While this is the session I ran in 2011 it has been replaced by: Learning Scrum Through Games – Goldilocks Iterations II.
Last week at Agile Tour Toronto I had the privilege of working with my friend Paul Heidema to help introduce the basic concepts of Scrum in 60 minutes. This is a really interesting challenge, what’s the minimum amount you can teach people and still give them a taste of Scrum. In end we opted for about ~10 minutes of talking heads (spread throughout), ~30 minutes of simulation time and 15 minutes of debrief.
We invited our teams to create Children’s Books of the Goldilocks story. Along with the basic Story participants were asked to offer advertising, public service announcements etc.
Comments from participants:
- A number said it was surprising how well teams of complete strangers came together after two sprints.
- Several didn’t like the way I set them up for a mini “failure” by not playing the Product Owner role poorly and not communicating my needs. This is a fair point however it does simulate life with a real product owner
Feel free to use this simple simulation to help teach the very basic concepts of Scrum.
Great concept and slides..it must be challenging to limit people’s questions, as there must be many..and remaining in the 60 minute box you have set here.
Sounds nice, I’m just not quite sure what the expected product here is. Is the team required to draw an actual book here? The time seems quite limited for that (just 10 minutes for one Sprint?)
Joerg – It is a bit short but I usually only get 60 minutes to run this session. So two 10 minutes sprints is all they get. In addition we handle the Sprint Review and Retrospective as separate activities.
FWIW in my full 2 day CSM course the exercise is only 19 minutes of work including 4 minutes of Daily Scrum. I’m constantly amazed at the amazing products I get in a short time. I’ve also noticed that when teams have more time the product doesn’t get much better.
Cheers
Mark