2007 has been pretty eventful for me. After getting certified in Feb 2007, I started talking to the key stakeholders within PayPal. At that time we had a fairly large integration program focusing a lot on end user experience. We use traditional product development lifecycle for delivering solutions, but for this program the executive management supported to try out SCRUM. I think that support helped us a lot throughout the program.

We had a fairly charged up team members with diverse skills: extremely efficient Product Owners, experienced developer leads taking the roles of Scrum Masters. We also had a Scrum Adoption team that guided the entire program. We had about 50% of the delivery done by offshore teams, adding more complexity. We had to resort to group of "teams" with each team focusing on an area/workstream. each scrum team had an "indentity" (sort of team name) and consisted of dev, qa, UED, user research etc. - self contained.

We also had some parallel projects (like operations) going in the regular PDLC model (non-scrum), but an effecient Program Manager (also acted as Chief Scrum Master) oversaw that the timelines for Scrum teams and non-scrum teams were matched.

Our executive management support helped us a long way (esp the Dev director was passionate about as he had several years of prior experience in SCRUM), in resolving issues like resource shortage to travel budgets.

When we did a preliminary integration/QA check with rest of code base, we found extremely low integration bugs (as we had integration cycle at the end of every sprint), and infact set a standard.

The teams used velocity and burn down charts to manage sprint execution.

My role:

After the initial process support, I moved to a different role outside the Program. I did participate actively till the final sprint is completed, more towards Scrum Adoption within paypal.

Key Learnings:

1. Need executive support to adopt a change initiative like SCRUM
2. Focus for the team helps
3. It is "possible" to have offshore teams effectively participate in a SCRUM delivery model, as long as they have access to the "knowledge"
4. having a seperate "integration team" from core scrum teams could ease the pain a lot, and help in the Work Life Balance !!

more later on my learnings

What did I learn this year?

* The difficulties of having cross-functional teams in game development, where a team is composed of programmers, artists and designers. The workload for a feature is always heavier on the programmers, which means the artists need to produce assets for features that are yet to be coded, which is clearly suboptimal and in turn leads to a good deal of rework.
* The importance of high-level sponsorship. If upper management doesn't want to play ball, then it's a moot point.
* The value of openness, visibility and empowerment that Scrum brings to the team.
* The immense power of XP combined with Scrum. It's almost a crime to have one without the other ;)

What I want to learn more about in 2008

* The tidbits, the tiny tricks that can make me a better pm and scrum master.
* How other game development teams are doing things and sorting the most common problems out, exchanging ideas and building upon it.

What did I learn this year?

Communication is a two-way street. It's a exchange of information. When it comes to technology there are many ways we can enhance communication, but it can also make us lazy. My team learned that web-based Agile tracking tools can actually reduce real communication/collaboration. People interact more with the web site than with one another. You start to hear "well I posted a comment about that to the web site, didn't you read it?" When that happens it's time to unplug! We dropped the web site, adopted a kanban and went "organic" as Stacia calls it, using post-it note cards on the wall to track work - not a web site. It's made the world of difference.

What I want to learn more about in 2008
I want to learn more about how to become a Scrum trainer. I have a lot of experience and I love teaching people about Scrum, XP practices, Lean thinking, and just how to get out of the traditional mold of thinking and really focus on the stuff that gets software done! I'm helping create some workshops here in Austin, so I hope that opens some doors for me.

What would I do differently this year?
Hard one to answer. I'm going to try and bring in more Lean thinking into my Scrum practice. I have married in a lot of XP practices, but I think they escape managers a lot of times -- but I think Lean is something a manager would appreciate and understand.

Something to share?
I would say using simple tools, the simplest you can get by with, is a good approach to make sure the focus stays where it should be. The kanban board experiment I did with my team this year really paid off. I thought they'd hate having their work in clear view on a wall - and not tucked away on a web site. The team really likes it, the management likes it. All around it was a win-win. It's also very low cost to implement and maintain compared to some of the ASP license fees you pay for web-based apps.

Hi Stacia,

And Happy New Year! (this way). I would be very interested in hearing one or two specific things that you learned from Boris, Michele, Jim or Tobias (or the others, but I happen to know them a bit, so they are more interesting to me). What would you mention first?

For myself (and as an example of what I am looking for), I will mention the concept of Ba, which I learned about from Jeff Sutherland particularly. (I was about to give you a reference, but realized I needed to create one...back in a minute.) OK, now see http://agileconsortium.blogspot.com/2008/01/concept-of-ba.html

Studying "Ba" has helped me appreciate that (a) software development is really about creativity, and (b) that place or context (Ba) is really the intersection of many ideas that we in Agile were already working on, but had not understood quite so well why it was important.

Best regards.

Hello Stacia,

Nice to hear from you! I've joined the Scrum master course mid 2007 with you and Boris in Belgium - and I couldn't have made a better choice. I have already did two successful Scrum projects as a Scrum master and coach, and I have a lot of Scrum-related projects waiting for me in 2008! Agile Scrum is really hot, and as I can say now from my own experience: with good reasons.

For me, a number of competences are coming together in Scrum projects. First of all: my training as a coach fits in very well, especially with scrum meetings and retrospectives. Furthermore, I believe Scrum gives an excellent opportunity to explicitly introducte software architecture + product quality requirements in an incremental/adaptive manner.

Like you, I cannot wait to see what 2008 will bring: I'm asked to combine Scrum with Critical Chain Management, to introduce the Scrum approach for non-software disciplines in a multidisciplinary project, to develop a product line using Scrum, and to help outsourcing/offshoring a big project the Agile way.

Kind regards,
Erik

STACIA BRODERICK, ScrumMaster...

what I've learned: working with others is better than working alone. the experiences that I've had this year by working with trainers Boris Gloger, Michele Sliger, Jim York, Andreas Schliep, Lee Devin and Tobias Mayer (among others!) have been awesome. i've also learned more about Scrum in other cultures besides the US, which is really interesting to me. learning has been the best part of this year. i've immensely enjoyed the emails from other scrummasters with their questions, challenges and insights as they apply Scrum principles and practices.

what i hope to do better: respond to emails from ScrumMasters more thoroughly and quickly. :) I also
want to learn Ruby so that i can be on a Scrum team for real sometime in 2009. i want to be faced with the challenge of being asked to trade quality for speed and say NO.

general reflections: what a year! i have truly, deeply enjoyed meeting ScrumMasters all over the world. also, watching teams grow and perform is the ultimate satisfaction. this 'job' is not a job at all, but a gift. can't wait to see what 2008 holds.