I really enjoy leading public CSM classes. The intensity and focus the participants bring is a blast of pure, cool, oxygen that invigorates me.

For example, the most recent class was very intense with the team asking me some really hard and crucial questions.  Then they dropped the bomb. “Hey Mike, you act like Scrum is a Silver Bullet.” Arghhh! I HATE THAT. I don’t know how many times people get that impression and how many times I have repeated the litany, “Scrum doesn’t solve anything it shows you what is happening in your organization”.  Well not this time. What jumped from my lips was “Scrum is Not a silver bullet, Scrum is a silver mirror!”.

The next day, one of the class members reported out that my ‘catch phrase’ had really worked.

Huh? The class was right behind me in asking for an explanation.

It seems he left the class last night and went back to work (we are such a bunch of OCD wonks) where is boss was talking about Scrum not being the Silver bullet he, the boss, had expected. Our teammate then popped the phrase “Scrum is Not a silver bullet, it is a silver mirror!”. This stopped the boss in his tracks as he realized that Scrum was just that, a high definition reflection of all the things that were actually going on. And if memory serves the attendee went on to say the conversation went from Scrum not meeting expectations to what was coming off the mirror.

The class, being a great one, started kicking this around. One of the comments emerged from someone saying “Talk to the hand” and became “talk to the silver mirror in my hand”.

Maybe a good ScrumMaster is a person who can have people talk to the mirror in their hand.

I just got back from the Rochester PMI Chapter’s Professional Development Day. I must say I was very impressed with the organization of the event, the number of participants (over 250) and the level of interest. Both sessions of mine were filled up. Thanks to everyone who attended. As promised, I have posted a copy of my deck here

Techniques for Agile Project Managers - This presentation has some introductory content and then discusses some of the key practices needed to help a team self organize and be effective.

Well, it’s been a marathon weekend with back to back sessions at the SNEC and Mass Bay PMI Chapter’s professional days. I’ve always enjoyed these sessions and these two were no exceptions. I got to have some intriguing conversations and meet many interesting people. In an effort to not overwhelm people’s in-boxes, I deemed it prudent to post my slides here rather then distribute them in emails. more »

Like many other Agile practitioners, I have seen too many cases where an organization wants to adopt Agile, but believes that all they need is a little training. Of course, the most extreme would be when a group believes they can send one person off to become a Certified ScrumMaster and then they can simply train everyone else. While this intuitively sounds foolish, and many people could begin to articulate the shortcomings of this mental model, I’ve struggled to present a clear and succinct view of what exactly why this model doesn’t work. Although I recently came across a very good model that captures what I tacitly knew already. I hope this is valuable to the rest of you out there trying to make the case for coaching. more »

The other day I had an interesting thought. I’ m not sure what precipitated it exactly, but there were several things that led me to this idea I’ve been mulling in my head. Perhaps it was Alistair Coburn’s keynote at Agile 2009 where he said that Agile as a distinct entity was gone; if it was once an iceberg, it has since melted and is now just part of the ocean. It could have been Jeff Sutherland’s presentation where he points out that 84% of IT organizations are self-reporting to use Scrum. Or perhaps it was simply working with a current client when they were asking for my help to come up with very clear guidelines about the number of acceptance criteria that should be allowed for a single story. Anyway, it struck me: as Scrum grows in popularity, are we institutionalizing it? more »

Many thanks to the people who attended this presentation. Their comments and observations were very good and helpful. Getting this type of feedback is great!. You can download a copy from this location.  The impact of Agile Architect Teams in Scaling Enterprise Efforts

Thanks to everyone who came to see my presentation at the Agile 2009 Conference. Here is a link to the slides for anyone wishing to get a copy: http://www.bigvisible.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/Loss-Aversion-Slides.pdf.