- What's your experience coaching teams toward being Agile?
I have been involved in software development for 20 years. I discovered Scrum in 2004. At that time, I was the manager of 60 people mainly using waterfall approaches. We needed, at that time, a new way to generate better software (more client-oriented, better quality, more involvment from the dev team) and we turned to a consultant firm who suggests Scrum. We started a risky project using Scrum and it produced excellent results. The organization then decided to spread Scrum to the entire department, but I decided to join the consultation firm and concentrate my effort on being a Scrum Master and, eventually, a coach. In my job, I now help teams that want to adopt Scrum by providing training, coaching and change management technique to help organization make the turn to Agile. I have been involved with 20+ teams in different organizations with success and failures along the road, but my experience with the people is always incredible. People are highly interested in the Agile values and believe strongly in these, my job then is to help them figure out how to introduce these values into their own organization.
- What do you plan to learn / explore at this conference?
I believe that implementations of Scrum who had the more success were because two approaches was used: top-down and bottom-up. Many organizations started using Scrum because dev teams started using it. In many cases, management were rarely involved at the beginning, but when you want to spread Scrum at the organization level, management play a big role and this is where resistance usually begins. In my last two year as a coach, I tried to include as much as possible change management approaches to help mid and top management embrace the potential benefits of Scrum and help them play their role effectively in the transition phase to Scrum. During the conference, I would like to learn about experience of other coachs on how they help management teams integrate Scrum into their organization.
- How do you plan to contribute?
First, I will inspect and adapt
Next, I will be there to listen and try to contribute as much as I can by listening at the experience of other coachs and will share my experience during the sessions. Last, I really enjoy the open-space approach and I am looking forward to meet people who experienced the same kind of challenge that I have at implementing Scrum in large organizations.