Ball Points game at CITI

Sounds a bit like S*x and the City, but no!

I was invited by Martin Wright of Cape Venture Partners to talk to members of the CITI My Mentor programme about Scrum. As we frequently experience, most of these IT entreprenuers knew nothing about Scrum…other than the game of rugby kind. After a short intro we ran Boris Gloger’s Ball Points game to illustrate the value of empirical over defined process models.

The key learnings were (and this is always the case):

• Wow, we really improved the process a lot over the 5 iterations by applying our learning!
• Our estimates were quite close to actuals from the 3rd sprint on.

It’s always exciting to see the cogs click as people – in this case entrepreneurs – start to visualise the potential for applying Scrum principles in their businesses.

Now they need to decide whether to do something about it or just go about business as usual.

Boris Gloger has just spent another week with me doing Scrum Training in Midrand, Gauteng and in Cape Town. For the first time in South Africa we ran Product Owner training as a follow-on to the CSM class. This was well-received with 22 people receiving both CSM and CSPO certificates.

Overall in 2008 we have run 9 classes together in South Africa and Brazil with 177 participants including 132 CSM’s and 22 CSPO’s. 2009 looks to be a busy year too.

The Cape Town chapter of the Scrum User Group of South Africa held its second event on at 18:30 on Thursday 6 November.

We took advantage of Boris Gloger’s presence here to host a panel discussion with Boris, Steve van der Merwe and myself. Sue Bramhall facilitated and her company, 24.com kindly sponsored the venue and refreshments.

The audience of around 40 varied from people curious to know what Scrum is to those practising for a couple of years and looking for some therapy <g>. We had some lively discussions. Boris asked one person from a large enterprise what was preventing her from starting to apply Scrum in her team. Another outcome I recall is we all said we didn’t trust architects who don’t write code!

Steve got people to write down what they want from future events, which should help the organising team to tune future events.

Sue threw the laggards out around 21:00. Sorry, Dan, that I asked you so many awkward questions about your team’s journey with Scrum.