We learned earlier what it is a scrum master does. Now it’s time to see what makes a product owner tick:
If this makes you want to become a scrum product owner (and we’re certain it does!), you can take one of our product owner certification classes. The next one is February 25-26, and includes a free Kindle.
Inspired by Lesbians and Lawyers. Click the image to see at full size:
If this makes you want to become a scrum master, you can take one of our certification classes. The next one is February 27-28, and includes a free Kindle.
We hear that the traditional year-one anniversary gift is paper. Does e-ink count? We think so! The Elements of Scrum is a year old, and to celebrate, Agile Learning Labs is giving a Kindle to every student in our Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner classes this month.
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Last Sunday, several Agile Learning Labs team members became actors for a few hours, turning out to help our brilliant colleague Adam Weisbart film the epic drama saga, Sh*t Bad Scrum Masters Say.
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At last week’s Agile Manager’s Support Group, our very own Laura Powers, goddess of biz dev here at Agile Learning Labs, wowed us all with an exercise in personal goal-setting adapted from the basic framework of scrum. Laura knows a thing or two about meeting goals, having recently completed her first marathon.
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That was 13 minutes’ worth of Chris. If you’d like more, you can read our book, The Elements of Scrum, sign up for a public class, or even hire Chris to ride into your company on a white horse and save the day. Or deliver a brown bag. He can do both.
If you or a loved one bought this sweater for Christmas, don\’t return it; burn it!
Like most of you, I’ve been in customer service hell this holiday shopping season. I had to resort to the Better Business Bureau to resolve one dispute with a major online retailer that shall go nameless (they made good, once a person with authority actually listened to my complaint, which didn’t happen until the BBB got involved). Then there was the other online retailer who didn’t accept a return because a thin plastic bag that had to be torn to try the product out hadn’t been included in the return box. And the one who explained, when I called after not receiving the package, that “Next day delivery doesn’t mean you get it the next day. It means you get it the day after we send it.” Which could be any old day, apparently.
By contrast, there are companies that practice what the shoe-shopping factions at Agile Learning Labs call “Nordstrom customer service.” What is that? I have a friend who bought a sweater from Nordstrom. And wore it. Several times. For months. Then she saw a picture of herself in it, decided it made her look chunky, and returned it. No questions asked.
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Artist, illustrator and graphic facilitator Elizabeth McClellan is one of my favorite people, proving as she always does that the kind of work we do here at Agile Learning Labs–and what our clients do when they develop software–is as much art as it is business. Last June, as Chris blogged recently, Elizabeth recorded everything that happened in one of our Certified Scrum Master Workshops in her inimitable style. This week, she did the same for our Certified Product Owner course in Redwood City. Click on each image to see it in all its detail and glory.
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One of Herzog\’s early stars
One of the blessings of having a diverse (some might say schizophrenic) background is that I have friends like Anne Thompson, who has worked for Premiere and Variety and now has her own influential blog, Thompson on Hollywood. Today I read a post there by Sophia Savage about the filmmaker Werner Herzog, discussing some remarks he made as keynote at the Film Independent Forum, including this passage, which I think maps directly onto dilemmas in any kind of agile project environment, including software development using scrum:
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I am always looking for others who are experimenting in the arena of agile publishing, as we are doing with our side venture, Dymaxicon, and I ran across a fascinating article today on a Bryn Mawr college blog called Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education. The article is by Rebecca Pope-Ruark (affectionately nicknamed RPR by her students), a professor of Writing and Publishing at Elon University in North Carolina who learned about scrum from her geek husband and decided to try using it to teach collaboration skills to her students, who would be working on some publishing projects. (Since it’s academia, the blog post is also co-authored by several of her students–apparently publish or perish extends to blogging now.)
I loved the description of how the students viewed “collaboration” before the project:
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