Reflection on my MasterClass on Scrum Performance

Last Thursday, I held my first MasterClass Workshop in my new training facility “zum Talgarten”. The topic was Scrum Performance and the target audience was people who have been doing Scrum for a while yet feel the need to get better. Three people attended (in German, they say “klein aber fein!”), a Product Owner and ScrumMaster from one company, the former ScrumMaster from another.

The inspiration for this workshop came out of my workshop at the Scrum Gathering “Reinventing Scrum”. I discovered none of the participants wanted to reinvent Scrum, they all wanted to debug their own Scrum implementations. And so the workshop was born.

The second piece of the puzzle came from the Temenos retreat I attended last summer. (Read more in the article on Deep Trust – a foundation for lasting change in your organization). A Temenos retreat goes through a process of reflecting and letting go of what happened, then creating personal and shared visions for the future. I set out to follow this model:

1. Identify reasons and goals for attending this workshop.
2. Draw of picture of your Scrum flow, showing how you really do “Scrum”  (which may or may not be very close to how Scrum is actually defined).
3. Share and discuss your Scrum with the other participants
4. Reflect on how you and Scrum have failed each other
5. Review how Scrum-by-the book works, and why
6. Create a Vision of how Scrum should be in your organization
7. Create a list of improvements to start implementing on Monday.

The next public workshop is scheduled for December 6. I’m going to do it once more as a one day workshop. In the meantime, I’ll consider whether it should become a two day workshop/retreat for next year.