Serious Scrum’s First Meetup!
An account of at least three Journeys related to Serious Scrum
On June 20th, Serious Scrum held its inaugural meetup, and it was a story of three journeys. (At least) The event was graciously hosted by the kind folks at Ingenico in Hoofddorp (which I quickly learned is not Amsterdam :) near Schiphol Airport in Holland. I had the pleasure of attending and participating, and this is an account of the event. Fair warning: subjectivity is present!
Intro
For those of you who might not have known, this was the first time that Sjoerd Nijland and Willem-Jan Ageling, the two Founding Editors of Serious Scrum, had actually met! In fact, I believe it was the first time that many of the writers or editors for Serious Scrum had met in person. Maarten, Max, Gunnar and Pieter were there too, and maybe even Scrum Rebel, but we don’t need to talk about that :)
For all of its obvious faults, it seems the online world can actually help us to build things. In any case, this was one more great reason to have the first Serious Scrum meetup!
Personally, I had one more reason why I was keen to participate. I’ve learned so much from participation in Serious Scrum: writing and reviewing articles, and engaging in conversations in the Serious Scrum Slack Workspace. It has only been a year, but the journey has been fantastic. It felt odd to be only meeting these authors, editors and collaborators for the first time, seeing as we have effectively been building our little online community for around a year now.
Journey 1 — Serious Scrum— Sjoerd and Willem-Jan
First up, Sjoerd Nijland and Willem-Jan Ageling described the origins of the Serious Scrum group. For those who don’t know already, the two guys started the publication around a year ago, with two main series. Sjoerd’s ‘Road to PSMIII’ described learnings and prepared an awesome series of reference articles to assist anyone on that arduous journey of study. Meanwhile Willem-Jan’s ‘Are you serious!?’ series challenged myths and misunderstandings related to Scrum.
In the last year, many new editors have joined to collaborate and write posts and series of our own. John Clopton and I were the first two new editors to join the two guys, and since then the number of editors has grown steadily, with awesome contributions from a whole host of talented writers and Professionals in the domain of Scrum. Adrian, Dan, roland, Justin, Marty and Raymond are just some of the writers that were saluted, but sadly we weren’t all able to get together this time. A Serious Scrum World Tour surely beckons :)
The goal of the Serious Scrum publication and community is to encourage contribution and to facilitate discussion and learning: to bring ‘a tsunami of sense’ to online discussions around Scrum.
After presenting the story, Sjoerd shared an excellent video on Scrumbuts, and we participated in an exercise to gather Scrumbuts from the group. (Note to self: we need to follow up on these :)
Journey 2 — Evolving with the Scrum Guide — Paddy
My own talk was based on a post about the Evolution of the Scrum Guide, and I was pleased with the Q&A discussion that we had afterwards. There were some great conversations about management involvement, self-organisation, and the changes we would make to the Scrum Guide. We also discussed Willem-Jan’s own experience of making a suggested change, and how Ken Schwaber coolly rejected it :)
I really enjoyed the experience. Part of my talk was also to ask a question: ‘Does the Scrum Guide Provide your definition of the rudiments of Scrum?’ You can see the responses from the room below.
On reflection, I think the question is good, but the suggested responses are not. This means the data is difficult to interpret. A simple yes/no choice is better I think. Next time I ask the question, I’ll frame it that way, with a second question for those who answer no: “What source do you use?”.
Journey 3 — Ingenico’s Agile Journey — Willem-Jan
Next up, Willem-Jan gave a talk on the Journey he and his colleagues at Ingenico have gone through over the last few years in developing their approach to Agile delivery.
The talk was really great: it was an authentic story of a journey implementing Scrum over a long time-frame, complete with successes, failures, lessons learned and a feeling for the work still to do. The attendees were under no illusions with Willem-Jan’s story, and it was not just a vanity tale, or an edited story with difficulties glossed over.
Some of the stories from Willem-Jan’s posts were really bought to life: the impediments wall, Scrum vs top-down management, the marketplace where team formation happened in a self-organised way, and a really interesting experiment covered in the Management Scrum Team series.
It sounds like Willem-Jan, Pieter, Corine and everyone at Ingenico have gone through a very interesting journey with their approach to Scrum. It was fascinating to imagine some of these experiments in different contexts and how they might play out!
Another demonstration of how Ingenico live the Scrum value of openness was the guys’ willingness to take us all on a tour of the building in Hoofddorp, to show all of us visitors how things happened in real life.
Agile Safari:
The experience of strolling around the Ingenico offices and getting a feel for how things happen there was really great, and as Willem-Jan himself has said, there is an open invitation to come and experience it yourself: just join the #agile-safari channel in the Serious Scrum slack workspace, or contact Willem-Jan to find out more.
All throughout the tour, and of course afterwards, there were conversations constantly happening. It was clear that even just seeing another working environment — perhaps one that was different from our own — was enough to generate ideas and get some inspiration flowing.
It might seem like a straight-forward idea, but when was the last time you visited an organisation and had a tour of how they work with Scrum? Perhaps as Scrum Professionals, we should all be more open to that idea!
Closing
The first Serious Scrum Meet-up was a great success and has genuinely emboldened us to do more. We found ourselves naturally discussing the many ways that we could involve all of the Serious Scrum authors, editors and readers around the world. Meetups in Dublin, Berlin and St. Louis, or maybe an annual conference? It really feels like there is potential here to continue on this journey to enhance professionalism with Scrum.
On a personal note, it is difficult to put into words what involvement in Serious Scrum has represented for me in the last year, but I was very happy to make the journey from Dublin to Amsterdam to participate and meet the guys. For the record, I was not the only one with a journey to make to be there: Max traveled to Hoofddorp from Berlin!
It was really great to meet everyone involved in this humble, ambitious project and take huge swathes of inspiration back home.
The event was a genuine highlight for me, and a lovely story to tell. I’d like to thank everyone at Serious Scrum and Ingenico for making it happen. Kudos to you all.
I’m excited to see where the Serious Scrum journey goes next!
