Scrum Gathering Stockholm 2008 - Day 1

So the first day of Scrum Gathering has come to an end. I just wanted to check in with a few first impressions. The opening session with Jeff Sutherland did not only cover the announced topic; Secret Sauce for Making Scrums Hyperactive. He also talked quite a lot on a Distributed Scrum, a topic that is very popular at the moment. Guess it has to do with companies trying to actually profit from outsourcing by using Scrum. Ken Schwaber talked on what the Scrum Alliance is doing to support Scrum practitioners around the world.

When it came the breakout sessions I chose topics that was of interest to me and held by speakers that I didn't know much about or had never heard before. The reason for this is that in my experience the well known speakers often say more or less the same thing in a new package so by choosing a less known speaker I gamble a little in the hope of learning something new. And even in the less interesting sessions I learned at least something.

First breakout sessions was Agile Transformation: what to do with managers. It was interesting to hear how others work to involve the middle managers in the change toward an agile organization and how to handle the fears these managers typically have. Following that session I attended The Day After Retrospective. Retrospectives being one of my favorite topics it was very interesting to hear a few new views on retrospectives and how to handle situations where the Scrum Master turns out to be the actual problem. The last session for the day was a reserve alternative since the session I intended to attend got canceled. So the last session was Does Scrum Stifle Creative Innovation. Wish I had chosen something else. It was not at all about what the title said (which actually is an interesting topic). Instead it was a lot of talk about how to survive and adapt when the product owner is doing a really bad job and not understanding what he is supposed to do; order the product backlog from a user experience perspective. So far that is OK, but I got a feeling the speaker did not recognize this as a major problem at all. To him it was normal since nobody can know everything.

So that was a short summary of the first day.