My colleague Don MacIntyre invited me to attend and co-teach his Scrum @ Scale Certified Practitioner class in Raleigh, NC last week (September 10-11th, 2018). It was in my hometown so how could I refuse.
It was a 2-day class with ~20 attendees. There was a nice mix of agile and Scrum experience across a spectrum of well-known companies leveraging agile at scale. We even had one gentleman fly in from India for the class.
Don spent most of the time teaching, but I had a few opportunities to teach basic Scrum and contribute to our general coaching conversations. Overall, I think the class went very well.
Last week I attended a 4-day Scaled Agile Framework class with a result of sitting for my SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) test. A few days after the class, I received an email telling me I passed the exam. I am now a proud and newly minted SPC. This enables me to teach several SAFe courses, to kick-off and coach Agile Release Trains (PSI’s), and to generally coach organizations that are adopting SAFe.
But to be honest, I’m still digesting SAFe. It’s not that I’m having trouble with the concepts or approaches. It’s more so that I’m having a challenge fitting them into my own experience in a useful way. You see much of what I learned in the class I’ve been using and doing for a long time in my own agile journey. But I’ve couched those techniques under Scrum of Scrums for agile scaling—and with fairly good success.
