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Portfolio Management Scrum Software

Agile 2010: Enterprise Scrum

I presented our work on Enterprise Scrum at Agile 2010 this year. The session was well-attended for a specialized talk like this one (really only suitable for software engineering teams larger than 30 people), with about 40 people in the audience.

Enterprise Scrum: Creating an Agile Company

Enterprise Scrum, a fractal extension of Scrum and XP, has organized all development at Citrix Online since Jan 2009. We estimate team months, run quarterly Sprints, reassign teams, meet in weekly stand-ups. We start or postpone whole projects that use Scrum or Scrum-of-Scrums. No other known companies yet use Enterprise Scrum. It provides extreme visibility and control for CXOs. It promotes agile thinking enterprise-wide, driving adoption outside engineering. It demands NPV justification and forces executives to prioritize decisions transparently. It makes us more profitable.

I learned at the conference that Tektronix Communications adopted a variant of Enterprise Scrum two months ago, after Keith Miller had read this paper:

Daniel Greening, “Enterprise Scrum: Scaling Scrum to the Enterprise Level,” 2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Koloa, Kauai, Hawaii January 5-8, ISBN: 978-0-7695-3869-3 (10 pages)

I invited Keith to present a few slides on the Tektronix implementation during my Agile 2010 talk. I love to rope people in at the last minute. Keith did a great job, and added credibility by showing other organizations find utility in this approach. You can download the presentation slides, including both mine and Keith’s sections, here:

Agile 2010 Enterprise Scrum

I am assembling people in a similar role as me (orchestrating agile processes for engineering groups from about 50 to 343 (7²+1 to 7³) people) to share ideas and experiences. One participation requirement is evidence that you have contributed significantly to the well-being of engineering groups outside your own company. This could include presenting at agile conferences, helping CSTs with scrum training or other indicators. Feel free to contact me if you think you fit this category, and would like to get involved.

Reviews

13 attendees responded to an audience survey for this talk. Agile 2010 does a great job of surveying attendees and sent the responses the last day of the conference (which is really fast).

Ratings

Attendees were asked to score each question from 1 to 5, where 1 = Very Poor, 2 = Poor, 3 = Satisfactory, 4 = Good, 5 = Excellent.

Question Ave Score
How well did this presentation meet your expectations? 4.58
Would you recommend this session to a colleague? 4.67
Evaluate the speaker’s presentation skills. 4.58
Evaluate the speaker’s command of the topic. 4.75
Did the topic description match the presentation content? 4.75
Overall rating of the presentation. 4.67

Comments

  • Dan is well-versed, presents well and kept audience engaged. Very valuable lessons and learned discussion – Wish this session had been 90 minutes instead of 60.
  • Maybe some interactivity?
  • Excellent data.
  • Too complicate to understand.
  • I had no idea we could monetize points.
  • Nice concept to share with our execs and portfolio teams.

By Dan Greening

Dan Greening is a serial entrepreneur working on his fourth startup, where he leads implementation of two agile practices, Lean Startup and Scrum. Between the third and fourth startup, he was the lead agile coach for Citrix Online, Skype, Overstock, and other companies. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA. He is a Certified Enterprise Coach with the Scrum Alliance, and a Scrum@Scale Trainer. He has published innovative work on agile management, parallel processing, and chaotic systems.

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