Wow! It’s been a frantic last few weeks, but things are coming together nicely for Tom and Kai Gilb’s visit to the US and my hometown of Richmond, VA. Amongst other things, we’re doing a public course on Saturday March 6th titled “Delivering Real Value with Scrum”. Sign up now to join us for this special training opportunity!

It all started a few weeks back when Kai contacted me saying he and Tom were coming to New Jersey for some training and consulting. Last summer in London we had chatted about working together and now the opportunity had presented itself. They were already on the East Coast and a relatively short flight or drive away from Richmond.

Kai and I brainstormed some course ideas (using Google Wave...I was pretty impressed) and agreed upon a day long course on Delivering Real Value with Scrum. I recommended the course to our executive team and they agreed, choosing to roll it out to everyone in the company interested in attending. Now there’s a positive buzz around the office as folks are looking forward to the team training next week. We’ve even reserved some space at the Capital Alehouse across the street for a social hour afterwards!

While Kai trains our team on Friday, in the afternoon Tom and I are going over to a client of ours where Tom will give a talk on “Measuring Value in Project Delivery”. They are an organization that uses a mixture of waterfall and agile for project delivery. While their project teams can and do report “tasks completed” and “velocity”, there’s no clear way to translate that into value delivered to the business. I’m confident some of Evo’s concepts can give them ideas to try on their next project.

As I mentioned earlier, on Saturday we’ll give a public course sponsored by Agile Richmond on “Delivering Value with Scrum”. Sign up here. I’ll be giving a brief of my presentation Evo + Scrum = Value Delivery. I’m pretty excited for this course and hope we get a good turnout. At $99 for the all-day course (including lunch), this is a great deal.

It so happened that as Kai and I were working out the training details, I told him I was giving a talk (Evo + Scrum = Value Delivery) at the upcoming Scrum Gathering (March 8-10) and that he and Tom should attend. Next thing I know, Kai emails Jeff, who emails Tobias, who makes room for Tom and Kai to give a 5 hour tutorial on Monday. Quick work! Now they’re all heading to Orlando from Richmond on Sunday for the conference.

So now we’ve got two Evo sessions at the Scrum Gathering, Tom and Kai’s tutorial on Monday March 8th starting at 10:30am and my 60 minute presentation on Tuesday from 11am - 12pm. If you plan on attending, please stop by for one or both sessions and say hey.