The Fearless Journey at Scrum Day Oviedo 2014

On December 13th, I gave my very first keynote address for the very first Scrum Day event in Spain – Scrum Day Oviedo.  And not to be one to avoid a significant challenge, the entire sixty-minute talk was in Spanish!  The organizer was a good friend and colleague of mine, Raúl Herranz, and on a cold, rainy Saturday in December, Raúl and his volunteers turned out forty-five attendees to hear me talk about “Scrum – The Fearless Journey”.

The backgrounds of the speakers and attendees were extremely varied.  Present were programmers, CXOs, Agile practitioners, ScrumMasters, Product Owners, consultants and folks that were merely curious.  The seven speakers on the program discussed diverse topics such as how to implement a UX process within the rapid pace of Agile iterations, why being a Product Owner is so special, how the Product = Team and other relevant themes related to a successful application of Scrum and Agile processes in the business.

As I mentioned earlier, my talked was called, Scrum – ¡El Viaje Intrepido!, and launched the conference.  In the talk, I explained the importance of understanding your destination before beginning your Scrum journey and recognize what you really want before starting.  Next, I shared some of the common obstacles (or impediments) I see when implementing Scrum in different organizations.  Finally, I invited the conference participants to form small groups to play a game – Fearless Journey (based on the book Fearless Change) – to help them get unstuck and move beyond their obstacles with adopting Scrum and Agile for their teams.  This was the first time I used the game in a conference setting, but the outcomes and understanding of the importance of the game were really good based on the participant feedback at the end of the session.

Seems like “Do Food” and “Right Moment” were two popular patterns from the Fearless Change book.

Finally, another speaker at the conference, David Hernandez, also provided a nice summary of his experiences at Scrum Day Oviedo as well.  To stay in touch with the Agile community in Asturias and keep on top of their announcements, I suggest you follow their twitter feed at @ScrumDayOviedo.