Scrum User group meeting - 24 Feb
Twas a blistering night in Cape Town, and nearly 50 newbies gathered to hear the tale of ‘Scrum’…
Mike Freislich, our MC, kicked off with some feedback on what the user group committee has been up to. If you’re reading this on the new site, then you probably know about some of them already.
We’ve relaunched the website, started adding more dynamic content.
We now have a local scrum discussion group which already has some good discussions going.
There is also the events announcement group, which hopefully people know about, since they were at the event.
The committee is also offering services in the form of sending a scrum evangelist to your company if you would like someone to speak about scrum.
Then into the presentations: I gave what felt like a very hurried presentation about the basics of scrum. Trying to cover all the roles, practices and artifacts as well as some tips and insight on what it takes to implement it into your organisation all in 30 minutes was a challenge. It probably didn’t help that the air conditioning was going full blast (not that it seemed to help much) making it difficult to be heard.
Questions after the presentation focussed on the reasons why scrum implementations tend to fail; Ken scwaber is quoted here as saying approximately 75% of teams attempting to implement scrum, will return to their previous ways of working.
The consensus that seems to emerge is that it is likely due to the necessity for handing over the locus of control from the traditional management structure to the teams who will be doing the work. Many organisations struggle with this and abandon the framework.
A copy of the presentation can be found here. For other (much better) presentations, you can look here and here.
A short break and Chris Tisdall from Allan Grey next spoke about his experiences as a Product Owner, implementing scrum. Some wonderful insights into the challenges of rolling out scrum at an enterprise scale. Chris is passionate about being a Product Owner and it really came through in his presentation. I think he has a lucky team; a Product Owner who gets scrum, has a vision for the product and leads his team.
Some of the questions posed to Chris included ‘What kind of career pathing is done for team members in a scrum organisation’ and ‘How do you handle bonuses and increases for a team in an individualist culture’.
No real answers emerged, so perhaps they’re good topics for future meetings.
We wrapped up and headed for the cold drinks, with lots of interesting discussions after.
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