My reflections on Scrum Day Denmark 2014

Yesterday the first ever edition of Scrum Day Denmark was held at Microsoft’s headquarters in Hellerup near Copenhagen. The event was hosted and organized by Mads Troels Hansen (@madsth) and Ole Rich Henningsen (@olehenningsen) and Microsoft sponsored food and drinks, making it a free event for the participants.
The event was structured much like Scrum Day Europe with a keynote from one of the people behind Scrum.org to kick it off, three case study based talks by organizations actually doing Scrum (or at least Agile), a couple of experience talks by the organizers and an Open Space session to close the event.

The keynote was held by Gunther Verheyen (@Ullizee) from Scrum.org on Evidence-Based Management. Much of the talk was about the history of software development and how we used to (and still do) diagnose problems based more on gut feelings and circumstantial evidence than on hard facts. During the second half of the talk Gunther briefly introduced the model behind Evidence-Based Management. Unfortunately he didn’t have the time to go into all the details I would have liked, but I guess the level of details was appropriate for a key note talk.

gartner_hype_curveThe three case studies (or war-stories if you will) were presented by Peer Helgo Eland (@PeerEland) from Bluegarden, Lasse Hende Noergaard (@lasse_hende) from ScanJour and Bo Kristensen from DFDS. All three companies have gone through a transformation from traditional waterfall development to Agile and their journeys were more similar than different. Bo Kristensen framed it nicely when he pictured their journey on the Gartner hype curve. They had all gone through the initial stage of hype and inflated expectations, grinded it out as disillusion set in and started to climb the slope to the plateau of higher productivity and increased employee satisfactions. You could almost see the war wounds on their faces, but they also all agreed it had been well worth the effort.

On a personal note it was especially cool to hear Peer Helgo Eland from Bluegarden tell their story. Having spent almost two years, with colleagues from goAgile, coaching Bluegarden on becoming Agile, it made me proud to be able to sit back and hear their story as they wanted to tell it. It also made me even more comfortable, that they soon will be able to continue the journey without a guide and that’s really what we want as Agile transformation coaches.

Since I started with Agile 15 years ago, Scrum and Agile has become much more widely accepted. This was also evident at Scrum Day Denmark with participants representing almost every role, company size, industry and experience level you can think of. An event like Scrum Day Denmark will help Agile get even more traction and judging on participation during the talks and the chatter going on during lunch and breaks, I’m sure a lot of the participants will be back again next year and hopefully bring a friend or two.

Thanks Mads and Ole for making the event possible – and see you all next year at Scrum day Denmark 2015.
/Martin

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