Scrum Gathering Musings

I came away from the Scrum Gathering last week feeling surprisingly positive about the future of the Scrum Alliance. All in all it was a very enjoyable conference, and my overall impression was of a community which is more open and inclusive than I have perceived it to be for a long time. Talking to Tobias Mayer at the end he put it quite nicely – the Scrum Alliance is about transforming the world of work, and not about defining Scrum.

My Kanban Deep Dive seemed to be well received. I had a great group who were very engaged and willing to enter into the spirit of lively debate, including Jean Tabaka, Lasse Koskela and Jurgen Appelo. My goal was not to “teach” Kanban, but to explore some of the key elements, and how they compare to Scrum. After some inspection and adaptation, the discussions centred around “how will these ideas change the way I work?” It was interesting to hear some diverse opinions and discover how people would take away what we covered. I also came up with a new format inspired by Kanban – the Kanban Konversation – a pull-based variation of the Goldfish Bowl. I’ve blog about this separately.

Other sessions I went to included a couple on Lean Thinking and Scrum, including a great summary of Statistical Control Charts by Mark Strange – something I never thought I would see discussed openly within the Scrum Community! Mike Cottmeyer also hosted a useful OpenSpace session on Scaling Agile in which we explored his ideas about using a Kanban approach to co-ordinate Agile Enterprises.

The OpenSpace itself was hosted by Harrison Owen, creator of the format, and it was insightful to hear him talk about its origins, and how he typically uses it. I liked the more fluid way of creating the market place. Proposers were limited to stating the problem they wanted to discuss, and their name – no rambling descriptions or explanations. The market place itself was had no explicit schedule – proposers just added a post-it with a time and location to their problem. The schedule seemed to self-organise into more of a structure later on. One thought I had was that OpenSpace as used by the Agile community may itself be overkill for how we use it. I’ve never been to an Agile OpenSpace in which we needed to solve a specific problem by yesterday. Rather they are forum for open conversations on a variety of topics relevant to the conference and community. Much like the conversations I generally find mysefl involved in over a beer (or Mohito this time) in the evening. I wonder what would happen if we simple hired a bar for a couple of evening and people came along for a drink and a chat? Oh wait, that’s XTC!

To sum up my thoughts after the Scrum Gathering, it seems to me that the Scrum Community is now seeing itself as part of the picture, and not he whole picture, which can only be a good thing.