I have an hour to kill in the Vienna hotel I am staying at so I thought I would take the opportunity to do a brain dump of what I have seen and done Agile (or technologically related) as a bit of a midrospective:
- Telstra are evil. I tried to get my phone working with an Austrian SIM card and the phone is hard coded to not allow any other SIM card to work in it. Several internet searches have found that this is due to the way Telstra and Apple setup the phones.
- Apple is evil. For some reason unbeknown to me apple products don’t work on 95% of WiFi connections here (including my hotel, which was one of the reasons why I choose it). There is nothing worse than watching my hubby surf at ease on his android and me being devoid of any interwebs.
- Austrian keyboards are weird. The z and y are around the other way. Count how many ‘Y’s there are in this blog. Each one of them I typed a ‘z’ in originally. Many of the special keys are in different spots or work using the right Shift or Alt.
- I am finding some intriguing parallels between the history of Vienna and Agile. When I get back home I will write a more detailed blog but in essence there is definately a theme of people who were considered revolutionaries, who were incredibly passionate and entreprenurial but were ostricized for most of their lives. How they dealt with it and the ethics that they had I found very inspirational.
- I have just finished reading Buyology whilst here. Again I will probably blog about it but again found huge parallels to Agile and Lean Startups. If you haven’t read this book then get a copy – it is eye opening and highly educational.
Non Agile related:
- Surprisingly there is very little sunshine in Summer (it has rained every day)
- Nothing opens until generally 10am. This would not be an issue if I didn’t wake up at 6am every morning. On the upside most things are open till late at night.
- I’m sleeping really well. Walking about 7 hours every day will do that for you.
- I need to buy another memory card. I have been taking about 400 photos per day (and processing them back to 100 at night). Vienna is truly an incredibly beautiful city. If you love jaw dropping architecture every time you walk around a corner then this is a must see destination for you.
Agile Forest 
Mike, I absolutely agree that Scrum is small and simlpe enough for anyone to get it. The problem is not the solution itself, it’s the required change. Simple solutions to an unhealthy life style would be to eat less and/or to exercise more and yet we have big problems (pun intended) with obesity in both the US as well as here in Sweden.So many parts of Scrum are not even about learning how to do new things, they’re simply about not doing a bunch of bad things, and yet people keep doing them.I do think that both Scrum and Kanban are excellent tools, but we almost always underestimate the power of habit. The cultural change needed to implement Scrum is much more complex than the tool itself. In many organizations, just getting people to talk with each other is a major change. Looking a couple of weeks ahead instead of a budget year ahead can be a major change. These changes are often made even harder by the fact that the rest of the organization is still implementing old ways of thinking that are working against the change effort. Revisiting the unhealthy life style example; it’s like trying to diet while being surrounded by fast food restaurants.I don’t propose that we should go lighter than Scrum, but I think that -very often-, the changes that stick are the ones implemented gradually.Cheers!