Pune is hosting India’s very first Scrum Gathering this year in July with the theme of “Scrum - Kal, Aaj aur Kal“, meaning the past, present and future of Scrum. I appreciate all efforts by Madhur Khaturia and his team in making it happen. I hope and believe it will be yet another milestone in India’s journey towards agility, and will stimulate a whole lot of new ideas and conversations thus ultimately leading to increased awareness, higher adoption and more breakthrough products from India.

Scrum Gathering India Regional 2013

I got confirmation mail yesterday that my workshop on “The Joys of Designing Agile Solutions for New-Age Problems” has been accepted for Scrum Star Trek, which is the track for discussing The future of Agile Philosophy and Scrum Framework. This would focus on new techniques, methods , innovations and concepts being used by practitioners. This would have workshops, concept presentations and round-tables on future of Scrum. The other two tracks are Scrum From the Trenches and Scrum Accomplished.

I am really looking forward to this workshop. Here are a few details about it.

Agile methods, and scrum in particular, help organize the work by prioritizing items could be done and delivered in a small timebox. While its simplicity and effectiveness is based on timeless experiences that make it an effective approach for a certain class of problems where a product backlog exists in some shape or form, and there is some basis (scientific, data-driven or otherwise) for the product owner to prioritize features, it doesn’t really offer any clear guidance for a newer class of problems where, for example, the work is so radically new that there might not be a product backlog. For that matter, there might not even be a market, a customer or a product to begin with. Think of you specifying and designing ‘something’ when no such product ever existed - not just in the minds of customer but even in the dreams of its designers! How can one have a ‘product owner’ or a product backlog when there is even no source of such information? All we have is a loose set of ‘ideas’ which might or not work. Distilling such innovative ideas in a product or a sprint backlog might be too premature. We clearly need a different approach than a thoroughbred Scrum.

In the last few years, the work on Customer Development and Lean Startup by Steve Blank and Eric Ries has led to putting a framework in place for solving such class of “VUCA = Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous” problems in a more systematic and result-oriented manner. These have greatly helped startups and entrepreneurs where failure rates tend to be extremely high traditionally. In this half-day workshop, we will experience to joys of creating a product starting with Design Thinking and apply principles of Customer Development and Lean Startup and explore the nuances of designing agile solutions for such new-age problems.

Do you have experiences to share in this class of new-age problems? How do you design effective solutions that allow you to thrive on ambiguity, deal with unknowns and keep moving at lightning speeds despite maintaining a holistic sense of agility? Share back your ideas and experiences…