Me and a collegue of mine was recently asked to do a short introductory scrum lecture for a company within the gaming industry. The company has a couple of international blockbuster hits in their portfolio and was in the process of adopting agile ideas into their development process. The gathering was a bit different than the usual corporate settings, but nonetheless very interesting and it seemed to be quite a creative environment.

I learnt from this that scrum would be an excellent choice of method for their small cross-functional teams having great benefit from short feedback loops and early demos. This also made me curious about scrum and agile methods within the gaming industry in large. A bit research on the web led me to this interview of Clinton Keith, CTO at High Moon Studios. Keith tells how they successfully adopted scrum into their games projects thus addressing many of the usual problems in the increasingly complex gaming industry.

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Agile values can be applied on all levels of an organization, from an individual to a whole enterprise. Agile values are based on the Agile Manifesto.

• Individual level – Agile values on individual level is pretty much what coaching is all about: creating awareness, taking responsibility, being committed and spreading motivation.
• Team level – Agile values on team level result in team coaching in the same way as individual coaching does. Scrum and XP also have a number of practices that further support these coaching values, e.g. the daily sprint meeting. Actually Scrum evolves around the team and the composition of the team is crucial. Do it right and you get a hyper productive team/project.
• Project level – Agile values on project level is basically what agile methods like Scrum and XP is all about.
• Project portfolio level –Lean principles cover a wider scope than just the project, but also share agile values. On a project portfolio level Lean principles are providing support for making decisions about which projects to start up and which to shut down. With Lean we also get support in resource management and ways to optimize across projects.
• Corporate strategy level – By taking the agile values and Lean principles even further in the organizational level we get process decision support by controlling the value flow from the demand side and by optimizing across the organization.

References:
Agile Manifesto
Scrum in 5 minutes
Lean Thinking

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The blog celebrated its first anniversary during the christmas holidays. I started about a year ago (I backdated the first few posts) as an experiment. For me personally it has served as a combined self-therapy, self-coaching, knowledge-increasing and confidence-boosting activity, because it forces me to really think through the writings and it often involves a fair share of subject research.

Also I have been on a parental leave since september, not leaving much time for work related activities. However in february I will be back at work for 100% and I’m really excited about that. I’m convinced that interesting things are destined to happen this year. So stay tuned because I have all the intentions of continuing posting to this blog, especially after the holiday breaks and my long paternity leave. About posting frequency I don’t have the intention of posting every day, it’s not that kind of a blog. I will post when I have something interesting to write and hopefully that will happen every week.

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