Certified Scrum Master Training

Megan Walsh, 11 March 2010

On Thursday and Friday last week I participated in the CSM Course held at the Hotel Grand Chancellor at Auckland Airport.

I had been looking forward to the course since last year and was not disappointed. Our trainers were Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of the Scrum framework, and Jens Ostergaard, a certified Scrum Trainer with many years Scrum experience. Their extensive experience and success stories were really inspiring and helped to create and maintain an exciting learning environment.

The two day course was a mixture of lecture-type sessions, exercises that taught us to apply the Scrum process to projects and Q & A sessions where we each got to seek advice from the experts about how Scrum applies to our individual situations. There were 18 people in the course, all from varied IT backgrounds. We were split into three teams of 6 people, which were our Scrum teams for all exercises.

One of the best things I took away from

the CSM course was the clarification of the Scrum Master’s responsibilities. The Scrum Master is not a manager, they do not have any authority to make business decisions or assign tasks. The Scrum Master is a servant leader who supports and guides their team to follow the Scrum process in order to deliver complete and tested software functionality in rapid increments.

I’ve also come away with practical steps to take to improve our use of Scrum within Magnetism. Over the coming weeks I’ll be sharing the progress we make, so watch this space!