London Scrum Users Group announced
Roman Pilcher recently announced the formation of a London Scrum Users group. Here’s the original message:
As you may have heard, we are starting a Scrum user group in London. The first meeting will take place on 14 Oct 2008, 7 pm in the Old Bank of England pub, London. The details are here: www.scrumalliance.org/events/20-london-scrum-user-group-inaugural-meeting. Do pop by if you are in town!
If you’re in London during October, this maybe something you’d like to attend.
South African Scrum Users Group has announced it's first meetings
Peter Hundermark (a Scrum Coach based out of South Africa) has announce the first meeting of the South African Scrum Users Group. He announced it on the Agile Announcement mailing list here and has arranged a time and venue for their very first meetings. If you’re in the area, I would encourage you to attend. Here are the details:
Cape Town: Wednesday 27 August from 18h00 (The Pavilion Conference Centre, Waterfront).
Pretoria/Johannesburg/Gauteng: Thursday 28 August from 18h00 (Momentum Auditorium 1, 268 West Avenue, Centurion).”
Swarming presentation at Agile 2008.
Last night I got to see an advanced screening of Tom Perry’s Agile 2008 presentation: Swarming – The Birds and the Bees and Agile. Tom talks about swarming behaviour in nature and connects this with innovative self organizing teams. He also talks about some of the disadvantages of swarming such as the Ant Death Spiral.
It was thought provoking, controversial, funny and interesting. If you’re lucky enough to be attending Agile 2008, I’d thoroughly recommend Tom’s talk.
If you not lucky enough to be attending Agile 2008, you can pick up a pdf copy of his slides here.
Distributed Teams are not Teams
Tobias Mayer is always willing to stir-the-pot and his latest blog post is true to form. Tobias puts forward the argument that “distributed teams” are not teams. The crux of his argument is this:
“Distributed teams are not teams; they are at best a collection of people who communicate regularly. But communication is not collaboration; it is a poor relation, weak and insipid in comparison.”
He then calls for the Agile community to refuse to work with “distributed teams,” in order to speed up their ultimate failure.
“Once the organizations that support it are dead, we can begin building new kinds of companies, democratic companies modeled on true Agile principles: ideal ones, not half-hearted ones.”
This is intoxicating stuff for idealists, such as myself. Tobias presents a good are argument and I enjoy his writing style very much. My only concern is best summed up by Keynes:
“The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”
The Road from Project Manager to Agile Coach
In case you missed it, Tobias Mayer recently posted a message on ScrumDevelopment about a presentation from the recent Scrum Gathering called “The Road from Project Manager to Agile Coach”, by Lyssa Adkins. It’s an excellent presentation and Lyssa has taken the time to put it on YouTube. I’d encourage you to watch it.
Here’s Tobias’ original message and here are links to the YouTube videos: Part 1 and Part 2