Tue 15 Jun 2010
As some of you may know I have been on a committee led by Harvey Wheaton, that was tasked with selecting the candidates for the two vacant seats on the Scrum Alliance’s board. I was pretty surprised with the proposal to be a part of this group given some of my views, mostly about CST process etc., that I express also here, but I took this as an opportunity to help the Scrum Alliance.
It turned out to be an interesting experience. Since SA’s bylaws didn’t prescribe a process we should follow, so we had to self-organize and devise a process that would be – in our opinion – fair. It worked out better than – I think – anyone of us expected. We managed to come up with a pretty good selection pretty quickly with just e-mails and two confcalls.
The process was pretty simple – on the first call we decided we want to learn more about potential candidates who expressed interest, especially what they want to bring to Scrum Alliance, so we have created a simple questionnaire for them to respond to. Some obviously didn’t saving us work, but 17 people did submit responses varying in length. As it turned out on the last call all of us took time and read through those responses, some even more than once. Thus prepared we were able to reach a consensus during the second call and present a very balanced list of candidates.
Personally, when reading the submissions, I was looking for concrete vision and addressing SA’s real problems (damaging and unnecessary rift with Ken and Jeff, certification process in dire need of an overhaul – incl. the CST process, lack of vision and openness in what the board does, Scrum being pushed aside by the “Kanban camp’s†marketing efforts etc.) rather than general statements on promoting Scrum etc. I think a board member is responsible for steering the organization in a (hopefully) right direction, not for defining what is Scrum for example (“Scrum Guide†by Ken and Jeff does this well enough).
Overall, I’m pretty satisfied with the candidates that we selected – the list will be published on the SA site pretty soon.
Now it is up to members to vote and choose, keeping in mind that those two board members will have limited influence and can be outvoted by the incumbents anyway. However, at least they can probably influence the Scrum Alliance in the right way or tell the rest of the members how the board works or what it decides and why.
It is about time to reinvigorate the Alliance and save it from fading into irrelevance – which is what can happen if those pressing points I mentioned above are not addressed – so vote carefully.