Part of the ScrumMaster role is to ensure that everyone on their team is educated about Scrum and to evangelise Scrum to their organisation. Over the past few years we have come across many ScrumMasters who have great intentions of running training but then get bogged down in the planning and preparation and don't ever get round to actually doing it.

We have been training teams in Scrum for about three years. Over the past year we have trained Certified ScrumMaster classes worldwide. During this time we have spent many hours preparing training plans and creating workbooks, flipcharts and slides. Our materials have been continually refined from feedback after each course. All our training uses Training from the Back of the Room principles.

This book is a collection of all of our materials. It will help you plan and deliver interactive, fun Scrum training for anything from a short workshop on a particular topic to a full two-day course. If you buy the book you will also get access to our slides, participant workbook, exercise handouts and training plans.

It's taken us several years to master the skill of facilitation, and it continues to amaze us how few people learn the skill, or even understand what it means. People spend much of their lives in meetings, and yet so many meetings lack facilitation. We hope the collection of tips and techniques in this book will inspire you to grow your own facilitation skills and improve the meetings in your organisation.

Anyone who attends meeting can benefit from this book. However we are specifically aiming the book at people who regularly run meetings, workshops or training sessions. You might call yourself a facilitator or trainer, but more likely you have another title and meetings are just how you interact with others to get things done. 

Have you ever looked at a requirement document that’s 50 plus pages long and wondered if there was an easier way to communicate? Or have you ever received a 1 liner story without any context and thought “what?”.

We have and in our years of work in traditional waterfall organisations and newer agile organisations the trend continues. Very seldom is the sweet spot in the middle achieved. In every single case the path to the sweet spot started with conversations.

Over the last 3 years we have developed a number of workshops to help people start these conversation. The workshops are aimed at different stakeholders ranging from business people, to Product Owners and teams. This book is a collection of some of those workshops and can be used to help improve the way you think about and communicate agile requirements. 

Although we talk about Product Owners, this book isn't just for Scrum teams. You can apply most of the lessons in here to any project you are on. We have used these techniques and ideas for renovating houses, redesigning websites and even writing this book!

If a team believes they are agile, but nothing has changed about the way they test, then there is still much to learn. We teach 5 key principles that explain why agile testing is fundamentally different to traditional testing.

This books includes a collection of workshops to help teams grasp these principles and adopt an agile testing mindset. It's not just for testers. A key part of agile testing is that the whole team is involved, so we always run these workshops with everyone in the team. 

If your team is ready for the next level we highly recommend running through the workshops in this book, it will teach them a number of simple but valuable techniques to help prevent bugs and dramatically increase the quality of your products. We provide the facilitation plans, teaching points, and even the slides you might use to help you run the workshop.

Scrum is great for getting teams to deliver good quality software regularly, but that doesn't really help if you are building the wrong thing! The Product Backlog is a key artefact to helping steer the team in the right direction. Yet sometimes the Product Backlog is just a long list of tickets logged by the business. Often Product Owners can't see the forest for the trees. There are so many items in their backlog that the team have no idea what direction the product is actually headed. Even if you know what your backlog should look like, finding the time to get it in order seems impossible.

If this sounds familiar, this book is for you. We have worked with a number of business analysts and Product Owners who feel the same way. We found that sending Product Owners on two day theoretical training courses is not the answer. Instead we run short workshops where we work with the Product Owner's actual backlog. The workshop is a working session, and an hour later the Product Owners emerge with an improved backlog.

We have combined a number of these workshops into this book. We provide all our workshop plans, tips for facilitation, and teaching points to cover for each topic. You can use these workshops to help the Product Owners you work with to master their backlogs.

We often hear people say "We're agile, we don't need a plan" or even worse "We can't plan". This is just not true. Release Planning in agile is as important as it is in traditional projects, the only difference is there are a few techniques that help make sure the plans bear some relation to reality. We've all worked on projects where you know from day one that you will be late, and yet no one does anything about it. Agile planning is different. We give up the illusion of control of traditional rigid plans, and replace it with a clear view of where we actually are, even if it's badly behind schedule, so that we can make decisions based on what is actually possible.

We have run Release Planning workshops with many organisations. Sometimes starting with C-level executives to set the direction and vision for a product suite; other times starting with teams and making sense of what they are currently working on. This book is a collection of our workshops that will help you run similar workshops to create agile Release Plans. We include teaching points on a range of techniques like Story Mapping and Release Burnups to help you explain to other's how to use these methods effectively.

Over the years we have played various games with individuals and teams to illustrate the value of collaboration. The games are fun and non-threatening which allow for great learning experiences. Many people have AH-HA moments when playing games.

You know how you learn how to ride a bike as a kid, and then years later, you are able to hop on and cycle? That’s muscle memory. Your muscles remember what they are supposed to do and how they need to work together to keep you on the bike and keep the bike going. We like to think of the games as emotional memory. During the game each person experiences certain emotions that they remember. One day a situation will arise and those emotions will emerge, they will recall the game and their emotions, and be able to apply the lessons they learned during the game.

We hope you enjoy these games & techniques - we certainly love them. Each time we facilitate these games we learn new things!