Scrum Gathering South Africa 2014 Closing Keynote: My Scrum Odyssey
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Karen Greaves delivered the closing keynote for the 2014 Scrum Gathering in Cape Town. She shared her personal agile journey as well as the journey of the Scrum community in South Africa over the last 12 years.
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Scrum Gathering South Africa 2014 Closing Keynote: My Scrum Odyssey
- 2. Karen Greaves - agile coach & trainer
Editor's Notes
- 4:05 pm
- In case you missed the annoucement this morning, I am not Bilikiss and I didn’t suddenly get a lot paler 9pm Cara approached me My first thought was – I need to ask Sam – we’ve been pairing for 3 years Then I realised an hour of 200 people listening to ME! Perfect If you know me you know I like to talk So why me? Was I just the only sucker at the bar? I hope not I hope I have something relevant to say. I’m an agile coach and trainer at Growing agile, and I’ve been on my own agile journey since 2002 when the manifesto was signed
- So what to talk about? In the spirit of the conference theme I decided to talk about an Odyssey And discovered I can’t spell it without looking at my name tag Thinking about the story I’d like to share I thought of 2
- Firstly, inspired by Gitte’s talk on vulnerability and honesty I’d like to tell you my personal story. Secondly, I’d like to tell our story, the story of our community and our country on our journey of adopting agile Finally I will share 3 tips that I hope will make a difference in your personal journey
- So my journey….. 4:10
- 2002 Interviewed for a job as a developer The company Workshare was doing XP Had heard of it but had no idea what it was They offered me the Product Owner job (onsite customer) Worked for 2 1/2/ years in utopia I had no idea how good I had it
- Even in utopia we get bored and frustrated I moved on And became a project manager…. PMI, Prince 2, 1000 line gantt charts, 95% done I worked on a project that had a date error in the contract (out by a year) and we STILL missed the deadline (on a fixed price project) An obvious failure But I even got good at it. Delivered early, and under budget, exactly what was asked for And still failed! One good thing I learned here was about team. We had a stable team who worked with the same customer and a known process, and we did repeatable delivery.
- I took a brief detour at JPMorgan I encountered my first Scrum of Scrums It was twice a week for 2 hours, in a meeting room, with 20 project managers, analysts and other managers The dev team had 4 people in it! I knew it was wrong. I started looking. I was a bit more critical this time around.
- I started at Intec. I was a project manager initially, but 6 months in to my job there new head of R&D said she wanted us to do Scrum, I read Scrum & XP from the trenches on the weekend, and came back ready to roll it out. Training was an hour powerpoint presentation per team, and I started a new team every 2 weeks, until all 9 teams were doing Scrum I heard about the CSM from my husband and decided to go along to get the certificate (I loved certificates) I didn’t expect to learn anything. And then…. MY LIFE CHANGED I realised I had missed the entire point of Scrum. I had focussed on process not principles, and I knew nothing about managing a change this radical. I knew I had to learn more
- I started getting involved in the Community. SUGSA was just starting out. Peter suggested Carlo and I go to a Global gathering before we ran one here. We went to Orlando in 2009 I met Lyssa Adkins My life changed again. I realised how much I had blamed people in the organisation rather than understanding what they were going through I got a small peak into the world of coaching. It was a very different place to be.
- After Orlando I joined a coaching circle with Lyssa I realised I was dreadfully unhappy I realised I was in a company of very low trust I realised I didn’t know how to fix it I realised I had made things worse not better I was angry at them and myself It was ugly I fled They probably won’t let me back in the building
- I joined Fundamo as dev manager. They were already doing Scrum, but had just gone through some big changes related to funding and offshoring I had a boss who ‘got’ agile. And he trusted me enough to let me try new things I played. I had fun We did well I saw what Scrum was really capable of I played with Kanban I co-trained with Peter I submitted my first talk to an international conference based on what we had done with Kanban in support. It got accepted!
- I wanted more. I had solved the problems at Fundamo They were bought by VISA, and I didn’t want to deal with that, Richard had resigned. It was time for a change I spoke to Sam, and she felt the same. We started GA 3 years ago. Agile is the core of what we do. We don’t do Scrum or Kanban, we use bits of both We retrospect every month, we craft everything as an experiement and have a learning board to track what we are learning We change our business model continuously But still it’s a journey, there is more to learn and know. And without continuous attention we fail and have to relearn our own lessons.
- 4:25 Now lets talk about us. Running in parallel to my story is the story of agile in South Africa and in particular the SUGSA community.
- In the beginning (2001) it was all DIY Scrum or XP. People who had read books and tried a few things themselves. They wasn’t any course, or coach in SA – although they did exist elsewhere
- But what we had was an explorer, someone who wanted to know more, and had the freedom to travel to Europe and the US to find our more about Scrum, and start to bring that knowledge back to SA. That explorer was Peter Hundermark. I want to try an experiement. Heard of the Kevin Bacon effect? All actors are connected with Kevin Bacon via 6 degrees
- I want to visualise the Peter Hundermark effect Peter, please stand. (1) If you know Peter, please stand ( 2) If you know someone who is standing (including me) please stand. Anyone not standing? One more level? Why is this important? Was it just a way to get you all to stand at the end of the day? Maybe, but personally I think our close community is related to how we are doing. Let’s continue the story
- So Peter went out, and found Boris, and brought him to SA to train. He created some Scrum fanatics (and I can use that word because I was one of them) Anyone trained by Boris in the room? He created zealots, we were the early adopters and a bit lunatic fringe We wanted to try ideas that weren’t main stream and seemed a little hippy dippy at the time. We told everyone that the CSM was a life changing experience
- It worked, more and more people started doing the CSM, the SUGSA community formed and started having meetups and we planned the first Scrum conference in SA event the Scrum Day 2009.
- Unfortunately, this lead to a lot of people, myself including thinking they could adopt Scrum by themselves without experience, and we say a lot of bad Scrum, and failed Scrum and Scrum Butt, and people who had been burned by Scrum and didn’t want to give it a try again.
- It took some time for people to realise they needed help. We started reaching out from Training from the very few players in the market at the time SUGSa became even more popular We started coaching circles for people to grow their knowledge even more.
- With some help, Scrum started being successful. Team were being trained and coached and Scrum started to get a reputation for being a good option. Big corporates started to notice, and they all started some pilot teams or projects in Scrum At the same time agile and Scrum has taken over in the US, and we start to see companies with american owners being told to adopt Scrum. But with the problems of scale come other challenges and a bunch of other acronyms enter the landscape – SAFE, DAD,
- As the scale spreads and more people get experience and realise this is hard, particularly at scale, we see an explosion in agile coaching. Suddenly there are loads of agile coaches, and companies are starting to ask not just for training but also for coaching to help them get started. To me this is a great sign, and happened rapidly as a result of our strong community and ability to share knowledge We also start seeing more and more South African’s attending and presenting at International agile conferences, and international speakers coming here.
- I see the question starting to change for sompanies who have been doing this a while, to how can we improve We see repeat business from clients ready to take another step in agile, and an acknowledgement that it’s an on going journey.
- So where are we now? I think we are in late majority Most small companies are doing a version of agile Most corporates are trying or starting Agile transformations are becoming key strategic decisions We have a growing based of coaches and trainers to help But we are catching up Technical practices are still lagging the US
- 4:40 So what? I’d like to see agile and Scrum grow further, and help us all get better, and for me to be successful in the dream I need your help I need you to add your journey and voice to ours How can you do that – here are my 3 tips
- Pay continuous attendtion Wayne or Kevin can give a better description of Entropy that I can, but I was to explain with a story. Remember Fundamo – I presented an experience report on how we had reduce the defect count from over 600 to less than 20 And how we had met ever release date for a year without overtime. Last week I went to a talk by Carol May – now at Visa. She nearly had the same results slide as me, except it was 3 years later And in one of the most depressing moments of my life I realised everything I thought I had achieved at Fundamo had been erased over time due to a lack of attention. I didn’t intend to depress you, I just want you to realise that if you aren’t focussing on this constantly you will go backwards. If you are doing sprint planning the same way you were 6 months ago, you have regressed, change something, and see what happens
- The most important thing for you to do is learn. If we need to be continously improving we need to be continuously learning. But I don’t just mean taking 2 days out of your schedule to attend a conference I mean thinking about what you will try at work because of this conference, and then setting up an experiment to see what you can learn.
- Finally Join in, get involved, attend a talk, give a talk, write a blog, run a session on something you learned here at work. You can’t change anyone except yourself, so stop finding all the reasons you can’t do or change anything and start exploring what YOU can do.
- I am going to give you the most valuable gift of all right now I’m ending early and giving you some time. Maybe you want use it to decide on the next steps of your journey? Or to just reflect on the last 2 days Or to say goodbye to new faces you have met Or to duck home early Enjoy.