I went to the 59 Minute Scrum session last October which sounded interesting – from the blurb:
“This session will give attendees a unique opportunity to experience agile practices first hand in a non-technical environment.”
I had good expectations but was left a little under-whelmed at the actual event. Now I have to admit that I arrived late and missed the intro so maybe it’s all my fault and the intro answered everything! (Discussion over a beer afterwards showed I wasn’t totally alone though).
The format was to split up into teams and discuss various scenarios. These were implementation projects including marketing, programmes and anything else we fancied on topics such as: a theme park around “spam”, a health club for pets and a space tourism project.
The event was fairly tightly timetabled so we had a slot to discuss our backlog, then split up further in our teams to actually come up with ideas on particular areas. Then round 2 for more implementation. Finally, all the teams (8 if I remember correctly – typically 2 per idea) presented their solutions to the whole group and touched briefly on how well they had addressed the backlog/made progress etc.
There was then an all-too-brief Q&A session at the end.
For me the format didn’t really work. I was left with too many questions and faffing about in the exercise had very limited benefit. I would much rather have had a well though through presentation on Scrum with lots of time for questions. At most half an hour of some exercises and then a presentation and lessons learnt would have worked much better for me.
Maybe I am just becoming a stick-in-the-mud?! I am likely to stear clear of such sessions in the future though unless there is time for a solid hour or more afterwards to get into details and ask questions.
