Think Talk

A while back I bounced a couple of mails back and forth with Tomas Sandén from our Göteborg office. I was planning to submit the outcome to a conference; I still might but not sure when.


Anyhow, I thought I’d share some of the key questions or statements we formulated. I could feed you with how I would answer them and build up a speech, but it is more interesting if you contemplate yourself. If you feel the urge to discuss them there’s always the comment box.

So the talk was going to be around team organization and improving “speed” in companies developing some type of product(s), or “industrial scrum” as I sometimes refer to it when I’m sloppy (which is a somewhat bad term since scrum per se doesn’t hold the complete answer and since industrial can give you a very incorrect mental picture).

Tomas summed up the bullets that we were sort of coming back to all the time, so here are those questions for you:

• Can you regard scrum as an organizational pattern for teams, and as such is it strong?
• Can you gain focus and drive in a large PD-organization by relentlessly shortening the feedback-loops and lead-times?
• How do you balance the focus on external customer value with the need to appreciate internal ditto?
• Is the transparency provided by Scrum enough when the development is distributed in several teams and over a longer period in time?
• How do you balance product management - development - pre-development with minimized over-head?
• Should the focus really be to have better control mechanism, development methods etc. than your competitors, or should it be to be able to learn faster?
• Which have precedence and why; Quality or velocity?

 That will have to be enough for today.