I’ve been hearing good things about the Scrum process over the past couple of years and have implemented some "Scrum-like" processes here at Vertex. The results have been quite positive, so I decided to take a course in Scrum so that I could be more informed about what we were doing. I signed up for a two-day training and ScrumMaster certification via ASPE Technology. The course was taught by Peter Borsella. You can take it directly from Peter if the ASPE times and locations don’t work for you, and he’ll also do private trainings for companies. The pricing is similar, but there are different rates for groups from both ASPE and Winnow Management, so shop around if you’re looking to send more than one person.
The best part about the course was Peter’s instruction. He’s a good presenter, paced his material well, and gave thoughtful answers to questions which really showed the amount of experience he has with the Scrum process. We did some role playing which was kind of a mixed bag but on the whole positive. The course materials included Ken Schwaber’s book "Agile Project Management with Scrum, which I found concise and readable. Also included were printouts of the around 200 slides from Peter’s presentation and a quick reference card on the process. The slides were in what you might call "classical PowerPoint" style; they consisted mostly of lists of bullet points. I found the visual materials to be accurate and on-topic, but not exactly compelling reading.
Overall the class was an excellent use of my time. Despite my mixed assessment of the visual materials, the single most important feature of a training of this sort is the instructor’s knowledge and pacing, and Peter was first-rate on both counts.
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