I’ve been having a very interesting twittervation about how to start teams off with Scrum. I believe you best learn by doing. And that it’s more important to get teams actually starting Agile in the workshop than merely learning Scrum which will hopefully lead you to Agile.
So we “teach” Scrum with a 1-day emulation and discussion of it followed by 3 days of ATDD. This first day teaches the essence of Scrum but it illustrates how teams work – mostly their foibles. 🙂
The other three days are on ATDD. Each day isi split by 1/2 day discussing it & then an hour with each team doing it. What we’re really teaching is – collaboration, test-first, feature slicing, and how to use minimum business increments. These directly address the issues we’ve seen most teams have- unclear requirements, stories too large, POs not appreciating the impact of interruptions and a lack of focus on finishing.
The test-first is mostly about discovery & specification but it also informs design (the 1st mantra of design patterns is designing from behavior).
The result is that once a team gets moving they can keep moving. But a course that prepares you for movement may not ever get you started.