Notes on Whale Rider

At the beginning of last week I drove to Moscow for the Whale Rider conference.

I heard about the conference from the first year of its foundation, but I could not attend it. Somehow it did not work, and even the plans of the past year unexpectedly failed. This year, an invitation came from Oleg Bunin - I sent the theses of the report and went to the main program of the conference. Like a speaker.

You can read my abstracts in a blog , and see the presentation below.
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Some words about other speakers

I was not at all reports. I rarely come to listen to the report itself. The most interesting can be found only in a personal conversation over a sandwich and tea. "On the sidelines."


George Barkan
http://whalerider.ru/2011/abstracts/13519.html



George spoke about the role of product manager in different companies. Very informative material on how many in different companies differently understand the role of the product manager. Somewhere it is a person who understands only the business, and somewhere actually a project manager for product development.

Another interesting point: the product manager must be an excellent story teller. His job is to tell a fascinating story of the use of the product to the development team.

Boris Volfson
http://whalerider.ru/2011/abstracts/13492.html



One of the most interesting reports for me at the conference. The story of how SoftLine built the management structure for the entire development of Scrum. In total, about 120 people work in this structure now.

For me, Boris’s experience is valuable in two ways: first, agile works in a large organization, and second, they have gone from a standard matrix structure to project management, having overcome political battles and serious restructuring.

Periodically in EPAM I come across questions about how a team of 50-80 people go to Scrum. And here the ignorance of approaches and practices, political issues, unwillingness to change customers, etc. Therefore, it is extremely interesting to talk with a person who has launched such processes and has already done it.

Alex Yakima
http://whalerider.ru/2011/abstracts/13399.html



Another report on how to scale Scrum.

I think that by its volume of information and importance this was the best report of the conference. And it seems to me that the audience simply could not understand the level of problems that Alex was covering.

Conclusion: in some set up agile does not work! Under agile, you need to build an organization again, you can not first build walls and build testing and analytics teams, and then scrum the practices on them. We want Scrum - we have to destroy the walls. The beauty of agile in communications.

Anton Marchenko
http://whalerider.ru/2011/abstracts/13410.html



I really respect the company TargetProcess , where Anton works. Not only for the fact that they develop a very functional agile-tool. But also for the fact that they are trying all the newest things in agile practices, realizing that they will soon have to automate this (when these practices become de facto standards). The same with Kanban , already there, already working, can be used for a long time.

Conference impression

Conference is people. I found everyone I was looking for, collected business cards, talked and drank coffee, so for me the conference not only took place, but was a success. Went with benefit.

Photo failed to insert. See here: fotki.yandex.ru/users/yshilyaev/album/170321/slideshow