Train 'em up

On Tuesday I ran the 59 Minute Scrum simulation for our team and the parallel team that will be adopting Scrum. From nothing but resistance to viral adoption of the practice is under three months. Quite impressive. The head of IT (above THUD, in our organization) sat in on part of it and she looked pleased. People are tangibly excited.

So now for some useful commentary on it. It was actually done as two hours instead of one - lunch was provided during the retrospective conversation. It consisted of about 14 people: two dev teams, the test team, and THUD and THOT(both of whom left periodically during the exercise for phone calls, etc.).

The presentation was easy for people to digest, but the exercise became chaotic (which was good). During sprint planning where people were selecting their tasks, one developer commented "If this is how Scrum actually works, it sucks." Their team ended the exercise delivering the most business value. Teams were not clear as to my role as the "Product Owner," leading me to feel I didn't adequately explain the exercise before hand.

During the retrospective we were all sitting and eating. I started out asking leading questions of the group instead of lecturing. Here were some of my questions:

• How did you feel about the exercise
• Did you have an adequate backlog ready or were you re-planning
• What was problematic in the exercise
• Do you thing this accurately reflects a software process
  

That did an OK job of eliciting comments, but not a great job. It also tempered people's excitment about the process (which is not wholly bad). It easily filled the two hours by including a discussion of how the process is working for our pilot project and the problems we're encountering. Overall, it was a very useful exercise.