training Archives

Last week, I got the opportunity to spend two days in Scrum training with the development team of a great Indy company, Blue Pillar. For those of you haven’t heard of Blue Pillar yet, you’re not alone. I only learned of them through my partner in crime, Tana Linback. Blue Pillar is one of those companies that tech folks dream about: Company is started by a tech founder who starts out coding in his basement, growing into an award winning business.

The story wasn’t what got me stoked about the scrum training though. BP has adopted Scrum and Agile through a grass roots effort, and had wanted to get their team on the same page by attending scrum training. Because most of the attendees had been practicing for a while, the framework portions went fairly quickly. As a team, they were less interested in the activities geared toward reinforcing the concepts, and were more interested in the practical applications. As you can imagine, I enjoyed the back and forth of the discussion interacting with the BP team.

What got me stoked were the attendees. The attendees included the BP scrum team, plus their product strategy/management folks (Kyle Zeronik, Eric Reichel, David Schwarz). In fact, the leadership of BP felt so strongly, that Brad Witter, the President of BP, was an active participant for both days. For a small company, titles don’t mean much, but BP‘s staff is comprised of about 50 people. If a company’s success is measured by the commitment of their leadership, BP will go a long way. The commitment of the leadership certainly resonated with the other attendees.

As always, I enjoyed the opportunity that the Blue Pillar Scrum team was kind enough to provide. I hope the Blue Pillar Scrum team found the Scrum training helpful as they continue on their Agile journey.

Thanks for coming in today.

Chris

This past weekend we visited my Alma mater and conducted a two-day Scrum Training for interested Purdue students. We partnered with the Purdue University Computer Science Women’s Network – thanks CSWN!

Each time we do a training, the class is different. Different backgrounds, different perspectives, different reasons for coming to training. It’s magical watching the pieces coming together in the attendees’ minds where they start having “aha!” moments as we near the end of training.

What was special about this training class were the women (and a couple fellas!) in attendance. Let me tell you why. If you know Scrum, you know an important component of every sprint is the retrospective. The team answers three questions regarding the work they performed and how they performed it in the last sprint – what went well, what didn’t go well, and what can we improve upon to fix what didn’t go well. We run our training sessions just like sprints and end with a class retrospective. The trainers leave the room for 20 – 30 minutes and allow the attendees to answer the three retrospective questions about how the training went.

This class took this task very seriously. They were thoughtful and insightful with their feedback. What was most profound was their authenticity and vulnerability. They were brave enough to share feedback that I think most professional adults might have avoided. And the result? Yes, an improved training format but, more importantly, a class of students I won’t ever forget.

Boiler up!

Tana

UPCOMING EVENTS