Guido Maliandi’s Blog

Last week we had a really interesting visit. Tobias Mayer came to our headquarters, where he acted as the facilitator for a series of agile workshops we hosted, organized by Agilar. On Friday he gave a talk in which he spoke about his personal experience as well as his vision on Scrum.

Then he kept speaking in an informal conversation, where I had the privilege of talking face-to-face with him.

Here are some concepts I found interesting about it. They cover some fundamental aspects of scrum, as well as some mindsets for effectively reaching the necessary creativity to succeed in complex environments such as working with emerging technologies.

• At first one might do some different, seemingly unrelated activities; then at some point in our life we experience an ‘aha’ moment, and we combine your passions into a task in which we unleash a large amount of creative energy.
• People neglect change, because it initially implies suffering, getting away of the ‘comfort zone’. For example, Tobias told us an example of a company making changes to its culture in order to implement scrum, which is an extremely complex process. He then said that in such cases, scrum can be applied, since scrum is effective for complex problems.
  (This diagram was inspired on Ken Schwaber’s book ‘Agile Project Management With Scrum‘ p5.)
• Adding constraints or rules can boost creativity to an unimaginable level; sometimes, changes must be done just to keep the spirit of change, keep the team alive (Idea from Martin Salias).
• If one can’t apply the traditional approach to complex/chaotic development processes, then we must redefine our approach, expectations, and mindsets, and we will increase our chances of succeeding. ‘If you can’t succeed, then redefine success‘.
• “Don’t sell scrum, do scrum; because scrum done well sells itself“.
• Scrum principles don’t transmit an answer itself, but rather a way of thinking than will lead us to reach our own answers. It gives us a set of rules, a framework, which we then implement in a different way, depending on the changing context and needs of the company where scrum is being implemented.
• Scrum divides complex problems in chunks, optimizes from the small.

Since here at Southworks we do work a lot with complex emerging technologies, it’s understandable that using Scrum helps us greatly increase our productivity and creativity in serving our customers’ to their highest expectations.