On 30th September I attended the Agile Leadership Day 20151 conference, held at GDI in Rüschlikon2.
During the day there were a number of half hour sessions happening in one of four tracks3 and visitors to the conference were able to choose which of the sessions they wanted to attend.
The second session I attended was hosted by Paul Boekhout4 of Trapeze GmbH5, and described in the abstract as:
Paul Boekhout is Head of Control Centre Development at Trapeze GmbH in Neuhausen am Rheinfall and leading the transition to Agile Development. Drawing on his experience in change and transition management in an agile context, he introduced Agile Scrum in the Technical Development department. This transformation is an ongoing journey with various obstacles along the way. Scaling Scrum to 20 teams while developing new products brings new challenges for the organization - the (line)management, teams and customers.
This talk ended up being a little disappointing. Within my current team we are growing quickly, with a scrum team in Switzerland, followed by offshore in Europe and the APAC region. With the rapid growth of our teams I thought that it would be interesting to hear someone else’s experience when it came to rapidly scaling up the team. However, Trapeze already had the development teams in place. This talk just spoke about the adoption of scrum amongst the many existing teams.
One thing that I did find interesting was that each of the teams was able to organise themselves as they wanted using a variety of tools. Some kept it simple and used whiteboards, others used JIRA while others were using trello6. Now that the teams are up and running they are being pushed to use JIRA so that management can have an overview across all teams.