Becoming a : Scrum Certified Product Owner
This week I officially became a: Scrum Certified Product Owner
I have always had an interest in ways to optimise team efficiency, first beginning when I took operations management at University, studying Lean, Agile, Sigma 6 to name just a few.
Last year I became interested in Scrum, first reading "Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time" by Jeff Sutherland. It intrigued me but due to my job at the time I never really took it much further not having a need to optimise team efficiency at the time.
New Team
This was until I changed teams and became responsible for business operations. The main challenge was to revolutionise the entire purchase process to make it scaleable, measurable and also successful.
But we had some issues:
-- Monolithic Legacy apps
-- Individual projects
-- Highly specialised team members with little cross functional capacity.
As this was a new team we did not want to alienate them so we started a evolution rather than the revolution bringing the team together in an agile manner. This as good but we kept on missing sprint targets, backlog items getting pushed from sprint to sprint. You could think of it as Californian Agile…
Honestly, we were making more progress than we had in about 3 years but, the progress still felt slow. We were doing it all wrong, over the last 6 months we have slowly introduce scrum techniques but never fully committing to the entire process. You can read the books, training webinars etc but you never really feel like you can go ahead, especially if the rest of the team has little knowledge of scrum, so we continued with "Bad Agile".
So that was that we needed proper training to get the scrum certification and the confidence to take this to the team and fully enforce it.
We needed a PO (product owner) - Me and also a scrum master, we booked the first course available with Jeff Sutherland the co-creator of Scrum in the UK. These courses are fairly rare in Europe if you want to train with Jeff.
Preparation
So before arrival to get the best out of the course you need to have a good understanding of Scrum. What are some good materials to prepare with?
-- Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
-- Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time the audio book it is a great addition to listen to on your commute to cement the thoughts, examples and theories in.
-- The Scrum Guide
-- The Scrum Guide, Audio book version - again it is great to use to cement the theories for a better understanding, created Michael Vizdos and is available for free.
-- Learning Path: Scrum Practitioner by Tommy Norman - in total this is 14 hours long it was well worth doing to cement the basic learnings along with getting instruction on how scrum can practically be applied.
By this stage I was ready of my in-person Training with Jeff, - we had been using most of the scrum tools understood what was not working for us - Great now we can go to the training with Jeff to really know how improve things that we were finding difficult.
Key findings from the Training:
-- The PO and Scrum Master should be thought as joined at the hip in a symbiotic relationship, the PO should not be afraid to help assist and advise the Scrum Master with necessary.
-- Estimating the backlog, this is a MUST. We had been waiting for the Scrum master training before we introduced this to the team so that the whole team can understand the concept that come seem to find difficult.
-- Feature focused teams, not project focused
-- Cross functional team members
-- Team swarming - the swarming of the team allows for features to be completed at a rapid pace.
-- Backlog grooming this is critical - to the success of the team a clear backlog will allow teams to deliver incremental improvements within the timebox of the sprint.
-- Scrum does not just work for small teams but can also work at scale for an entire organisation.
-- Keep on splitting stories down as far as they can in order to produce the smalles product increment possible.
-- Jeff is a Tesla fanatic - I have never known anybody tobe so enthusiastic about the brand and the car's.
If you would like to get in touch or have any questions then please do not hesitate to get in contact.Or check out my profile on Scrum Alliance.
I have always had an interest in ways to optimise team efficiency, first beginning when I took operations management at University, studying Lean, Agile, Sigma 6 to name just a few.
Last year I became interested in Scrum, first reading "Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time" by Jeff Sutherland. It intrigued me but due to my job at the time I never really took it much further not having a need to optimise team efficiency at the time.
New Team
This was until I changed teams and became responsible for business operations. The main challenge was to revolutionise the entire purchase process to make it scaleable, measurable and also successful.
But we had some issues:
-- Monolithic Legacy apps
-- Individual projects
-- Highly specialised team members with little cross functional capacity.
As this was a new team we did not want to alienate them so we started a evolution rather than the revolution bringing the team together in an agile manner. This as good but we kept on missing sprint targets, backlog items getting pushed from sprint to sprint. You could think of it as Californian Agile…
Honestly, we were making more progress than we had in about 3 years but, the progress still felt slow. We were doing it all wrong, over the last 6 months we have slowly introduce scrum techniques but never fully committing to the entire process. You can read the books, training webinars etc but you never really feel like you can go ahead, especially if the rest of the team has little knowledge of scrum, so we continued with "Bad Agile".
So that was that we needed proper training to get the scrum certification and the confidence to take this to the team and fully enforce it.
We needed a PO (product owner) - Me and also a scrum master, we booked the first course available with Jeff Sutherland the co-creator of Scrum in the UK. These courses are fairly rare in Europe if you want to train with Jeff.
Preparation
So before arrival to get the best out of the course you need to have a good understanding of Scrum. What are some good materials to prepare with?
-- Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
-- Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time the audio book it is a great addition to listen to on your commute to cement the thoughts, examples and theories in.
-- The Scrum Guide
-- The Scrum Guide, Audio book version - again it is great to use to cement the theories for a better understanding, created Michael Vizdos and is available for free.
-- Learning Path: Scrum Practitioner by Tommy Norman - in total this is 14 hours long it was well worth doing to cement the basic learnings along with getting instruction on how scrum can practically be applied.
By this stage I was ready of my in-person Training with Jeff, - we had been using most of the scrum tools understood what was not working for us - Great now we can go to the training with Jeff to really know how improve things that we were finding difficult.
Key findings from the Training:
-- The PO and Scrum Master should be thought as joined at the hip in a symbiotic relationship, the PO should not be afraid to help assist and advise the Scrum Master with necessary.
-- Estimating the backlog, this is a MUST. We had been waiting for the Scrum master training before we introduced this to the team so that the whole team can understand the concept that come seem to find difficult.
-- Feature focused teams, not project focused
-- Cross functional team members
-- Team swarming - the swarming of the team allows for features to be completed at a rapid pace.
-- Backlog grooming this is critical - to the success of the team a clear backlog will allow teams to deliver incremental improvements within the timebox of the sprint.
-- Scrum does not just work for small teams but can also work at scale for an entire organisation.
-- Keep on splitting stories down as far as they can in order to produce the smalles product increment possible.
-- Jeff is a Tesla fanatic - I have never known anybody tobe so enthusiastic about the brand and the car's.
If you would like to get in touch or have any questions then please do not hesitate to get in contact.Or check out my profile on Scrum Alliance.
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