I just returned from two days at the Scrum Gathering, and enjoyed every minute of it. I’ve attended quite a few conferences, but I thought this one was quite special for several reasons:
- PMI executives Greg Balestrero, CEO and Mark Langley, COO were in attendance as special guests of the Scrum Alliance. Greg delivered the keynote address on the first day and stressed his committment to breaking down the barriers and enhancing collaboration between the PMI and Scrum communities. I thought it was an important step in bringing the two communities closer together.
- Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson eminently represented the XP community.
- Alistair Cockburn teamed with Ken Schwaber on a “duet” session. Incidentally, Alistair is now a Certified ScrumMaster trainer.
- As part of the PMI Agile forum, I presented along with Michele Sliger, Jesse Fewell and Dave Prior. My session was titled, The Agile PMO: Scaling Scrum through Adaptive Governance. You can download a copy of my presentation here.
Another special opportunity was getting to see the launch of the space shuttle – picture is on the right. As you might guess, I’m a fan of the management methods that NASA used back in the day — see this Blog post for an example.
