Yesterday, I gave the keynote presentation at the Scrum Gathering - Pretty Good Scrum: Secret Sauce for Distributed Teams. Ken Schwaber, Scrum Alliance leadership, and a packed house are all here. It is raining off and on in Stockholm so the weather is not great but the spirit is high.
I'll be doing a ScrumMaster training with Henrik Kniberg on Thursday and Friday. You can still sign up for the course!
I'm beginning to incorporate learnings from OpenView Venture Partners portfolio companies. I meet with many of the companies once a month to review progress on their impediment backlog for improving their Scrum implementation. They will aggressively try new things and report back the next month on what happened, making them an excellent laboratory for validating and improving the Scrum experience.
OpenView Venture Partners runs all of their internal operations with Scrum teams so when our senior partners attend board meetings of the companies, they can thoughtfully examine the state of each Scrum implementation. They are mainly concerned about senior management understanding the velocity of their teams so their release plans make sense. And they want to know how many impediments the management removed since the last board meeting to help the teams increase velocity while simultaneously improving quality.