Scrum Day 2015

On June 16 and 17, 2015, the Scrum-Day took place in Stuttgart. There were interactive workshops and interesting talks. Keynote speakers were Jeff Sutherland (PhD), Joe Justice (initiator of WikiSpeed) and Jurgen Appelo (Management 3.0), as well as Dr. Volkmar Denner (Chairman of the Board of Management of Robert Bosch GmbH and shareholder of Robert Bosch Industrietreuhand KG). We were there and would like to share our impressions here.

The first day was shaped by workshops on topics such as leadership, retrospectives and agile culture, as well as interesting Open Space sessions on cultural change, Scrum in the company, lessons learned from Scrum and Scrum in management. In the workshops, participants were encouraged in a hands-on and interactive way to think along and take part. For example, the workshop “Handing over control – keeping leadership …” dealt with trust and leadership as well as the individual leadership tasks of each Scrum role.

In the evening, Dr. Volkmar Denner addressed the challenges of implementing agile approaches at Bosch in his keynote and discussed some interesting internal examples. They showed that agile approaches will increasingly play a greater role at Bosch as well. Afterwards, there was an entertaining panel discussion with all the keynote speakers about change and the necessity of establishing agile values and principles in organizations.

Panel discussion at Scrumday

The second day started with a keynote by Jeff Sutherland (PhD), the co-founder of Scrum. There were also interesting talks on topics such as error culture, Requirements Engineering and Scrum, as well as on the psychological background of why Scrum works. Prof. Dr. Ayelt Komus, from the Chair of Organization and Business Informatics at Koblenz University of Applied Sciences, presented his current study “agiles PMO”. What do agile methods mean for PMOs? How do they need to change their services? How do they need to change themselves? He presented interesting findings and analyses showing that agile projects run more efficiently than traditional ones.

Around midday, Joe Justice showed us how efficiently Scrum can also be used in hardware development. The talk by Immobilienscout24 was also very informative. Kristina Müller and Petra Stühler explained what team composition and personnel selection look like at Immobilienscout24, why the teams are interdisciplinary, and how the Scrum Master is increasingly taking on a coaching role.

In the afternoon, Vincent Tietz addressed the risks and challenges in distributed teams in his talk “Agile & Distributed: Four Pillars for Success.” He reported on our experiences and presented the ETEO concept as a comprehensive collection of best practices that can significantly support the work of distributed teams.

Risks and opportunities of distributed and agile teams

The day concluded with a keynote by Jurgen Appelo, the founder of Management 3.0, who introduced us to the world of agile management. Overall, the two days in Stuttgart were very interesting and offered us the opportunity to engage in conversation with many representatives of the agile community.