to Know with speaker John Rudd
– there are now fewer constraints, with more variables in our world
– example of horse races, move bets to the horses in front
– use examples of failures in your organization to encourage the change
– benefits and ROI model
– waterfall: 15%
– agile: 30%
– agile with reduced scope: 50%
– People that I met in the session:
– Bill Rosner from Capital Group who is on a Scrum team in California
– James Kauffman who is the ScrumMaster near Seattle

Do We Have a Good Coach or a Bad Coach? with speaker Alan Atlas
– all about learning: good or bad
– results for a coach: direct (eg. launching a Scrum team), indirect (eg. less bugs produced)
– the SKERT framework: Skills, Knowledge, Environment, Results, Type of coach
– get feedback on coach throughout the year

30 Minute Chat with Alan Atlas
The Scrum Alliance set up this great thing: Scrum To Go. A participant can sign up for a private session with an experience Scrum coach, I believe that all of them were Certified Scrum Coaches (CSC). So I signed up to speak with Alan Atlas. He was very kind and knowledgeable. I asked him about becoming a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) and many questions about helping teams to use Agile and Scrum. He offered three things to help when team members are not buying-in or becoming empowered on the Scrum team. (1) Team members to convince themselves of its usefulness and validity. (2) Peer pressure from other team members to become active participants. (3) Cheap coaching tricks such as putting those against Scrum in charge (you are now the ScrumMaster) or getting those team members to research something and share it with the team. He said that we don’t like to do bad work, so they will try to get the task done.

Met Other Great People
Talked with Roger Brown (a CST) about the Certified Scrum Coach (CSC) process and how it has evolved. I also asked him about co-training with him for me to become a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST). I also met Vernon Stinebaker (a CST) who lives in China and was trained by Mishkin Berteig, my colleague, many years back. I had the honour of meeting Lyssa Adkins (a CST) in person for the first time. I spoke with Lyssa, emailed back and forth, and I was part of her Agile Coaching Circle which took place over conference calls and emails. She is a wonderful person who is extremely motivated to work with coaches who, in her words, are the change catalysts in organizations. She introduced me to Carlton Nettleton (a CST) who I spoke with about co-training with him to become a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST).

Overall it was a great day. I look forward to learning more and meeting more great people. My take away for the day: Scrum people just like helping!

Warm regards,
Paul Heidema

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