Dave West

What do you do when implementing Scrum? Who does what and what about Scrum reporting? Here are five “golden” rules for ensuring that any model you deploy does not undermine the fundamentals of agility.

When your product gets really big and you need to work with teams at scale, what options do Product Owners have? In this episode, Dave West joins the show to discuss the Nexus framework and what PO’s need to know in order to work in this type of scaled environment. We cover some of the basics that are detailed in the new Nexus book and look at other keys to keeping multiple teams coordinated and delivering value together.

n February this year, Scrum.org published the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams and announced a new course - Scrum with Kanban Course, aimed at Scrum practitioners who wish to improve their processes by introducing certain Kanban concepts and elements.

Through mad luck, we were able to set up a Q&A with none other than Dave West, CEO and Product Owner at Scrum.org (a huge thanks to Lindsay Velecina for making this possible) and get extraordinary insights into the ideas behind The Guide.

Most organizations want to improve their agility to be more responsive to customer and market changes. They want to build on the success they have had with scrum at the team level and apply it across the whole organization. And while they might like to be more like Apple, Netflix or Airbnb, their challenge is that, unlike Silicon Valley
startups and tech giants, they are not starting from a clean slate. Instead, they are trying to change from a traditional, process-centric, hierarchical… Show more

Most organizations want to improve their agility to be more responsive to customer and market changes. They want to build on the success they have had with scrum at the team level and apply it across the whole organization. And while they might like to be more like Apple, Netflix or Airbnb, their challenge is that, unlike Silicon Valley
startups and tech giants, they are not starting from a clean slate. Instead, they are trying to change from a traditional, process-centric, hierarchical organization into something else.

Their challenge is compounded because there isn’t a repeatable process for this transformation; everyone starts in a different place and has different goals. The word “transformation” is itself part of the problem; it implies moving from one state to another. Perhaps a more realistic description is that the organization must evolve from one that values processes and standards to one that values learning and flexibility. Evolution takes time and is ongoing. While standards remain important, even more, important is to achieve quality in the products and services delivered. Show less

Agile delivery has hit a tipping point, with the majority of IT organizations finding some level of agile success. For these organizations, the next logical step is to scale this success into an "enterprise adoption", taking the value they are getting from a single team and replicating it.

Everyone building software products today aspire to be able to seamlessly update the production software in a continuous manner. To be able to deploy code without the 'normal' friction of process controls, reviews, test departments and committee meetings. As Martin Fowler describes in his review of Jez Humble's and Dave Farley's books Continuous Delivery, the last mile of software delivery is often the hardest part. But is continuous delivery really the aim or is it something more? To… Show more

Everyone building software products today aspire to be able to seamlessly update the production software in a continuous manner. To be able to deploy code without the 'normal' friction of process controls, reviews, test departments and committee meetings. As Martin Fowler describes in his review of Jez Humble's and Dave Farley's books Continuous Delivery, the last mile of software delivery is often the hardest part. But is continuous delivery really the aim or is it something more? To understand this question, I want us to think about how our approach has evolved from Continuous Integration to Continuous Delivery and on. Show less

The Nexus Framework is the simplest, most effective approach to applying Scrum at scale across multiple teams, sites, and time zones. Created by Scrum.org—the pioneering Scrum training and certification organization founded by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber—Nexus draws on decades of experience to address the unique challenges teams face in coming together, sharing work, and managing and minimizing dependencies.



The Nexus™ Framework for Scaling Scrum is a concise book that shows… Show more

The Nexus Framework is the simplest, most effective approach to applying Scrum at scale across multiple teams, sites, and time zones. Created by Scrum.org—the pioneering Scrum training and certification organization founded by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber—Nexus draws on decades of experience to address the unique challenges teams face in coming together, sharing work, and managing and minimizing dependencies.



The Nexus™ Framework for Scaling Scrum is a concise book that shows how Nexus helps teams to deliver a complex, multi-platform, software-based product in short, frequent cycles, without sacrificing consistency or quality, and without adding unnecessary complexity or straying from Scrum’s core principles. Using an extended case study, the authors illustrate how Nexus helps teams solve common scaling challenges like reducing cross-team dependencies, preserving team self-organization and transparency, and ensuring accountability.
Understand the challenges of delivering working, integrated product increments with multiple teams, and how Nexus addresses them
Form a Nexus around a new or existing product and learn how that Nexus sets goals and plans its work
Run Sprints within a Nexus, provide transparency into progress, conduct effective Nexus Sprint reviews, and use Nexus Sprint Retrospectives to continuously improve
Overcome the distributed team collaboration challenges Show less

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave West, CEO and chief product owner at Scrum.org, about the state of Scrum in 2017 and the future of agile.

Key Takeaways
Agile adoption is now in the late-majority phase of the adoption curve; large organisations who are risk averse have seen the ideas proven elsewhere and they are adopting themThe underlying issues are not that complicated – we’ve got customers who have needs that they can’t explain and are… Show more

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Dave West, CEO and chief product owner at Scrum.org, about the state of Scrum in 2017 and the future of agile.

Key Takeaways
Agile adoption is now in the late-majority phase of the adoption curve; large organisations who are risk averse have seen the ideas proven elsewhere and they are adopting themThe underlying issues are not that complicated – we’ve got customers who have needs that they can’t explain and are rapidly changing, so we need ways to deliver products and experiment rapidly to enable us to learn and adapt to the emergent needsThe unicorn organisations are not successful because of their technology; it’s because they have served their customers better than the traditional businesses didThe primary customers of scrum.org are professional product developers, and helping them become more professional helps ensure the products are built betterYoung enquiring minds “get” why an agile approach is the obvious way of working in today’s worldThe future of agile is about communicating in different ways to make it relevant to different people to solve their evolving and emerging problems. Show less

Craig catches up with Dave West, product owner and CEO at Scrum.org, at the Agile 2016 conference in Atlanta.

Agile is increasingly the standard way software development organizations deliver software. In a recent survey by TechBeacon, two-thirds of organizations said they are using "pure agile" or "leaning toward agile."

For the majority of government projects, however, agile is still a dream, and waterfall methodology continues to be used, with large amounts of process governance and control.

That lack of agility is highlighted in high-profile failures such as the Universal Credit… Show more

Agile is increasingly the standard way software development organizations deliver software. In a recent survey by TechBeacon, two-thirds of organizations said they are using "pure agile" or "leaning toward agile."

For the majority of government projects, however, agile is still a dream, and waterfall methodology continues to be used, with large amounts of process governance and control.

That lack of agility is highlighted in high-profile failures such as the Universal Credit project in the United Kingdom and the disastrous launch of HealthCare.gov in the United States. Agile alone would not have solved many of the problems that plagued those projects, but it would have made them more visible, thereby enabling the right decisions to be made earlier. Show less

As Scrum and Agile become mainstream organizations are looking to double down on the role of the Product Owner, encouraging them to lead the intersection between technology and the customer. But Product Ownership is a difficult role as it tries to balance the needs of the business with the reality of product delivery. Also, for many organizations there is some ‘confusion’ with existing roles of business analyst, product manager or even project manager. What does the product owner do anyway? In… Show more

As Scrum and Agile become mainstream organizations are looking to double down on the role of the Product Owner, encouraging them to lead the intersection between technology and the customer. But Product Ownership is a difficult role as it tries to balance the needs of the business with the reality of product delivery. Also, for many organizations there is some ‘confusion’ with existing roles of business analyst, product manager or even project manager. What does the product owner do anyway? In this talk Dave West, Product Owner and CEO Scrum.org, the home of Scrum, describes the genesis of the Product Owner role and how many organizations are dealing with the challenges of slotting this key role into existing product, project and release organizations. He will introduce some techniques such as user centric design, and hypophysis based development and describe how approaches such as Lean Startup and pragmatic marketing are providing product owners with a tool box to do their job.

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Did you know that DevOps, when it was introduced in 2009 was called “Agile Infrastructure”? For many, this will not come as a surprise. DevOps, after all, is the breaking down of barriers between operations and development in pursuit of increased business Agility. But, like with any good movement, the focus has been narrow to allow for easy adoption. This has often meant that people talking DevOps forget the key relationship with Agile, the Agile manifesto, and the most popular Agile framework,… Show more

Did you know that DevOps, when it was introduced in 2009 was called “Agile Infrastructure”? For many, this will not come as a surprise. DevOps, after all, is the breaking down of barriers between operations and development in pursuit of increased business Agility. But, like with any good movement, the focus has been narrow to allow for easy adoption. This has often meant that people talking DevOps forget the key relationship with Agile, the Agile manifesto, and the most popular Agile framework, Scrum. In fact, the Agile manifesto, with its emphasis on people rather than tools, feels like it is missing the importance of the work of DevOps engineers who are trying to automate the last mile of software delivery or operations who spend the majority of their time managing applications and infrastructure. Show less

I recently met Dave West, CEO of Scrum.org. While not one of the founders of Scrum.org, West is the CEO and product owner at Scrum.org. Dave and I spoke a bit what is happening with Scrum.org and how it interacts with DevOps. If you are interested in Agile, DevOps and Scrum, this is a good DevOps Chat to listen to.

Scrum.org CEO and Product Owner Dave West has come a long way from being a RUP Product Manager to where he is today. After realizing RUP wasn't helping developers or enabling them to build great software, Dave took a Scrum class where a light bulb went off. He saw that if you gave a team enough safety, the right problems to solve, access to the right people and some discipline in the form of XP practices (refactoring, continuous integration, etc.), you can get generate massive amounts of… Show more

Scrum.org CEO and Product Owner Dave West has come a long way from being a RUP Product Manager to where he is today. After realizing RUP wasn't helping developers or enabling them to build great software, Dave took a Scrum class where a light bulb went off. He saw that if you gave a team enough safety, the right problems to solve, access to the right people and some discipline in the form of XP practices (refactoring, continuous integration, etc.), you can get generate massive amounts of value.

Scrum turns 21 in 2016, so what do the next twenty years look like? Dave says some of it centers on scaling product delivery, using evidence-based measurements (EBM) (i.e., value, release frequency and innovation), and actually getting to done.

John Esposito, Editor-in-Chief of DZone, SolutionsIQ partner, hosts at Agile2016 in Atlanta, GA.

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A quick guide to scaling an agile software delivery lifecycle across your organization

Discusses the evolution of process and how the PMO needs to be connected to your development practices.

For many years, software delivery has been treated as an ancillary business process; a business process that, though costing the organization a considerable amount of money, does not have the structure, rigor, or focus of other enterprise business processes such as supply chain management, financial management, and even talent management.

Water-Scrum-Fall is the norm, but is that good or bad.

The original article introducing the term water-scrum-fall