The fall ScrumGathering is in Minneapolis, MN, this week. I’m here for the two-day open space and the trainer’s meeting. Groups are using http://scrumalliance.pbwiki.com as the conference proceedings. I’ll refer to those articles rather than repeat them here.
Product Owner – I hosted a session on challenges of being a product owner. We described various problems, and broke into subgroups to look at it from the perspectives of "patterns of product owners," "traps," and a "values/principles/practices framework."
Planning a Long Project, hosted by Kelly Weyrauch. We defined a long project as lasting more than a year, and considered a variety of issues that affect planning. Two key challenges are "dealing with changes in scope" and "being absolutely clear about how much is left to do."
Being a Manager, hosted by Jens Ostergaard. Looked at things managers do: remove impediments, set goals, coach/help with individual development, encourage innovation, provide resources/environment, block for the team. But the most important thing is to provide vision.
What is business value?. Hosted by Joe Little. Value to the customer versus benefit to the business. The Kano model – mandatory, linear, delighters. Value vs. cost.
Write a product backlog, hosted by Mike Cohn. We took a couple examples and broke them into stories. Mike talked about using the expected implementation cost as a driver for whether to make stories bigger or smaller. He also described using the back of the card to record conditions of satisfaction, high-level acceptance criteria.
Scrum for non-software applications. We identified a number of areas that use or can use Scrum. Then we explored some challenges and potential solutions for problems they might face.
In the afternoon, we did some closure exercises, to identify important areas going forward and to turn the energy into accomplishment.
I joined the Leadership group. We decided to survey scrum masters and trainers about how leadership is presented as a topic in the courses, to create a resource list of books and articles, and to gather success stories of people on Scrum teams who demonstrated leadership.
I had a fun couple of days, and took away some inspiration, some ideas to try, and some ideas for new articles. It’s always feels good to re-connect to the community.