Tuesday, February 07, 2012

Certified Scrum Master

I took my test yesterday after the 2 day course last week and I am now a certified scrum master.
As was pointed out somewhere else, this has nothing to do with Rugby at all and everything to do with agile project management.

The idea is that instead of running projects where you spend a couple of months planning, investigating and writing a solution description, followed by a couple of months building a solution and then a couple of months testing. You work in short cycles of 2-4 weeks which each involve a little bit of planning, some implementation/programming/building and then some testing so that at the end of each "sprint" you have added some usable functionality to what you had before. You keep repeating this cycle until you are finished or run out of time or money. Whatever happens, you should only ever be a short time away from having something that works with some defined functionality that was the most important at the point that it was made.
The scrum part is the daily 15 minute meeting where everyone states what they did since yesterday, what they will do today and what is getting in their way.

Sorry if that is dull, but I found the course very interesting and Í am in the process of implementing it in one of our product teams


7 comments:

  1. Anonymous8:31 pm

    Is Scum Master a follow up qualification?

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  2. Anonymous10:11 pm

    I think SCRUM is quite interesting. I did considered running SCRUM in my department but decided to run KANBAN instead, as it is more adaptive to new incomming tasks or unplanned work. I think SCRUM is ideal for executing projects but has a weakness of handling ad-hoc or incomming tasks not included in the current sprint.
    /L

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  3. Anonymous3:55 am

    I think that it does have something to do with Rugby because it is about adapting quickly to new information. There is also the fact that a scrum cannot last forever - like some project installation can.
    I am reminded of management training in my day when Rugby and Ballet styles of management were compared and we were led to believe that the ballet is the better idea where everyone knows what they are meant to do and when to do it.
    wrm

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  4. Sorry about the missing "r".

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous7:17 pm

    Sounds like blog writing.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous12:20 am

    Can you help me then, I seem to lack defined functionality some days.
    Can we have daily scrums next week?
    m

    ReplyDelete
  7. we can have a daily scrum
    You stand up, it takes 10-15 minutes and everyone says what they did yesterday, what they'll do today and what is getting in their way.

    Simples

    ReplyDelete