Life as an agile coach - month one

I've had quite an amazing first month as an agile coach. I've made a few trips to studios adopting Scrum to give classes and coach quite a few teams. These studios were ideal because they had:

• Talented and very experienced teams and management.
• A history of successful games.
• An openness about exploring improvements to their process and practices.
• A critical eye towards evaluating agile. They didn't take things at face value, but they weren't cynical either.

Given this, we were able to have real discussions about the issues they had with adoption and very productive classes with entire teams. I'm sure I'll face greater challenges in coming trips, but this was a great set of clients to start with, but to use a surfing term: I'm "stoked"!

One other thing to note is that the issues with adopting Scrum seem very common with the various developers I've worked with (High Moon, Vivendi owned developers, developers on the AGD list and my clients). I'm beginning to see a common arc of adoption traits with game companies. The experience is very similar to those that Ken Schwaber describes in his latest book "The Enterprise and Scrum". I'm documenting these and working out a more defined road-map with game teams adopting Scrum.

Other news:

• My business website is coming along. I'm glad I used WordPress to start it up.
  
• I'm off on another trip next week. First stop will be at the Scrum Gathering in Chicago. The program looks great.
• The Certified Scrum Master for Game Developers course in Austin May 8-9 is filling up. Mike Cohn and I have been working on this class for a month. It should be great!
• I've accepted an invitation to speak at the NLGD Festival of Games in the Netherlands this June. I'm looking for clients in Europe in the second and possibly first week of June to work with.