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InfoQ Homepage Podcasts Dave West on the State of Scrum and the Latest Scrum Guide

Dave West on the State of Scrum and the Latest Scrum Guide

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In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave West, Chief Product Owner of Scrum.org about the state of Scrum, the latest revision to the Scrum Guide, the rise of Digital and the way Scrum.org maintains its courseware.

Key Takeaways

  • Scrum continues to be the dominant force in agile/digital/lean startup approaches
  • As complexity grows in our world the value of Scrum continues to grow
  • If you’re not doing Scrum per the book it doesn’t mean you’re “wrong”, just don’t call it Scrum 
  • It’s not optional to improve how you work – it’s mandatory!
  • Scrum is fundamentally about dealing with complexity and improving productivity
  • Digital is about building organisations that are very different and able to take advantage of new technologies with new business models
  • Organisations need to move very strongly towards a product mindset and a product structured organisational architecture

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Show Notes

  • 0:40 Scrum continues to be the dominant force in agile/digital/lean startup approaches
  • 1:15 The Scrum story has gone beyond delivering software to delivering broader business benefits
  • 1:50 The latest Scrum guide came out in November 2017
  • 1:57 The most significant addition to the Scrum Guide is related to the use of Scrum rather than any of the practices
  • 2:13 As complexity grows in our world the value of Scrum continues to grow
  • 2:40 The origins of Scrum in the HBR article from 1986 – The New New Product Development Game
  • 3:10 The analogy of Scrum from the rugby game – when progress slows down the team comes together and pushes forward
  • 3:37 Scrum became associated with software delivery, but it was originally conceived in a much broader context
  • 3:58 The latest revision of the Scrum Guide
  • 4:07 The Scrum Guide focuses on the rules of the game of Scrum
  • 4:13 If you’re not doing Scrum per the book it doesn’t mean you’re “wrong”, just don’t call it Scrum 
  • 4:20 Scrum alone isn’t enough – you have to layer additional practices on top of it
  • 4:40 The process the authors use to update the Scrum Guide
  • 5:03 The 2017 update was focused on providing some context on the use of Scrum, adding some definitions on the role of the ScrumMaster  
  • 5:26 Misconceptions about the ScrumMaster role – a hipster project manager
  • 5:49 The three questions of the Daily Scrum meeting are optional not mandated – they are an example of what can be used
  • 6:03 The timebox is not something that has to be filled – the timebox is the maximum time you should be waiting to release a product increment, it could be done sooner and more frequently
  • 6:27 The Sprint Review is not a phase gate for releasing software
  • 6:38 Continuous improvement is not just about improving the product, it is about deliberately improving the process you use to build the product
  • 6:53 It’s not optional to improve how you work – it’s mandatory!
  • 7:29 The waste if time that results when retrospectives are not applied with a determination to improve the way of working
  • 7:39 Reasons that retrospectives are dropped
    • The things they are finding are not acted on
    • The team feels they are doing well enough and don’t need to improve
  • 8:09 Ken’s approach to the perception that the problem is out of the hands of the team – just do it, make the changes and tell people afterwards rather than seeking permission
  • 8:47 Making process improvement a mandatory part of Scrum should encourage complacent teams to look for ways they can improve
  • 9:39 Why technical influencers should care about Scrum – the world they are working in is in a continuous state of change (with examples)
  • 10:25 The pace of change results in many opportunities and massive complexity
  • 10:32 Scrum has become the de-facto way that teams organise to deal with complexity
  • 10:49 You have to add technical practices on top of Scrum to deliver value
  • 11:32 Productivity has not increased much over the last 5 years and this is a concern
  • 12:03 We could be doing more and solving many tough problems if people actively looked to improve the way they do work
  • 12:25 The contrast between SpaceX (34 engineers building software) and an insurance company (700 people to build a claims system) – why are we so unproductive?
  • 12:49 You should care because you want to build great products and building them efficiently and effectively
  • 13:03 Scrum is about dealing with complexity and improving productivity
  • 13:29 The Digital movement – is it just a rebranding of the ideas from e-commerce?
  • 13:57 The consulting firms are pushing a “digital” agenda, which means there is an opportunity to take advantage of it to deliver more value to your customers
  • 14:13 By using the terminology which is being used at the executive level you are able to influence the agenda
  • 14:27 The digital wave takes advantage of new technologies which provide an opportunity to do new and interesting things
  • 14:33 Digital is the convergence of data, mobility, AI/machine learning and cloud to enable completely new business models
  • 15:12 Digital is about building organisations that are very different and able to take advantage of new technologies with new business models
  • 15:35 Examples of how these new business models could play out
  • 16:43 The way that Scrum.org maintains its own courseware
  • 16:59 Consistent courseware delivered by different people globally
  • 17:31 Initially the courseware was maintained by Ken Schwaber as the creator of Scrum.  That’s no longer the case
  • 17:45 It now has an open source approach using stewards and Github as the repository
  • 17:56 Using the community to maintain the courseware, the assessments and the learning objectives which drive the content
  • 18:20 This enables continuous innovation while keeping consistency
  • 18:31 Because the contributors are able to feel ownership there is constant improvement
  • 19:09 The way community discussions and collaboration around the constant revision of the content add value to the products
  • 20:22 Describing how they use Scrum to build the course content
  • 21:09 Exploring #noprojects – Scrum has been product centric from the start
  • 22:16 You deliver customer value through products
  • 22:30 A product should describe a series of customer outcomes, not a set of features
  • 22:47 Organisations need to move very strongly towards a product mindset and a product structured organisational architecture
  • 23:30 Projects are a collection of work, and work on its own has no value
  • 23:35 The best Scrum teams are lazy Scrum teams – they do the least amount of work to deliver the needed value
  • 24:09 The minimum effort needed to deliver the maximum value to the customer
  • 24:10 Projects are focused on the work, and as a result care more about the work than the outcome and the product suffers
  • 24:45 On-time, on-budget is of no value to the customer
  • 25:00 In complex problems you can’t figure out in advance how long it will take to solve the problem – it’s forecasting
  • 25:21 The relevance of Scrum is changing as the needs of the world change, but at it’s core it remains relevant to the problems we face in today’s complex organisations

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