READING TIME CA. 3 MINUTES

Working according to agile principles and Scrum have been a tradition at punkt.de for a few years now. By visiting the heart of the movement, the Global Scrum Gathering in Prague, we expected to gain new impulses from the presentations and the experiences of the other participants. We were certainly not disappointed!

Niels Pflaeging gave the exciting but also rather lurid opening keynote on the topic of "Organize for Complexity". He argued that management has been nothing but a zombie since the 1970s - killed by the complexity of corporate structures in the changing industrial age. In today's information age, structures are needed in which the thinkers are also the doers.
He also presented Douglas McGregor's X-Y theory, which describes the directed, security-seeking and strictly controlled Theory-X person and the intrinsically motivated, responsible Theory-Y person. He comes to the conclusion that Theory X people do not exist. People's behavior is determined solely by their environment - in this case by the corporate culture and structure.
Corporate structures that produce Theory Y employees should not necessarily be flat - flat is the wrong image - they should rather be "peach-shaped". With an outer, customer-facing periphery and a core that works towards the periphery. It depends on the role and the respective situation who sees themselves as part of the core or as part of the periphery.

Non-violent with giraffe

In his session "From Non-Violent Communication to Potential-Focused Communication", Ralph Miarka used the image of the giraffe, the animal with the biggest heart, to introduce the four steps of non-violent communication. In his experience, talking about problems creates new problems, while talking about solutions also creates solutions. The four steps of potential-focused communication emerged from this idea.

Scrum for many - More with LeSS

LeSS - Large Scale Scrum is a framework for scaling Scrum and agile development in several parallel teams for large projects. In the very entertaining presentation "More with Less", Bas Vodde presented the principles of LeSS. While Bas uses the term scaling to mean dividing a central backlog into 100 parallel teams, many of the principles presented are also easily transferable to the distribution of a project on our scale, with three teams. It is important not to divide the development teams according to specific tasks such as backend or frontend, but to have several cross-functional teams working on individual features. (The customer does not want a frontend feature or a backend feature - but simply a feature).
Dependencies between the teams alone are not the problem here - the problem is rather the temporal asynchronous dependency. This refers to the following situation: Team A wants to start a task, but needs the preliminary work from Team B. To avoid idle time, Team A starts a new task. Meanwhile, team B is finished but receives no feedback from team A, which is now working on something else. With many teams working in parallel, there is a lot of time lag and the supply chain comes to a standstill.

Open Space with 600 participants

After two days full of sessions, the third day was all about Open Space, a now well-established conference concept - but an Open Space with 600 participants and 15 parallel sessions in three time slots was a completely new experience for me. As a special challenge, the providers of the topics were asked to sing or dance their session proposal and this was diligently and often humorously complied with. My difficult decision among all the interesting sounding sessions fell on "Artistry Mastery" by @Stuartliveart, who also graphically captured the essence of all the talks at the event on large posters. In "Improv games (with hats)", Paul Godard showed how exercises from theater pedagogy are also suitable for working in agile teams, for example in retrospectives.

Between the individual sessions and of course at the "Monday Mingle" social event on Monday, there was also plenty of opportunity to exchange ideas with other interesting participants from all over the world and discuss topics and issues. All in all, it was a very well-rounded and enriching event and I hope it won't be my last Global Scrum Gathering.