Kane Mar

“Why Scrum?” is a webinar that I gave today (Friday, 26 June). This is a difficult topic to talk about because every organization has a different reason for adopting Scrum, and a 45-60 minute webinar doesn’t do it justice.

The difficult nature of the talk, and the fact that I’m still tired from traveling up from Sydney late last night made the webinar feel very flat. In particular, I didn’t have many interesting stories or jokes around the material. I’ll have to restructure the presentation and my thoughts before I try presenting it again.

I still think the webinar platform is a good learning exercise (for me), and I think I’ll continue to do webinars in order to trial new material and different formats. I’d like to thank the views who participated, and stayed around until the very end! You can view the presentation here, and you can find the raw materials (Keynote and PowerPoint files) here.

The usual yada, yada: The presentations are released under a CC-By license. What this means is that the you are welcome to copy, edit, and redistribute the material provided that you give proper attribution. Importantly, you’re allowed to use this material commercially. This means that you’re welcome to use the material in presentations to your management or clients, for example.

Finally, there are a number of photos in the presentation. These are all released under the same CC-By license. They are credited in the presentation, and I would ask you to retain the credits page should you decide to use this material.

My latest presentation was to the Queensland Chapter of PMI, and was a gentle introduction to “Agile Estimating and Planning.” I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the Queensland Chapter for their warm welcome, and engaging discussions. You can view the presentation here, and you can find the raw materials (Keynote and PowerPoint files) here.

The presentations are released under a CC-By license. What this means is that the you are welcome to copy, edit, and redistribute the material provided that you give proper attribution. Importantly, you’re allowed to use this material commercially. This means that you’re welcome to use the material in presentations to your management or clients, for example.

Finally, there are a number of photos in the presentation. These are all released under the same CC-By license. They are credited in the presentation, and I would ask you to retain the credits page should you decide to use this material.

I’ve been preparing a few webinars recently in order to raise the awareness of Scrum and Agile software development in Australia, New Zealand and Asia.

The idea is to host a webinar and then release the material under a Creative Commons (CC-By) license for others to use. My first webinar in the series was (appropriately) “What is Scrum?” The webinar is now over, but you can view the presentation here, and you can find the raw materials (Keynote and PowerPoint files) here.

The presentations are released under a CC-By license. What this means is that the you are welcome to copy, edit, and redistribute the material provided that you give proper attribution. Importantly, you’re allowed to use this material commercially. This means that you’re welcome to use the material in presentations to your management or clients, for example.

Finally, there are a number of photos in the presentation. These are all released under the same CC-By license. They are credited in the presentation, and I would ask you to retain the credits page should you decide to use this material.

The idea for this post came from an online discussion that I had regarding types of large scale Scrum. Many of the ideas that were being dicussed had already been debated within the Scrum community and resulted in the concept that “there can be only one Scrum.” Although these ideas have all be talked about before, much of the conversation is hidden in Yahoo forums and I wanted to take this opportunity to raise the visibility of the discussion to a wider audience.

In the beginning …
In the beginning there was the HBR paper, “The New New Product Development Game”, that served as a source of inspiration for the first Scrum. This paper talk about more than just Scrum. It discussed different types of Scrum (Page 3, exhibit 1), specifically Type A, Type B and Type C.

What happened to Type B and Type C
In the software community we only talk about Scrum, without distinguishing between different types. Why is that? Why is there no exploration of “advanced” Scrum topics such as Type B and Type C?

Jeff Sutherland introduced Type B and Type C directly into Scrum most notably through his blog posts in 2005 titled “Scrum Evolution: Type A, B, and C Sprints”. This ultimately lead to a debate in on the ScrumDevelopment mailing list and prompted Ken (Schwaber) to post his thoughts on the subject:

I’ve been following the threads about type N, A, B, C and advanced Scrum. Although these may represent the engineering, personnel, and product management practices that an organization adopts as a result of Scrum’s inspect and adapt, they aren’t Scrum.

There can only be one
Ken’s position has since been widely adopted throughout the Scrum trainer community, and over time Ken’s original position appears to have solidified: “There is only one Scrum”

What does the mean, and what is the one type of Scrum? In a recent discussion, Tobias Mayer summed it up nicely when he commented that Scrum is “a framework and a set of principles which will allow you to emerge your own process, one which respects your context (e.g. culture, people, products…), and morphs over time as appropriate.”

Update: I’m releasing the presentation under the Creative Commons (cc) by 3.0 license. This basically means that you can remix, edit or create derivative works of this presentation, provided that you attribute it to me, and the artists whose work (photographs) I’ve used. The license allows you to use it for profit, so you can use it for work purposes (for example, presentations to teams and/or management). The fully description of the license can be found here.

The presentation can be downloaded as a Powerpoint (ppt) file, here.
Or, as a zip file that contains a Apple Keynote (key) file, as well as the ppt file, here.

I recently did a presentation to the Brisbane Scrum Users Group on “Technical debt and what to do about it.” I even got to do the infamous “Squirrel Burger” exercise, which I haven’t done for about two years. I think it’s a wonderful exercise, but not everyone agrees and it can provoke some strong reactions. I stop using it in my CSM courses partly because of complaints about making people feel ill. I still love it, however, and certainly enjoyed dusting it off and the Technical debt presentation.

I’d like to thank James Brett and everyone at the BSUG for such a warm welcome. The presentation is available on my downloads page, and here:

How do you go about getting invited to speak at conferences? The other day Brian Marick mentioned that his conference submissions seldom get rejected. I was curious so I asked him why. He mentioned several reasons included the fact that he usually gets invited to speak!

My own track record for speaking at conference is abysmal, so I asked for his advice and he kindly wrote a two blog posts in response: here and here. Both are great articles with concrete advice, and well worth reading.

Update: I’m happy to announce that the Perth CSM course has been confirmed and will definitely go ahead. Here’s the official Scrum Alliance page: http://www.scrumalliance.org/courses/4483-certified-scrummaster

I’ve been talking to Brendan Power in Perth, and he’s talked me into exploring a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) course there. It’s scheduled for April 1st and 2nd. The course is still subject to cancellation depending upon interest, but I really, really hope it goes ahead … I haven’t been to perth in about 25 years!! =)

If you’re interested, you can sign up here.

I love this article from Michael Smethurst at the Beebs Radio Labs entitled “How we make websites.” It’s really nice to see a collection of good practices all put together. If you’re pressed for time I suggest skipping the presentation at the start … it’s good, but I found the rest of the article to be far more interesting.