Right now, Ingrid Domingues and Sara Lerén at inUse are at Scrum Gathering in Phoenix, USA. We are here to get inspired but are also hosting a workshop on Impact-Driven Scrum Delivery.
The first day of Scrum Gathering 2015 in Phoenix has been great! For Swedes like ourselves, the warm weather as well as the desert landscape makes the location feel really exotic, and as usual at Scrum gatherings everyone is very friendly and talkative.
Mike Cohn started the day off with an inspiring keynote speech on the importance of intellectual humility and keeping an open mind. There is an important boundary between knowledge and beliefs, and there must be a willingness to change your mind and admit you were wrong if you want to learn. He also called out the bad habit in the agile community to label some endeavors as “scrum-but”, saying that new things are often laughed at and that the first agile developers might well have been called “waterfall-buts”. We shouldn’t get too attached to brands like scrum and agile if it will hinder us from being pragmatic enough to adopt methods from different frameworks, as long as they help us getting the jobs done.
I and Ingrid held our workshop today named Impact-Driven Scrum Delivery, 90 minutes on impact mapping, impact management and the importance of design, complete with exercises on formulating metrics, naming user groups and evaluating designs. About 50 enthusiastic attendants participated and we got some great feedback saying that the workshop was very much appreciated. Slides from the workshop are available at Slideshare.