The ancient heart of Ghent was hidden in a medieval building site full of mud and dirty water.

Normally, I don't care much, but now I just had to be there.

In the NH-hotel , a course for Certified ScrumMasters was organized. And I enrolled, together with two colleagues.

 

A rapid consultation yesterday on the Agilar-site learned us that the teacher would be a certain Tobias Mayer,  a lot of nose with a bonnet on his head.
 

The future of IT is wearing a Peruvian bonnet. Bugger.

 

He was assisted by Xavier Quesada and that's a guy we know. We've been in projects together and even as we speak, we are involved in one giant project at a Telecom-operator.

Tobias and Xavier.  It could have been worse. Let's give them a chance.

 

We know Scrum. We practice Scrum already for some years, but we were eager to see what the course would look like.

In the confirmation mail, it was stated that the course would be an ‘interactive workshop’.

No presentation, no slideshows, just live experiences.

I was wondering how they would do that. Giving us experience in only two days.

 

Before the course commenced, there was coffee and cake. Pretty good start.

Tobias was already there. Without his bonnet. And his nose seemed less gigantic than first thought.

Another windfall.  All well.

 

 

Fifteen pairs of eyes were looking tense and mesmerized to what the Peruvian bonnet had in store.

‘Workshop’, he had promised, ‘no boring presentation’ he told us, ’no slides’.

And sure we knew it! I don't recall that we were seated for more than one hour. The last time I was that interactive must have been at the stag night of my mad nephew.

(I am not going into further detail).

 

The course was set-up as one big Scrum project. Over the two days, the course was cut up in eight sprints of about 1h40 minutes.

Progress was measured on a sprint task board and the product backlog contained stories like: As a team member, I want to know more about implementing tests into a sprint

or: How can you work with multiple product owners (short answer: you can't).

 

We saw our product backlog stories turn into sprint backlog items, we got them prioritized.

At the end of day one, we did a retrospective. We played planning poker, did ‘dot prioritizing’

and we experienced the importance of sticking to the rules, how simple they might be.

We learned about ants and Mexican cement mixers, about the importance of ugly fruit and that ScrumCoaches have a peculiar way of eating grapes.

We learned and were entertained. We entertained each other and learned from each other.

 

And since the course highly valued the agile approach, we could alter the content of the course after every sprint.

Real implementation examples came in the picture, other topics considered less important were dropped. But what was most important, we learned agile thinking. We learned to twist our brain into the right directions. We saw a ScrumProject developing before our eyes.

 

No matter how hard we worked, at the end of the day, we were full of energy, enthused of what we've learned. For me and my colleagues, it was a reassurance: we still did scrum the right way, we didn't drift into some kind of Scrum…but.

And a nice bonus: our company now not only employs experienced ScrumMasters, she has now also four certified ScrumMasters. 

 

The downside of the course was that I was so energetic, that that same evening I started to create a product backlog for the household jobs and to clean up the garden.

My wife told me that I resembled my mad nephew. A lot.

 

Thanks Tobias & Xavier, it was a great experience. You made it work wonderfully.

Respect to all Peruvian bonnet wearers.