AgileTHIS

So I recently discovered that the worlds largest M&M store i located in the Florida Mall in Orlando – the mall is a real turisttrap but the store phewww… for a real chokolatelover like me it was awesome!!! So I did buy a few kilos for my daughters birthday in one week from now – just attached a few pics from that

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Now on to the conference:

The first day I had a good talk with Ken Schwaber regarding setting up User Groups for government organisations or investing time in the new ScrumHub for the public sector. Interesting thing was that on this conference there was alot more attention to the fact that more and more governments are looking into the agile projectworld, and Scrum Alliance is aware of this. So this will be very interesting in the coming years!

Dr. Mark Paulk from Carnagie Mellon University had a great keynote about their findings and upcoming research on agile projects. I had this feeling listening to him: “Now people is starting to wake up – now its time to document the results” – which is very good!!! So in the coming month I promised to write a small note on my work in the public sector, and how our findings could contribute to their research.

Day two was open session/space time – Chris Sims was leading the battle together with one of his co-workers – can’t recall her name – sorry!!! But it was good – there were some great discussions going on in the different small groups. One group was called “DEATH OF SCRUM” – it was about the process will live on forever but eventually it will get a new name – hmmm… 

Scrum Alliance also revealed a few new things the next year – ScrumHubs – which you can read about in another blogpost on agilethis.com – new webiste – which looks so much more professionel – joint venture with PMI – yes scrum needs to work in a controlled environment and a few other things.

I had the pleasure of attending Mike Cohns session on leading self-organizing teams – which was great but the more interesting part took place afterwards where Martin Kearns from Renewtek asked Mike: “So Mike, if you had a budget of lets say – 80mill – would you just continue using scrum and self-organizing teams?” the answer was swift and clear from Mike: “No – I would need to get scrum working in a controlled environment” – that was when it really came out clear that Scrum Alliance are in fact taking scrum to the next level – nice!!!

So I did naturally attend Martins own session on the Marriage of Scrum and PRINCE2 – we had a great talk, and I will create a standalone post on this matter as promised in an earlier post – but at least I discovered that we are not alone outthere!

The last days were really good – heard some talking about the different certifications would be timeboxed to ran out in 2010 – and after that a “real” test would be required to gain the certifications – which will comfort alot of the people Im talking to who attended the certifications. Today there are over 54.000 certified scrum masters and little less product owners and many that has neither but claims they do.

Oh yea thats right – did some talks about agile contracts – will make a standalone post about that in the coming months – but it seems that both NASA and some aussie government organisations had good results – now we just need to reveal our findings as well!!!

So thats it for now – take care!

/Chris.