It was great see David Weiss’s post Using Scrum in MacBU.
Today marks the official beginning of sprint number 2 for the Automation Team. Last month was our first attempt at a modified Scrum. I mention "modified Scrum" simply because of the cruel fact that I don’t know everything there is to know about the Scrum Methodology. We just kind of picked out what made immediate sense and did it. It’s a good change and we are learning. While our team is the first team in MacBU to be using this Agile process, hundreds of teams at Microsoft have had great success with it.
It goes on to document David’s experience with the teams first sprint (mostly highs). I have the same experience as David: "You’d be surprised how different people can interpret even the shortest sentence!". Congratulations David it sounds like a great start – you just added one more subscriber to your blog.
One question David why did you choose OmniPlanner as a tool to manage your backlog. Did you try index cards? Did they fail?
David also remarked that hundreds of teams are MS are using Agile, this just adds more evidence to the fact that even the behemoths of the world (British Telecom, Yahoo, Google, Seimens and SAP) are starting to use Agile. At this rate Agile will move from being a competitive advantage to a necessity.