After returning from the Scrum Gathering in Boulder, CO last week, I am encouraged by the activity and the scalability of Scrum as it applies to the enterprise. There were many larger companies represented there discussing their successes and issues with agile adoption with Scrum.

Key Bank, BMC and Capital One were all representing their major shifts toward agile adoption. These companies all have strong agile executives leading the efforts corporate wide and have made major organizational adjustments to facilitate the agile transition. While BMC was leveraging the Rally Software team’s tool and coaches to assist in their transition, Key Bank has retained a close association to Ken Schwaber and has been developing an internal agile coaching and transition team to facilitate their efforts. Capital One is also developing its own agile resource pool and using a number of external consultants to facilitate their transition.

State Farm was represented there as an early evaluator in Scrum and looking at ways that it can transform its multi-year development cycles in delivering more value. They admitted to having a large effort in front of them as they have recently acquired the IBM Rational Suite tool set. However, given IBM Rational’s recent re-publishing of their software best practices, I believe State Farm has some leverage in adapting the process.

The five days of the gathering started with both Scrum Master training as well as advanced training for existing Scrum Masters. The Open Scrum Gathering provided a showcase of companies leveraging Scrum including a Software Gamming company – High Moon Studios. The final two days provided an Open Space format and was the highlight of the gathering. Many discussions around Organizational Structures, Cultural Change, Role of the Middle Manager, Type C Scrum, Tools in Enterprise Scrum, Distributed Teams, Scaling the Product Owner, Beyond the Scrum Team, etc. provided fascinating conversation and discovery.

You can check out the notes from the gathering on the Scrum Alliance Wiki.