Michel Löhr and Simon Roberts from ScrumCenter presented their view of the agile enterprise at Scrum Day 2011 in Darmstadt. They discussed some of the problems that occur in traditional, matrix-structured, waterfall-oriented organisations and proposed changes based on their experience coaching multiple agile enterprise transitions. The top three changes are:

• Creating stable, product oriented teams.
• Establishing a leaner approach to budgeting and financial control, with drastically reduced transaction costs.
• Taking a more holistic approach by integrating agile product development with agile customer development (as proposed by the customer development and lean startup movements) - an integrated and empirical approach to both provides a good foundation for creating truly successful products.

Thank you very much to the people who attended, for the interesting questions and great feedback.

Cartoon Story Board (also called Comic Story Board) is one of my favourite creativity techniques and it can be used to good effect in retrospectives. I have used it in the "setting the stage" phase of retrospectives to help a team to frame the key question to be tackled during the retrospective, and for helping to generate ideas when deciding what to do differently in the future.

As Scrum practitioners, we are used to short and sharp retrospectives at the end of each Sprint. Sprint retrospectives, taking 1-2 hours, can yield valuable results, enabling the Scrum team to improve its process. Typically these retrospectives yield lots of ideas, which are then prioritised and only the top 2-3 are actually actioned.

I If we only hold short retrospectives, we may be missing out on discovering further ways to optimise our  work. A longer retrospective, at the end of a release or other milestone,  enables problems and solutions to be explored in more detail.

In this article, I describe a 2-day retrospective that a client asked me to facilitate.

Back in March 2011, Christoph Weiß (agile coach at Allianz Germany) and I spoke at the Agilia conference in Brno, Czech Republic. Our well received presentation included the following topics:

• How agile teams are kicked off and supported through training and coaching
• The current state of agile at Allianz
• Agile in the Enterprise - why professional change management is important
• Key success factors, challenges and pitfalls

I coached and trained Scrum and agile during the first three of those four years and it was good to catch up with the latest news.

During the two days following the conference we taught a Certified ScrumMaster class in Brno. The class was a lot of fun and received great reviews from the participants.

Slides from the presentation are now available for download here.

Back in April I attended the wonderful Retrospective Facilitators Gathering in the equally wonderful Taos, New Mexico. During the final evening I recorded a podcast with many of the gathering's participants. The podcast took the form of an informal round table discussion and the topics included looking back at the gathering, externalizing thinking and group/collective learning.

Participants, in order of speaking:

John Martin, Esther Derby, Declan Whelan, George Dinwiddie, Oana Junco, Charlotte Malther, Simon Roberts, Diana Larsen, Josef Scherer, Grazyna Scherer, John McFadyen and Cyril Megard.

The podcast can be found here.

During our session at XP Days Germany 2010 in Hamburg, Jens Korte and I discussed 4 scenes in the life of a Scrum team. In each case we examined a common problem, what led to it and how better collaboration between PO and team could have helped to avoid it.

Thanks to the many people who came to the session and for the feedback.

Simon Roberts - Making Scrum Stick: Sustainable Scrum Transitions from Krakow Tech Conferences on Vimeo.

You've started to rollout Scrum within your organization and the initial teams are working well. What are the next steps? How can you keep the change sustainable?

The slides for my talk at AgileCE on sustainable Scrum transitions - "Making Scrum Stick" are available here. Many thanks to the organisers for a fantastic conference and to many people for the great discussions in person and via twitter.

We have introduced a new concept for 2010 - parallel Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Product Owner courses with an optional, combined 3rd day. The concept is simple:

• Christoph Mathis and Simon Roberts teach parallel CSM and CSPO courses at the same location over 2 days.
• On the 3rd day we hold an Open Space with participants from both courses.

The additional day is optional - certification is not dependent on taking part. It is also without extra charge for course participants! (non participants can take part for a nominal charge). It is an opportunity for participants to bring their own topics up for discussion. This can take various forms. For example, a burning issue from your own experience, or a breakthrough that you wish to share. We can also use some of the time for one-on-one consulting on a current problem. The overall objective is to dive deeper into Scrum and related techniques. The participants decide on the topics. We recently ran this new model for the first time in Frankfurt. Some of the topics that we covered during an intense Open Space were:

• Patterns for breaking down large user stories into smaller user stories
• Behaviour driven aceptance testing with FitNesse
• Scrum tools
• What to do if there are several customers for one Scrum team

The Frankfurt courses and Open Space were well attended (over half of the course participants stayed for the Open Space) and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. The participants say that they found the additional day very valuable. Further CSM, CSPO and Open Space events are planned during the coming months, including:

• 21.-23.04.2010 in Zurich
• 05.-07.05.2010 in Cologne
• 14.-16.06.2010 in Berlin
• 28.-30.06.2010 in Munich
• 07.-09.07.2010 in Frankfurt

The events in Zurich, Cologne and Frankfurt are organised in cooperation with andrena objects ag. To register for any of the above or for any other ScrumCenter courses please visit here.

The presentation from my talk with Jens Korte on team chartering at the March 2010 Scrum Gathering in Orlando is now available online at http://prezi.com/gc0m9zvmjb0q/.

We enjoyed preparing and giving this talk very much. Thanks very much to the people who attended and for the interesting questions and discussion, all of which contributed to the talk's success.

It's the first time that I have made a presentation using Prezi (http://prezi.com). Prezi allows the presenter to zoom around a large canvas and get away from the intrinsically serial nature of traditional presentation tools. It suits my style and was well received by all that I showed the results to (I've heard of some feeling symptoms akin to motion sickness as a result of the zooming and rotation). I'll be continuing this experiment with my next presentation at Agile Central Europe in Krakow Poland on 8-9th April.

Many thanks also to those who mentioned our talk in their post-gathering round-ups. Here:

http://www.agilitrix.com/2010/03/team-chartering-and-agreements/

and here:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/03/scrum-gathering-buzz