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InfoQ Homepage Podcasts Dave West on the State of Scrum and the Future of Agile

Dave West on the State of Scrum and the Future of Agile

This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave West, CEO and chief product owner at Scrum.org, about the state of Scrum in 2017 and the future of agile.

Key Takeaways

  • Agile adoption is now in the late-majority phase of the adoption curve; large organisations who are risk averse have seen the ideas proven elsewhere and they are adopting them
  • The underlying issues are not that complicated – we’ve got customers who have needs that they can’t explain and are rapidly changing, so we need ways to deliver products and experiment rapidly to enable us to learn and adapt to the emergent needs
  • The unicorn organisations are not successful because of their technology; it’s because they have served their customers better than the traditional businesses did
  • The primary customers of scrum.org are professional product developers, and helping them become more professional helps ensure the products are built better
  • Young enquiring minds “get” why an agile approach is the obvious way of working in today’s world
  • The future of agile is about communicating in different ways to make it relevant to different people to solve their evolving and emerging problems
  • 0:15 Introductions
  • 0:25 Intimidating stakeholders for a product owner
  • 0:42 What is the state of Agile in 2017?
  • 0:55 The core group of agile stalwarts who consistently come to the conference
  • 1:15 Lots of ideas being experimented with; Design Thinking, Lean UX, Lean Startup 
  • 1:35 The large proportion of people and organisations for whom these ideas are new – indicative of late-majority adoptions
  • 2:30 The challenges that current adopters face are similar to those faced by the early adopters, but they are more ingrained
  • 3:05 Optimistic that these organisations will get it right at some point
  • 3:48 Every organisation is different and their agile adoption needs to be unique to their context
  • 4:25 Agile organisations are responsive to their markets – sense and respond
  • 4:55 Agile organisations are continuously learning
  • 5:10 Management’s job is to protect, support and create an environment where people can deliver on their potential in support of their customers
  • 5:35 For most organisations there are parts of the business which are able to be agile, even where the whole enterprise is not
  • 6:05 Organisations are trying to figure out how to enable innovation and agility
  • 6:35 Inventing new terms for ideas and problems which have been around for a long time
  • 6:45 The underlying issues are not that complicated – we’ve got customers who have needs that they can’t explain and are rapidly changing, so we need ways to deliver products and experiment rapidly to enable us to learn and adapt to the emergent needs
  • 7:25 The unicorn organisations are not successful because of their technology; it’s because they have served their customers better than the traditional businesses did
  • 8:05 Business agility is fundamentally about building enterprises that are aligned to customers needs and can respond to them quickly
  • 9:05 Exploring the background to scrum.org and who their customers are
  • 9:30 The community of scrum.org trainers and their collaborative courseware development model
  • 10:25 The importance of the coaching/training providers as key customers, and the people they serve
  • 11:15 Organisations need to help build their people’s competencies through mentoring and coaching – it’s not just about the training
  • 11:45 The primary customers for scrum.org are professional product developers, and helping them become more professional helps ensure the products which are built are better
  • 13:05 Exploring the “what’s after scrum” question with Ken Schwaber
  • 13:40 Working with the charity YearUp
  • 14:55 Young enquiring minds “get” why an agile approach is the obvious way of working in today’s world
  • 15:35 The millennials and the following generation are intrinsically aligned with the agile way of working 
  • 16:15 Scrum will adapt to support the new ways of working as they emerge
  • 16:25 The essence of scrum is inspection and adaption through transparency
  • 16:50 There isn’t a need for “agile 2.0” – there is a need to talk about constantly adapting to emergent realities
  • 17:15 The future of agile is about communicating in different ways to make it relevant to different people to solve their evolving and emerging problems

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