Hi AgileSA members,

As promised my first update from the Scrum Gathering in South Africa.

First of all, what a beautiful setting, after a fantastic dinner last night in Franschoek, this morning we woke up in Cape Town to a typical day  - windy, rainy and cold – but nice as it fits the setting.

The gathering is at the Westin Grand, which is a 5 star hotel and does add glamour to the gathering which is very fitting.

The keynote this morning to kick-off proceedings was by Henrik Kniberg. Very interesting session!

Kniberg focused his keynote on some of the following points:

- Misusing Scrum
- Scrum as Messenger
- Not adapting processess
- Using the wrong processess

Without going into the detail, what stood out to me is the practicality of his keynote address and the entertainment value. This was so good to me as I am a firm believer that we can address serious issues effectively while having fun. One needs to have fun in order to work effectively together and invent quality solutions to fulfill customer value

Kniberg also introduced some new and interesting terms to the industry like

- scrumdamentalism (n)
- rain dance rhetoric
- waterfallitis (n)
- sadoscrumism (n)

These are all so descriptive to familiar topics covered at AgileSA event, speaking to organisations already using Scrum and most people in an Agile or Scrum environment can relate to some or all of these terms.

Not to say what is discussed at the gathering is not serious, but we take life too seriously sometime and get overwhelmed by process, bureaucracy, politics and KPI’s and forget to deliver customer value effectively.

I am very impressed with the quality of the gathering and the line-up for the day, my only problem, I have no idea which deep-dive session to attend as they all look so valuable, so I guess I will have to shut my eyes and pick one

More later on the deep dive session I attended…

From Cape Town and the Scrum Gathering

Arrie van der Dussen