Bamboo Blog

Gwyn and I presented our Bamboo Toolbox at the Munich Scrum Gathering on Tuesday.

The gathering was my first Scrum Gathering, and was one of the most enjoyable, friendly, and all round rewarding events I have been to.

We had the presentation slot just after lunch on the second (of three) days, and just before the board panel, which I expected many people to skip, and use as a chance to see Munich. In short, possibly the hardest slot of the conference to attract an audience to! great!

So I was flattered and surprised when the room started to fill up 15 minutes before the talk, and by the time we started, all the seats were taken, and people were having to start sitting on the floor.

Our presentation was intentionally pushing the boundaries. Gwyn and I both decided early on that we wanted to create a presentation that people would either love, or hate. We went for a high energy style, with acting, fights, and an argument or two. We also wanted to some some audience interaction, but scaled that back a bit, partly because we were not sure how well it would play, but also because the room was a bit too packed to make it practical. In retrospect we could have pushed things even further. Expect bigger things from the next talk.

The content of our talk was more practical than most of the other sessions, and this seemed to go down well. We presented a number of new scrum practices we have invented (as well as a few we didn't invent, but have adopted). Broadly these split into the categories of Sword Fighting, Stakeholder Management, Poker, Meetings, and Misc.

Each practice was developed to solve a particular problem that we have found, and we tried to cover the problem, the solution, and our practical experience of using the new practice.

Finally, we had everyone in the audience write down one item from our talk that they were going to commit to taking back and trying. When people read them out what interested me was that the most popular ones, like "Odd Times", were not the ones I would have guessed. It seems that small practices that can fix small but specific problems are more popular, as are ideas that a bit odd, but not too extreme. No-one committed to going back to their office and replicating our practicing of building paper swords :-)

The talk went down very well, and we got a lot of good feedback, which will be taken into account to improve the talk next time we give it. The same idea has been accepted for London's XP day, but the time slot is shorter so we will need to restructure the talk somewhat to make it valuable for the people who will see it there.

The slides will not be available online - as they are totally useless without seeing the whole presentation, but over the next few weeks we will be rolling out a series of blog posts explaining our new practices.