One of the most effective tools in recent years has been the use of Scrum Essential Cards to coach teams to improve their Scrum practice in their organization. These cards describe Scrum by using Essence. Essence is the international standard for defining methods and practices. Ivar Jacobson's company has worked with Dr. Jeff Sutherland, the Co-Creator of Scrum, to define a set of cards that provides a complete definition of Scrum consistent with the Scrum Guide. For instance, the cards have been used to have teams "Build Their Own Scrum" to clarify what parts of their implementation need work and define process improvements that need to be made in each sprint. Jeff Sutherland: “Work with these cards with hundreds of teams shows that the average Scrum team implements 1/3 of the 21 components of Scrum well, 1/3 of the components poorly, and 1/3 of pieces of Scrum not at all. Daily practice with only a third of components working well is like driving a car with wheels missing."

Exercises with these cards are dramatically revealing about how Scrum should work, how people on the same team may have different ideas about what Scrum is, and what a team needs to do next to improve their process. Jeff Sutherland: “One participant in this exercise using the Scrum cards said he learned more about Scrum in one hour with the Essence cards than he did in the previous six years of being on a Scrum team."

In particular, Scrum Essentials can result in a better retrospective, improved selection of process improvements for each sprint, a more clarifying Daily Scrum, and a more valuable shippable increment of product at every Sprint Review.

Learning Goals:

In this talk Dr. Ivar Jacobson will respond to the questions ‘why Essence’ and ‘what is Essence’ but focus on the question ‘How does Essence make Scrum better’. In particular, he will describe some new use cases of critical value to teams:

• Understand the Essentials of Scrum
• See where you are in your endeavor
• Plan your own achievements
• Adapt Scrum to your own needs
• Live Guidance™
• Dispersed teams

Although the focus of the talk is on getting a better Scrum, the talk will naturally extend to getting a better software engineering in general – an objective on the design of Essence by the organizations that created the Essence OMG standard.

A fresh introduction to modern software engineering and Scrum is guaranteed.

Few Product Owners — and even fewer Developers — spend a day in the life of the end user to understand business pain points. Our solutions end up being only best guesses that miss the mark. Then we deliver something Done and our framework says to move on to the next iteration. All of this somehow passes as being agile.

In the meantime, end users face the gap between their real need and our supposed solution. This multiplies the rate at which end users supposedly generate "new requirements." Yet there is nothing new about the needs: nothing in the business has changed, but the reality of the product makes it more difficult to gloss over important questions. And we screw the users by making them pay for the changes.

Beating waterfall doesn't mean covering up poor requirements elicitation by pleading volatility, but rather carefully exploring requirements with concrete prototypes and end-user workshops (as in waterfall), as well as managing for outcomes by attending to the real use of previously delivered features. Great agile delivers less on its first delivery than perfect waterfall (where we have just the right amount of exactly the right specifications), has higher per-feature cost than perfect waterfall, but has earlier partial delivery and lower overall cost than perfect waterfall.

We all know the drill, pivot faster and embrace innovation in these turbulent times. But how do you adapt your process and reach the outcomes that matter?

Gabrielle will give an introduction to Mobius, a navigator that allows you to create a customized innovation model connecting strategy to delivery.

Rather than prescribe one set of practices or one framework, this next-generation approach allows you to combine models in new and novel ways. Alistair Cockburn describes it as the ‘first real post-agile framework’, allowing people the structure and freedom to innovate effectively.

Gabrielle will show you some examples from social transformation in a war zone, pivoting a restaurant business model in 5 hours, to enterprise transformation at Red Hat.

eduScrum®: an opportunity to close the gap between the educational offer and the market requirements?

Willy Wijnands, creator & founder of eduScrum® and initial co-creator of Lightschools® and a passionate Chemistry & Science teacher, believes that Scrum suits the needs of the fast changing market. The workforce of tomorrow has to cope with these changes. Unfortunately, the current educational system is obsolete and this creates a gap between the educational offer and the market requirements. Could eduScrum become the connecting element?

He draws a parallel between Scrum and education environments. The starting principles are the autonomy and authenticity of people. Willy believes that children do take responsibility and can work together independently.

By using eduScrum, students work together in an energetic, effective and focus way. In small teams the self-organize their work and thereby learn engagement, commitment and taking responsibility. They train to self-reflect and give feedback to themselves as well and to their classmates and to continuously their own and team working process.

And most important: eduScrum students go through a strong and positive personal development. They get to know their own qualities and find out how to use their own resources. Tracking the learning process and progress is hereby always easy by using the eduScrum meetings and tools.

During this session, he shares his experience in implementing Scrum in education and the benefits eduScrum brings and lets you experience how you can use eduScrum as a tool to work with students in teams and create an Agile mindset by the students.