Brazil final impressions · Feb 5, 14:55

This trip to Brazil is over. The last stop was Rio de Janeiro. Here I ran a Product Owner and a Train the Trainer training session for Globo.com. It is the sixth largest internet portal company in Brazil. In the Product Owner Training session I showed them the importance of the role of a Product Owner. He has to care about the Vision, the planning process and a lot more. I learned that after the Certified Scrum Training classes that I ran in December, they still had a lot of basic questions and they found the follow up very helpful.

For me the most exiting training session was the Train the Training one. I was challenged to explain what the secret of my CSM training is. I had no clue — but I figured it out together with Danielo, Antonio and the others: The training design follows the Journey of the Hero described by John Campbell: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces.

Buenos Aires is green – that was my first impression from the city. The people are extremely friendly and the city is outstanding. Sitting in a coffee shop last Sunday morning in Buenos Aires let me smell the relaxing lifestyle in Buenos Aires. On the Sunday afternoon the plaza was crowded with people having fun and enjoying their lives.

For me it was a too short trip, as I got ill and stayed in the hotel for the next 48 hours, till I travelled to Rio de Janeiro. Fortunately this time I ran the class together with Jim York from FoxHedge and he did an incredible job, using my slides and dealing with the fact that I was not able to stand any longer during the class.

To repeat what I learned – CMMi is a big topic in South America and a lot of companies have the certification to Level 4 and 5.

In conclusion: Brazil is a wonderful place for Scrum. People embrace the ideas and they see that Scrum is the way they want to go. They immediately see that Scrum follows is based on human behaviour and is much more in tune with the Brazilian lifestyle than all the other processes that dominate the Brazilian software development market.

I am very glad that I am part of this and am helping to make this happen. But my thanks go to the people who attended my classes and to the companies which allowed me to see all these new endeavours happening.

— Boris