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

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

Mentioned:

• Scrum.org
• The New New Product Development Game article from 1986
• The Scrum Guide
• Ken Schwaber
• Jeff Sutherland
• McKinsey
• SpaceX
• Paddington (movie)