I have been working as a software consultant for more than 11 years. Because of that I am an eager supporter of lean principles and agile methods.
It was an interesting first day of the conference. Most speakers talked about their experiences when trying to adopt Scrum into their company. Some shared some interesting facts while others didn’t quite get their message through. The highlight was probably the first talk when Carsten Jabobsen told us how Systematic Software Engineering, a CMMI level 5 company, were using Scrum. They adopted Scrum after they had reached level 5, and the journey from level 1 to 5 took them 6-8 years and a lot of money. He claimed they got pay-back from their efforts, but I would like to see that calculation. My question is: “Could it be done quicker and cheaper if they adopted Scrum already in the beginning of their CMMI journey, instead of at the end?”
As for my own performances the speak went really good and I got some great feedback from the audience, however not everybody were convinced. They found the ideas really interesting, but since I couldn’t show any real results from any large scale project, they stayed a bit sceptic. Fair enough! I hope I get the opportunity to try it in large scale some time. At the moment I can only redirect them to the results of Corey Ladas and David Anderson.