Scrum Guide 2020 Launch Event

Introduction
Welcome to the Amazing Apps show for Microsoft business applications creators who want to build amazing applications that everyone will love. This [00:00:30] is a special episode to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Scrum framework and to let you know that the co-creators of Scrum, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, are hosting a special event on the 18th of November to launch the 2020 update to the Scrum Guide. You can get show notes for this episode, including a transcript and links to the registration page for the Scrum Guide 2020 launch event at customery.com/009. [00:01:00]

Student celebration
Before we get on with the show, a quick shout out to one of my students, Michael Hanley. Michael is an IT project manager at Health Carrousel in Ohio. He took my Scrum from Microsoft Business Apps audio course and achieved his Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master certification earlier this year. The audio version of the course is all the audio content from the videos in MP3 format and includes the quizzes, the case studies and the practise exam. It's a low-cost way of learning the Scrum framework and [00:01:30] how to apply it to Power Apps and Dynamics 365 applications. The audio course is just US$29 and you can join customery.com/scrumaudio.

What is Scrum?
So it's November 2020, and Scrum has turned 25 this year. The Scrum framework was created by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland and presented at the OOPSLA conference in 1995. It was devised as a lightweight framework [00:02:00] to help small teams build complex products. It's not a prescriptive methodology that tells teams exactly what to do. It provides a simple scaffolding of rules, events and artefacts that help us through an empirical process of experimentation and learning construct an approach that works for our teams.

If you're using Scrum to build business applications, you can add software engineering practises like pair programming, dev ops, test-driven development, refactoring, user [00:02:30] stories and lots, lots more.

Scrum evolved rapidly over the first few iterations. The daily scrum wasn't part of the Scrum framework for the first couple of years, and most teams weren't using task boards until around 2003.

My first Scrum project with Dynamics CRM
I used Scrum for the first time on a Dynamics CRM project a few years later, in 2008. My client, Debbie, was the operations director at Premier Medical Group and she wouldn't sign off on the requirement specification that Dan Barber and I had spent months writing. Debbie [00:03:00] didn't understand the technical jargon, and, despite its size, she was concerned the specification wasn't complete and we'd missed some of the requirements. Debbie didn't want to wait 18 months to see a version of the software that she could test. So Debbie and I talked about it and I introduced her to the idea of switching to an iterative, incremental approach I'd read about called Scrum. She loved the idea, but we were both concerned about how my small consultancy could deliver a product of this size using a new [00:03:30] approach that we had no experience with. So I partnered with another Microsoft consultancy who provided an experienced scrum master, Paul Fox, who guided a blended team of people who built an amazing application for Premier Medical Group.

After that first Scrum project, I've only ever worked on one project with a traditional approach, it was for a bank in London working with Microsoft Consulting Services and a global systems integrator, where I spent about 18 months in analysis and design, producing [00:04:00] lots and lots of documentation and no working software whatsoever.

It was after that engagement, I doubled down on Scrum. I took training courses, gained my certifications, I kept reading about Scrum, lots of books and articles, and watching videos, and teaching my Microsoft business applications teams how to apply Scrum to their projects. The feedback from my clients has been amazing, even though their projects were not always easy [00:04:30] or without their challenges. But we've achieved results and outcomes that we never thought we could have achieved through a traditional approach. And consistently, my team-mates have said this team has been the best professional experience of their careers, working in a cross-functional self-organising Scrum team where everyone shares the responsibility for building the application is so refreshing and liberating and rewarding. Architects, [00:05:00] analysts, configurator administrators, developers, testers, all coming together and working together every day closely with the users while building the application. It's been so much fun to watch them enjoying themselves so much.

Today, I'm committed to helping every Microsoft customer and partner build amazing business applications by adopting the Scrum framework. I'm really grateful to you for listening to this podcast and hopefully joining me on that journey. [00:05:30]

Scrum Guide 2020 launch event
This year at a special event on the 18th of November, Jeff and Ken will reveal the Scrum Guide to 2020. The Scrum guide was last updated in 2017. So it's been three years. What can we expect from the new Scrum guide?

I think we can expect it to be leaner, probably even shorter than the current Scrum Guide, which is less than 20 pages. This is going to be an attempt to keep Scrum lightweight so that it can be adopted by more practitioners in new industries and domains outside [00:06:00] of software development.

I think it'll be even less prescriptive to help us learn more and become better by running our own experiments within the framework so that we can maximise the value of the products that we're building.

I can't wait to find out more. I registered for the launch event on the 18th of November. Unfortunately for those of us in Australia, it's the middle of the night. It's going to be 1am for me and it's a three-hour event. The event itself is going to be running on Zoom and places are limited, so you'll need to register and join the [00:06:30] session earlier, otherwise, Zoom might not let you in. I think Zoom's biggest plan has a cap of 1,000 participants. I know, I know they could have 10,000 participants if they used Microsoft Teams, but using Zoom wasn't my idea. I hope to see you there.

Remember, you can get show notes for this episode, including a transcript and links to the registration page for the Scrum Guide 2020 launch event at customery.com/009. [00:07:00] That's a wrap for today. Until next time, keep sprinting.