Orlando Scrum Gathering 2010 Diary by Bachan Anand

By Bachan Anand / Filed under Agile Tools, CEO, Scrum Gathering, Transform IT, Uncategorized / March 15th, 2010

First of all I want to express my sincere gratitude to the organizers, presenters and participants at Scrum Gathering 2010, the event would not have been the same without anyone one of you.

I really enjoyed being there with seasoned practitioners and team and individuals who are fairly new to scrum.

There were the common themes I saw at the seminar

1) How we do we measure Agile at the enterprise level?

There were several session that talked about how to produce Agile metrics at the Enterprise Level, especially when we scale Agile beyond multiple teams. Discussion ranged from need to build metrics that can meet the managers needs to some centered around we should question the value of these metric and managers need to work closely with the team so that they don’t need to rely on metrics. I personally believe that we need to start measuring Agile success better and some scalable metrics can help. I found this article by Jeff Sutherland that could be very useful http://jeffsutherland.com/2010/01/excel-spreadsheet-for-hyperproductive.html

2) Scrum beyond teams to Architects, Sr Managers , CIO, PMO etc

There were quite a few discussion in the deep dives and open space about Scrum beyond teams , Product Owner and Scrum master . These were the major discussion points.

How do we guide managers to step into leadership roles and be part of a successful Agile adoption?
There are challenges in getting lot of managers engaged as Agile does not clearly define any roles for managers, either people go in with a leap of faith or they resist and come along when things fall in place.
How do change the perception from certain managers that Scrum/Agile does not clearly define any roles .
Need to get better at engaging manager in early stages on Agile adoption and articulate their roles.
There were also discussions around how to effectively engage Architects in Sprints. General consensus was for Architects to get engaged and be the hands on Technical leadership leaders who work with the team to bring about the best technical solution and also keep the bigger project technical vision in perspective.

Couple of other interesting concepts which could be used in any organization Agile or not were::

Open Space - I find this as a great way to solve problem in bigger teams .The most fun part is it a great way to self organize and come up with solution to a challenge or opportunity using all the available skills and most importantly people choose into what they do . You can follow the link to know more about Open Space

Scrum Clinic- this is something really cool for informal knowledge sharing .Some with a questions sign up with their topics as a patient and anyone who can provide answer signs up as a doctor. I find this as a great way for people to self organize and promote knowledge of scrum / agile values and for that matter knowledge in other areas.

Please find some links to posts from others who attended the gathering.

InfoQ: US Scrum Gathering 2010 Kicks Off With a Day of “Deep Dives”

http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/03/scrum-gathering-day-one

InfoQ: US Scrum Gathering, An Exciting Day Two

http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/03/scrum-gathering-day-two

US Scrum Gathering, An All-Open Space Final

http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/03/scrum-gathering-day-three

Scrum Gathering Turns Into Free For All

http://agilethis.com/2010/03/12/scrum-gathering-turns-into-free-for-all/

If You Had Been Me at Scrum Gathering 2010

http://derekwwade.net/blog/2010/03/10/if-you-had-been-me-at-scrumgathering-2010/

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