The Scrum Exchange: USA West, 2006

Workshop Descriptions


Scrum Starter

Introduction to Scrum
Exploring the Key Scrum Principles
The Velocity Game
The Essential Promises for Scrum
Writing User Stories, or how Use Cases are so 1990's
Splitting the Unsplittable

Advanced Methods

An Introduction to Innovation Games
Use Case Driven Story Development
Managing Leaderful Groups
Pitching Enterprise Scrum
User-Centered Design meets Scrum

Agile Interactive

Ensemble Tools for Agile Teams
Exploring the Deep Practices of Agile Project Management
Improvisation Tools for ScrumMasters
The Great Game of Power
When Talk Ain’t Cheap
Constellating the Field

Creative Play

Design the Box
Leading The Way To Creative Enchantment!
The Agile Playground


Introduction to Scrum

Victor Szalvay and Tobias Mayer  ^

This is a 15-slide introduction to Scrum, followed by a short discussion. This presentation covers a brief history of Agile, introduces the Agile principles and provides an overview of the main roles, artifacts and meetings in Scrum. This session is suitable for those who are new to Scrum, and those who want to get a clearer picture of the Scrum framework.

Duration: 45 minutes


Exploring the Key Scrum Principles

Tobias Mayer and Michael James  ^

There are many principles employed in the Agile world; most of these are clearly outlined at http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html. In our combined experience, we have found that there are two principles which stand out as being of primary importance: Self-Organization & Empiricism. Until an organization is willing to embrace these two principles, Scrum is not likely to gain a firm foothold.

In this workshop we will use a variety of different experiential exercises to illustrate the importance of following these principles. Each exercise will be followed by a discussion to extract the important lessons. Participants will gain a deeper appreciation of the principles, and understand how they relate to successful Scrum implementations.

Duration: 60 minutes


The Velocity Game

Victor Szalvay and Michael James  ^

The Velocity Game (originally The XP Game) was developed by Vera Peeters and Pascal Van Cauwenberghe of the Belgium XP Group. The game is a playful way to familiarize participants with the concepts of story estimation, velocity, and "yesterday's weather". Participants work together in teams, combining business skills with development skills to estimate, prioritize and then implement some simple (non-software) stories. The game teaches collaboration skills and shows through experience how people can to work successfully as part of a team to meet committed goals. It is useful for both business and development people.

Duration: 90 minutes


The Essential Promises for Scrum to Succeed in an Organization

Doug Shimp  ^

What is required for an organization to successfully implement Scrum? This question is a good one, and has led us to create a list of promises needed for implementing Scrum. We wrapped these promises in a "contract" to give both teams and organizations a familiar framework for understanding what is necessary for Scrum to succeed and for communicating a sense of ownership by all parties involved. Scrum is best defined (on Ken Schwaber's web site, www.controlchaos.com) as:

"...an agile, lightweight process that can be used to manage and control software and product development using iterative, incremental practices. Wrapping existing engineering practices, including Extreme Programming and RUP, Scrum generates the benefits of agile development with the advantages of a simple implementation. Scrum significantly increases productivity and reduces time to benefits while facilitating adaptive, empirical systems development."

Scrum is a framework, not a prescribed methodology. Since an organization’s inherent product and cultural complexities are unique to it, Scrum must be adapted to the organization, rather than providing an "out-of-the-box" solution. Scrum relies on a periodic "Inspect and Adapt" process so that empirical evidence and lessons learned can be incorporated into the practice of Scrum within the Organization.

During this seminar we will explore:

Why Scrum is a framework
  • The purpose of wrapping these promises in a contract
  • Scrum Roles and setup of the contracts
  • Explore the promises
  • Perform a small group exercise
  • Retrospective and receive a copy of the Scrum Contracts with Promises
Who Should Attend?

Anyone who wants to understand Scrum and how it can be implemented within an organization.

Duration: 90 minutes


Writing User Stories, or how Use Cases are so 1990's

Kane Mar  ^

I prefer to write User Stories for Backlog Items. They have an number of advantages over functional requirements or Uses Cases. This session will focus on: What is a User Story, Writing the Story, Writing Acceptance Criteria, and Breaking Stories down into a manageable size. This will be an interactive session so please come prepared to talk about some requirement of a current or recent project.

Duration: 90 minutes


Splitting the Unsplittable

Michael James  ^

During CSM courses we often hear the claim that some large work items cannot be broken into slices of demonstrable functionality thin enough to finish in a 30 day or 2 week Sprint. The creative skill of splitting Product Backlog Items isn't hard to learn, but it's also not obvious at first.

In this session we will explore several different techniques of splitting Product Backlog Items, or "stories" and apply them to real world problems brought by the participants. This session, led by a reformed "software architect", may get technical.

Duration: 90 minutes


An Introduction to Innovation Games

Luke Hohmann  ^

Modern product development practices, especially those that focus on innovative products and services, place great emphasis on having development teams work directly with customers. This is good news, for the foundation of innovation is a genuine understanding of your customers. This tutorial tackles the challenge of developing customer understanding head on by providing you with a fresh perspective on how to use a variety of games with your customers to develop the understanding you need to create innovative, successful products and services. You'll find that if you use them, you'll come to understand what your customers really want. You'll have fun doing it. Perhaps more importantly, they'll have fun doing it.

Duration: 105 minutes


Use Case Driven Story Development

Dan Rawsthorne  ^

As Scrum matures it is becoming more and more apparent that the most critical part of a Scrum project is the Product Owner Team. In my view, the primary responsibilities of the Product Owner Team are:
  • Understanding the needs and wants of the Stakeholders and Users
  • Developing Stories and Maintaining the backlog
  • Driving the team at a Sustainable Pace
  • Working with the Development Team to develop Product based on the Stories
  • Validating and Releasing the Product
In the teams I have worked with, one of the major difficulties the Product Owner Team has is developing 'proper' stories. In this workshop we explore this problem, using a use case driven approach. The attendees will work in groups to:
  • Identify a collection of use cases for a product
  • Explore a single use case and develop a gold-plated Basic Happy Path
  • Derive a collection of analysis and development stories that shows how this use case might evolve
Who Should Attend?

This workshop is suitable for Scrum Masters, Product Owners, and others wanting to know 'where the stories come from'

Duration: 105 minutes


Managing Leaderful Groups: radical transparency and the paradox of facilitated self-organization, or Okay... so now what do we do after the Scrum meeting is over?

David Chilcott  ^

Team self-organization is easy to say and we can all agree that it's the "right thing to do" but sometimes it's hard to figure out what to do! As team leaders and team members we're all constantly learning to:
  • deal effectively with relationships
  • get the work done
  • manage conflict
  • make decisions
  • stay focused on providing customer value
  • get the team back on track
  • give and receive support from the rest of the team
  • create a shared culture of collaboration and ongoing improvement.
Whether you're an experienced Scrum Master and team member or new to self-organizing teams this session will help you:
  • have more fluency and skill with thinking about your team and work life
  • be better equipped to understand and intervene in your real world work settings
  • understand group dynamics and provide tools for improving your group's process
  • identify practical next steps to try and skills to improve
In this session I'll present a mix of theory, skills, best practices, and learning experiences that will help you come away with a sense of inquiry and a framework for ongoing self-improvement in this area. We'll work together to identify :
  • common issues and challenges faced by self-organizing teams
  • possible solutions for these issues
  • helpful strategies and skills
  • ways to model effective learning and leading behaviors
  • tangible and practical behaviors that will increase your success and effectiveness.
Duration: 120 minutes


Pitching Enterprise Scrum

Victor Szalvay  ^

Scrum is often first introduced as limited "pilots" within a larger organization. As Scrum pilot projects show positive results, the news of Scrum's success starts to spread throughout the organization. There often comes a critical tipping point when upper management takes note of these successes and evaluates Scrum for enterprise-wide adoption. As with most organizational change initiatives, the cards are usually stacked against enterprise Scrum adoption simply because the political landscape favors the status quo. That is why when the time comes Scrum advocates must be able to deliver a powerful, concise message to upper management clearly outlining a rationale for enterprise Scrum.

This session explores such rationales and then asks participants to devise a concise pitch in preparation for when a real-life opportunity presents itself. Come prepared to work with others on developing a pitch and to practice the pitch in front of the group.

Duration: 90 minutes


User-Centered Design meets Scrum

Nancy Frishberg  ^

We all share the same big goal: make something that people want to use, find useful, and like using. We may have different ways of getting there. Let's explore a few apparent contradictions between Scrum methods and User-centered Design techniques with an eye to resolving them or at least understanding them. But this session will not be all talk, talk, talk. We'll try Prototyping with 3D materials, and perhaps invite feedback from our target audience.

Duration: 120 minutes


Ensemble Tools for Agile Teams

Kert Peterson  ^

In movies and on stage, we've all felt the electricity and power of a great ensemble performance -- a group of actors each expressing individually while acting cohesively as a unit. The group principles and individual skills that enable an ensemble to form are the same principles that guide an agile software development team in self-organization and ultimately, high-performance.

As "director" of an agile team, the ScrumMaster (or agile coach) is asked to shepherd the creative process of team formation and create an environment in which individuals and the group can flourish. Lucky for us, software projects have some huge advantages over theatrical performances; advantages that allow us to support the formation process with some unique and powerful tools.

We'll explore this topic in this interactive session designed to help you, the agile team leader, to awaken your team to its true potential. Topics include:
  • hidden advantages of the software "stage"
  • theatre games for actors and non-actors
  • the importance of framing and power of the debrief
  • enablers and impediments to ensemble formation
  • the leader's role in guiding effective training sessions
Duration: 120 minutes


Exploring the Deep Practices of Agile Project Management

Steve March  ^

We're all generating our product backlog, planning sprints, holding daily stand-up meetings, building potentially shippable product increments, and conducting retrospectives. These are great and essential agile practices. But what does it really take from us as human beings to be agile? In this experiential workshop, we will explore the deep human practices of agile project management. These practices will reorient us to ourselves and our team mates in ways that takes us beyond the technical practices of agile project management.

In this workshop, we will explore these deep practices by doing them. Please come prepared to learn something about yourself. You will leave this workshop with new observations about yourself and how you interact with others that will take you to the next step in your learning. And we'll have a lot of fun along the way.

Duration: 180 minutes


Improvisation Tools for ScrumMasters

Matt Smith  ^

This workshop will introduce the principles of improvisation, and facilitate exercises practiced by improvisational theatre actors. Matt Smith will lead the workshop in such a way that you will easily connect how an understanding and practice of this discipline can assist you as a ScrumMaster. Many of these exercises can be used with teams to support their comprehension of concepts integral to successful intense collaboration.

Themes include:
  • Creating an environment where straightforward communication is supported
  • Surrendering personal agenda
  • The art of agreement
  • What humans do to stifle forward movement in projects and relationships
  • An alternative model of listening and responding
Duration: 120 minutes


The Great Game of Power

Tobias Mayer  ^

The Great Game of Power was originally developed by Augusto Boal, as part of his "Theatre of the Oppressed" approach to working with and empowering various disenfranchised communities in Brazil and Peru. Oppression exists in many forms, and does not only affect poor, underprivileged people. We can observe many levels of oppression in large organizations today, amongst middle class, well paid professionals. Games of power are played out daily – often with great zest within the upper echelons, but with ever-dwindling willingness as we move down towards the grass roots of an organization. The oppression that takes place is sometimes conscious, but more often is "just the way we do things around here". It is usually hidden beneath the niceties of corporate behavior, beneath "socially acceptable" norms. In the oppressed people it takes the form of silent compliance, the fear of making mistakes (CYA) and a general sense that it is better to make no decisions than to make the wrong one. The result of this corporate oppression is inertia: it is stagnation. If this oppression is not recognized for what it is, it cannot possibly be surfaced and dealt with. An organization groaning under the burden of such oppression can never be agile, no matter how many nice facades it puts on itself.

A Great Game of Power workshop teaches participants, through interactive role-play, situation enactment and visual imagery, how to see oppression for what it really is; solutions emerge through the activities, and participants learn that there are actions that can be taken to change the status quo. more...

Note: due to time constraints of the event, this workshop is reduced in scope; this version will serve as an introduction to the ideas and the method of working.

Duration: 90 minutes


When Talk Ain’t Cheap: language practice that empowers effective agile project delivery

Michael Hamman  ^

What is language and what has it got to do with project delivery, teams, and business success?

How we respond to this question depends on our fundamental view of language. Traditionally, we view language as a form of speaking (or writing) that describes a world which exists independently of our speaking. That is, we use language to tell ourselves and each other what we are observing in a world that is already given to us.

An alternate view of language – one which has made its mark in recent management thinking as it has in 20th Century philosophy – views language as that with which we create a world. That is, we use language to bring forth a world that is congruent with our commitments and intentions.

In this mini-workshop, we begin to examine the play of language in our day to day practices, and how we might begin to intentionally shape language such that, indeed, it is we who "use it", rather than "it using us". Through presentation, inquiry, and practice, we will
  • Discover some of the most common – though often invisible – language practices which all-too-often derail projects and disempower teams;
  • Design a set of new language practices which can help agile project leaders (Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches) and their teams amplify the benefits of agile delivery.
Along the way, we will, more generally, begin to develop a facility for seeing the power of language in creating worlds, whether in our work, in our communities, or in our personal lives.

Duration: 120 minutes


Constellating the Field: A non-rational way to see what's shaking (that is: diagnosing and problem solving team, organizational, and community issues)

Michael Spayd  ^

Out of the work of Bert Hellinger on Family Constellations came an organizational form, which is called Systemic Constellations. Participants should bring to this workshop a team, organization or community problem or issue they would like to understand at a deeper level; perhaps a team that is stuck, an organization with deep misunderstandings between management and Agile teams, or even a community phenomenon such as the adoption of Agile across the globe.

Setting a constellation for the chosen system allows us to 'constitute the field' around that phenomenon, using people as the 'antennae' for grounding the field. Our human antennae--chosen at random--will begin resonating with the various roles in the field (such as the Agile coach, middle manager or senior executive) enabling them to articulate the thoughts, attitudes, perceptions and feelings of that role with astounding accuracy, even with no prior knowledge of the situation. As the constellation unfolds, there is a natural tendency towards movement which will be guided by the facilitator. Such movement frequently tends to settle in the direction of healing and understanding, creating a satisfying resolution that can be seen as a reorganization of the system at a higher level of functioning.

Please come join us, whether you have a system issue or just want to witness and lend support to this healing process.

Duration: 120 minutes


Design the Box: defining our goals with words, images and colors

Deborah Hartmann  ^

In his project management book, Jim Highsmith describes an exercise designed by a colleague: Design the Box. It's useful for focusing teams on the eventual result, and getting them to see through the eyes of customers. We don't have a common project... but as agile practitioners, we are a kind of dispersed team. So let's "design the box" for the Agile Alliance, or the Scrum Alliance, or the Agile Manifesto... why not? Our prospective audience is changing as we move out of early-adopter territory... how do the more risk-averse early majority need to see the "product" of Agile software development? We'll need "customer" representatives as well as team members. Bring one or two magazines with interesting pictures, and a pair of scissors (but NOT in your hand luggage! :-)

Duration: 90 minutes


Leading The Way To Creative Enchantment!

Terry Sand  ^

What if we all walked the planet in a state of childlike wonder? What if our daily tasks were as exhilarating as a Broadway show? What if we left this conference giving and receiving the applause we all deserve for devouring each and every Scrum delight so creatively presented on our plates? Let's do it!

"Creative Enchantment" will draw upon our improvisational skills to create a play and perform it in ninety minutes. Together we will write the new theatrical classic celebrating collaboration while revealing the power of play.

Oppression of scrumtious ideas stifles personal and professional growth. "Creative Enchantment" applies improvisational theater filled with beneficial magical thinking. It's time to unite and ignite our quest for comedic enlightenment.

Duration: 90 minutes


The Agile Playground

Open, Exploratory Sessions  ^

The Agile Playground is a space for Trainers, ScrumMasters and other Agile evangelists to experiment with, and share training ideas. Each session will be led by a facilitator experienced in interactive and experiential training. The facilitator's role will be to "keep the story moving", not to determine the content. The content of the session will be determined by the participants themselves, either through exercises they have used, or hope to use, or through problems they are facing and looking for new ways to resolve. New facilitators are especially welcome here. This is a safe place to try out new ideas, and get feedback from more experienced practitioners. Everyone is a presenter in this space, and everyone is a participant.

Participants can arrive late to this session, as determined by their individual schedules, but once present will be expected to commit to the remainder of the session.

Duration: approx. 90 minutes each session