First, my apologies to my readers for the not writing for a couple of months. Things have been quiet on my blog for a number of reasons. I reviewed two tracks for the Agile2016 conference and prepared three submissions (two of which were accepted). Also, I have been preparing for the Global Scrum Gathering that just finished here in Orlando this week. I’d like to share with you what happened around the gathering.
I had a few goals to accomplish around the gathering:
- Submit a presentation around my work with distributed agile
- Put out a call for community for those wanting to work in a distributed agile manner
- Help host the gathering by managing a distributed team of volunteers.
Since I had just presented the story of Sonatype’s distributed agile approach at the Agile 2015 conference last August, I submitted the same talk to the Scrum Gathering and to my surprise it was accepted. I think it’s a good story, but I wasn’t sure if it would be accepted at another similar conference.
But I wanted this talk at the gathering to be a little different. I wanted it to be a call for people to join me in exploring this space. In the last two years via conferences, video calls, podcasts and writing, I’ve been finding others who have been successful with distributed agile. It’s time to build a community and start some better conversations around why we do this, what we do different, and how you can make it work. I ended up with over 200 people in my talk on Tuesday afternoon and there were three sessions in the Wednesday open space on how to make remote work.
What I really want to share with you is the story of our volunteers. When I was asked by one of the co-chairs to organize volunteers a few months ago, I had to demonstrate that Agile Florida could more than support the Scrum community and that we could do it as a successful distributed team. Even I ended up being surprised by that wonderful team. I’ll share more on that next time.
Mark, I attended your presentation on distributed agile. It was excellent!
I’m very interested in this area and being somewhat of a newbie in agile, I’d love to participate and learn more. I work for a company that is trying a quasi-distributed approach.
Russ – glad you liked it! It was great fun telling the stories. I don’t often write about agile fundamentals because there are so many great sites out there now. But let me consider putting together a post that might provide some guides for you. Also, check for local agile user groups for more information. If you are in Florida, you might want to check out http://agileflorida.com … there are some great user groups there.