Scrum Practitioners Workshop: A Note From the Organizer
Posted on Thu, Sep 13, 2012
by Vibhu Srinivasan
I want to thank everyone who helped me coordinate the Scrum Practitioners Workshop in Hyderabad on 29 August, including our sponsor, the Scrum Alliance. Thanks also go to all the practitioners, speakers, and companies that participated in this great event.
The theme of the day was "Explore and uncover the issues and challenges faced while implementing Scrum and Lean practices in the Indian context". The conference began on time at 9, with all the topics and speakers posted on a huge wall. After a full evening of preparing the hall, we were delighted to see everyone register before 9. We kicked of the day with a daily Scrum, where all the presenters discussed what they were going to talk about.
From the first session by Joe Justice, I was confident that the day would go well. Joe spoke about how he uses Agile practices in his car manufacturing company, WIKISPEED. After this, Naveen Nanjundappa spoke about product ownership in India. Except for a brief technical issue, the session went really well. Post-chai, Jayaprakash Puttaswamy walked the crowd through stages of becoming a ScrumMaster. It was well-received and the audience enjoyed the journey.
Kanchan Khera and Bhuvan Lodha, co-presented a really interesting session called Retro Masala that included both video and audio. They spoke about the many newer retrospective techniques they are trying in their organization.
In the afternoon, we held an “unconference” that included around 14 different sessions — from ScrumFu, to games by Nanda Lankalapalli to Venkat Vatti demonstrating engineering practices. Rafael Sabbagh led a group though his session on Scrum case studies, and Naveen had a group listening keenly to him as he spoke about his topic, You do not know Agile. In addition, many from the audience presented a number of topics, including being green while doing Agile. The last sessions of the day included getting astrological predictions about Scrum and an overview of the metrics that are a must for Agile organizations.
We ended the day with t-shirts, gifts, and thanks. My special appreciation goes to all the volunteers who made this happen. We plan to develop many more insightful workshops in the near future.