However, I wanted to share a sample chapter of the book here. I got permission from the publisher to share this chapter because it is about ePlan Services, a company I was fortunate enough to work with years ago. The company has some great agile team members. If you’re familiar with much of what I’ve written you’ll definitely know Lisa Crispin, co-author of the Agile Testing book. Others will know Nanda Lankalapalli, one of the leading agilists in India. ePlan is also home to Lisa Owens, whom many in my classes have heard me call the best ScrumMaster I’ve worked with. There are many other great people there (Mike Thomas, Tony Sweets, Steve Perkins their product owner, and founders Mark and Dan Gutrich who truly embraced Scrum to allow it to succeed).

In any event, Gojko has written a great chapter in his Specification by Example book on this agile team and how they do it. I encourage you to check out the sample chapter and indeed the full book.

There has been a lot of criticism aimed at the Scrum Alliance over the past two years, much of it quite deserved. I want to let you know that we have plans to address as many of the issues as we can. As a start we’ve hired a new managing director, Donna Farmer, who has been wonderful to work with during her first six weeks on the job. Donna comes to from outside the Scrum community (which is probably a good thing) but brings a solid background in leading non-profit organizations, including ones in the high-tech industry.

The Scrum Alliance board met in person in Denver in September and established a number of goals for the coming year. These goals were presented to Donna as our vision for the organization, and Donna has produced a document describing that vision which is available for download. Highlighting just a few things that will make up the Scrum Alliance future direction:

• A focus on being more transparent to our members. The first meeting with Donna as managing director and me as chairman was open to anyone to dial in and join. We took questions from the dozen or so people who joined us. We will repeat this and with more advance notice next time so more can join us. As part of being transparent, we will also publish Scrum Alliance financials on the website.
• An improved Certified ScrumMaster exam. We want to get to the point where the exam following a CSM class can be a true pass/fail exam. There’s still a lot of work to get there but this is important. We’ll also introduce a pass/fail exam to follow Certified Scrum Product Owner classes at some point.
• Open membership. People will be able to join the Scrum Alliance without first taking a ceritification course. They won’t be Certified ScrumMasters or Product Owners, of course, but they will be able to become members of the organization.
• A better Certified Scrum Trainer application (and renewal) process. This thing has been a disaster for years. There are hardly any two CSTs who became such under the exact same criteria. The board of directors gave Donna a proposed vision for a two-step process featuring an application form and review followed by in-person interviews. She is reviewing that for feasibility and I’m sure will make some changes to it but we’re all committed to fixing this process.
• Continued improvements to the website.
• An initiative to make sure that newly-minted ScrumMasters (well, everyone, really) knows that “Scrum Is not Enough” and that there is a whole world of great, agile ideas out there. We want Scrum teams to look beyond the Scrum framework and experience the great ideas found in our sister approaches of lean, Extreme Programming, Kanban, Feature-Driven Development, DSDM, Crystal, Adaptive, and more. To start this off, the Scrum Alliance website and newsletter are soon going to feature articles from Bob Martin on XP and Alan Shalloway on lean. I asked these two well-respected authors to share their insights and the Scrum Alliance 100,000′s members will soon benefit from their thoughts. I’m sure we’ll have many more articles like this.
• We plan to add a second level to the CSP (Certified Scrum Professional) designation. The new level, CSP2, will be rigorous and a very significant accomplishment for those who achieve it. CSP2 will require three years of experience and what we plan to be a tough exam that will probably be taken in-person and proctored. You’re going to need to study for this one. (So will I.) Since we know that the best teams pull in ideas from beyond Scrum (see previous point) we want to make sure that a CSP2 is a well-rounded agilist familiar with key ideas from the whole wide world of agile.
• To help emphasize the importance of knowing more than just Scrum, we will continue to emphasize the Registered Education Provider program. We want the Scrum Alliance to be the first place when you think of for any type of agile training. Again, see the point above that Scrum is not enough. We want all world-class trainers to join us as Registered Education Providers.
• More gatherings. The Scrum Alliance will probably *run* only two Gatherings a year but we want to support more. We want local groups who want Gatherings to contact us, tell us what you need, and we’ll provide as much as we can whether it’s financial support, promotion, or whatever you can think of. I’m hopeful that there’s a request for sponsorship form or instructions on the Scrum Alliance website soon.

If I didn’t mention it, don’t worry. Certified Scrum Developer is continuing. So is Certified Scrum Coach. So is probably everything else I don’t have room to mention.

I’d love to hear your suggestions of other things we can do. Please make your suggestions as comments to this blog post. Please help by making your suggestions as actionable as possible. A suggestion of “let anyone listen in on board meetings” is easier to implement than “be more transparent.”

It’s a good time to be agile.

]]> http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/scrum-alliance-update/feed 29 http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/new-book-from-steve-denning-on-agile-at-the-company-level http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/new-book-from-steve-denning-on-agile-at-the-company-level#comments Fri, 22 Oct 2010 11:18:32 +0000 Mike Cohn http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/?p=890

If you want to see want agile look likes when applied at the corporate level, check out the new book, The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management, by Stephen Denning. Denning is the author of a handful of other excellent, award-winning books and this one is his best yet.

As he describes in the book, Denning set out to discover why so many of today’s organizations are struggling. His research led him to agile and Scrum where he found that these processes were reinvigorating teams and even organizations.

His new book looks at what he saw in these teams and companies and distills it into seven principles. The seven principles of radical management are:

1. Delighting Clients
2. Self-Organizing Teams
3. Client-Driven Iterations
4. Delivering Value to Clients in Each Iteration
5. Radical Transparency
6. Continuous Self-Improvement
7. Interactive Communication

Sound familiar, don’t they? This book takes these principles we’ve uncovered from doing agile software development and describes how they can be applied at the level of the organization as a whole, not just a single team or even a product development group.

This is the book you give your managers and company executives. It could be the book you’ve been looking for to help you get agile or Scrum spread outside the development group so that it can transform your organization.

I highly recommend it.

A Special Offer on this Book

Here’s something you don’t want to miss. Buyers of this exciting new book can receive an amazing set of bonus gifts and tools, in some cases worth thousands of dollars, when they purchase the book during the initial launch period beginning on Sunday October 24 at 4pm US EST. Check out the offer on SteveDenning.com. I promise you won’t regret it.

]]> http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/new-book-from-steve-denning-on-agile-at-the-company-level/feed 0 http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/avast-combining-the-scrummaster-and-product-owner-matey http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/avast-combining-the-scrummaster-and-product-owner-matey#comments Sun, 10 Oct 2010 22:34:51 +0000 Mike Cohn http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/?p=865 A common question is whether it’s acceptable to combine the role of product and ScrumMaster and give both sets of responsibilities to a single person. In general, combining these roles is a very bad idea. To see why, let’s look back in history and the job of the 17th-century pirate ship captain.

In a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review (October 2010), Professor Hayagreeva Rao wrote about the results of asking his MBA students to design the job of a 17th century pirate ship captain. His MBA students designed a job that lumped together two areas of responsibility:

1. star tasks–the strategic work of deciding which ships to attack, commanding the crew during battle, negotiating with other captains, and so on
2. guardian tasks–the operational work of distributing their pirate booty, settling conflict, punishing crew members, and organizing care for the wounded

The problem with this job description is that it mixes star and guardian tasks. As Professor Rao points out, there are very few individuals who excel at both types of task. Star tasks require risk-taking and entrepreneurship whereas guardian tasks require conscientiousness and consistency. A pirate captain good at identifying ships to attack and at leading his crew into battle would likely be bored by the administrative minutiae of the guardian tasks.

Professor Rao claims that people tend to spend most of their effort on the tasks they are good at (and presumably enjoy). My experience certainly bears this out.

Pirates avoided this problem by having a captain responsible for the star tasks and a quartermaster general responsible for the guardian tasks.

So what does the decidedly non-collaborative, non-agile environment of a pirate ship have to do with agile project management? Well, it turns out that the product owner is largely performing star tasks and the ScrumMaster is largely performing guardian tasks. And so, for the same reason that pirate ships had separate individuals as captain and quartermaster general, our agile software development projects should have separate ScrumMasters and product owners.

]]> http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/avast-combining-the-scrummaster-and-product-owner-matey/feed 16 http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/double-fine-uses-scrum-on-brutal-legend http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/double-fine-uses-scrum-on-brutal-legend#comments Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:29:04 +0000 Mike Cohn http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/?p=750 Mountain Goat Software client Double Fine Productions used Scrum while developing the popular game Brutal Legend. In this article on Gamasutra, executive producer Caroline Esmurdoc describes what went well and what didn’t on the project.
]]> http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/double-fine-uses-scrum-on-brutal-legend/feed 2 http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/game-developers-conference-2007-presentation http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/game-developers-conference-2007-presentation#comments Mon, 19 Mar 2007 16:16:15 +0000 Mike Cohn http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/?p=684 On March 5, 2007 Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat co-presented a tutorial on applying agile software development to video game development. Other presenters were from High Moon Studios (creators of the Darkwatch game) and from Epic (creators of the Unreal Engine).

You can download the slides if you are interested in agile for video game development.

]]> http://blog.mountaingoatsoftware.com/game-developers-conference-2007-presentation/feed 0