The third day of the London Scrum Gathering (day 1, day 2) was reserved for an Open Space session led by Rachel Davies and a closing keynote by James Grenning.
We started with the Open Space. I’d done Open Spaces before, but this one was definitely on a much larger scale than what I’d seen before. After the introduction, everyone that had a subject for a session wrote their subject down, and got in line to announce the session (and have it scheduled). With so many attendents, you can imagine that there would be many sessions. Indeed, there were so many sessions that extra spaces had to be added to handle all of them. The subject for the Open Space was to be the Scum Alliance tag-line: “Changing the world of work”;.
I initially intended to go the a session about Agile and Embedded, as the organiser mentioned that if there wouldn’t be enough people to talk about the embedded angle, he was OK with widening the subject to ‘difficult technical circumstances’. I haven’t done much real embedded work, but was interested in the broader subject. It turned out, though, that there were plenty of interested parties into the real deal, so the talk quickly started drifting to FPGAs and other esoterica and I used the law of two feet to find a different talk.
My second choice for that first period was a session about getting involvement of higher management. This session, proposed by Joe Justice and Peter Stevens (people with overlapping subjects were merging their sessions), turned out to be very interesting and useful. The group shared experiences of both successfully (and less successfully) engaging higher management (CxOs, VPs, etc.) into an Agile Change process. Peter has since posted a nice summary of this session on his blog.
My own session was about applying Agile and Lean-Startup ideas to the context of setting up a consultancy and/or training business. If we’re really talking about ’transforming the world of work’, then we should start with our own work. My intention was to discuss how things like transparency, early feedback, working iteratively and incrementally could be applied for an Agile Coach’s work. My colleague and I have been working to try and approach our work in this fashion, and are starting to get the hang of this whole ‘fail early’ thing. We’ve also been changing our approach based on feedback of customers, and more importantly, not-customers. During the session we talked a little about this, but we also quickly branched off into some related subjects. Some explanation of Lean-Startup ideas was needed, as not everyone had heard of that. We didn’t get far on any discussion on using some of the customer/product development ideas from that side of things, though.
Some discussion on contracts, and how those can fit with an agile approach. Most coaches are working on a time-and-material basis, it seems. We have a ‘Money for nothing and your changes for free’ type contract (see http://jeffsutherland.com/Agile2008MoneyforNothing.pdf, sheets 29-38) going for consultancy at the moment, but it’s less of a fit than with a software development project. Time and material is safest for the coach, of course, but also doen’t reward them for doing their work better than the competition. How should we do this? Jeff’s ‘money back guarantee’ if you don’t double your velocity is a nice marketing gimmick, but a big risk for us lesser gods: Is velocity a good measure for productivity and results? How do we measure it? How do we determine whether advice was followed?
Using freebies or discounts to customers to test new training material on was more generally in use. This has really helped us quickly improve our workshop materials, not to mention hone the training skills…
One later session was Nigel Baker’s. He did a session on the second day called ‘Scrumbrella’, on how to scale Scrum, and was doing a second one of those this third afternoon. I hadn’t made it to the earlier one, but had heard enthusiastic stories about it, so I decided to go and see what that was about. Nigel didn’t disappoint, and had a dynamic and entertaining story to tell. He made the talk come alive by the way he drew the organisational structures on sheets of paper, and moved those around on the floor during his talk, often getting the audience to provide new drawings.
After this great intro, we were treated to a backstage account of the way the Agile Manifesto meeting at Snowbird went. And then about what subjects came up after this year’s reunion meeting. James showed the top two things coming out of the reunion meeting:
- Demand Technical Excellence
- Promote individual [change] and lead organizational change
The Physics of Debug-Later-Programming