Gorilla Nation is hosting another ScrumClub event on 6/24/09:

Scrum and User Experience Design: Bringing Great Design into the Agile Process

Event summary:

Scrum provides us with a great framework for building our Scrum team, implementing the core agile practices and getting the inspect and adapt process started. But Scrum doesn’t provide much for the specific disciplines like programming, testing and User Experience. That’s where our coaches Paul Hodgetts and Patrick Neeman come in.

Join us as we explore how User Experience Design integrates with the Scrum process. We’ll see first hand how each type of activity fits into the Scrum cycles, and how our User Experience researchers, designers and artists integrate into a Scrum team.

Get your ticket with a special discount for RunningAgile readers.

Close to 100 people showed up to the scrum club event sponsored by rallydev tonight, including a bunch of CSTs/CSCs. Feed them, and they will come (thank you Amanda,  Mine and Kris from rallydev for the fantastic organization).

The theme of the evening was “Boostrapping and agile team”.

George Schlitz, coach from BigVisible Solutions, talked about the need to put agile projects in the context of the organization – defining clear stakeholders roles, involvement and communication.

Scott Downey, coach at myspace, presented reasons for scrum implementations ot fail and provided the base for what he calls “the shock therapy” – the scrum coach sets the one by deciding on iteration length, usage of story points, meeting agendas etc… until the team earns the right to change these initial decisions.

I challenged everyone with the idea that initiating a transformation to agile without executive engagement, strong engineers and experienced agile coaches is very likely a waste of effort, i.e. not going to materially change the success of the business.

A video should show up sometime soon.

This is an announcement that I will be hosting the next scrum club LA event at my company. A big thanks to my friends at rallydev who are making the event possible. No worry, this is not a timeshare scam turning into a sales pitch to get you buy rally.

When: Mon, Feb 9 – Mon, Feb 9 | 6:00:00 pm PST – 8:00:00 pm PST

Event title: Bootstrapping an Agile Team

Where: Gorilla Nation – Los Angeles

Event description:

Admission is FREE but you must RSVP since space is limited.

http://asc-gathering.eventbrite.com/

Please join LA Scrum Club and Rally Software for a special evening on Monday, February 9th with local Agile luminaries: Christophe Louvion, CTO of Gorilla Nation, Scott Downey, ScrumMaster at MySpace, and George Schlitz, Principal Coach at Big Visible Solutions.  Admission is free of charge and wine, beer and appetizers will be provided.

At this unique event, you will hear from Agile experts as they discuss the benefits of moving from a waterfall or plan-driven process to Agile. You will learn how the Agile process can help you achieve faster time to market, increased productivity and higher quality. With an Agile implementation, you can also experience more effective collaboration and better cultural alignment between your IT team, the business and its customers.

This event will focus on:

• Starting an Agile software team
• Measuring your progress and success
• What makes some Agile teams more successful than others
• The organizational barriers and opportunities to Agile adoption that you should know about
• Cultivating our Agile community for knowledge sharing and interaction

Admission is FREE but you must RSVP since space is limited.

http://asc-gathering.eventbrite.com/

SPEAKERS

Christophe Louvion, CTO of Gorilla Nation in Los Angeles

Scott Downey, ScrumMaster and Technical Project Manager at Myspace.com in Beverly Hills

George Schlitz, Principal Coach at BigVisible Solutions in Irvine

Audience moderator: Tony Wong, President of Digital Onion Inc. in Marina Del Rey