Starting the Scrum community in The Netherlands

In over two years of working with Scrum I’ve found it to be a great focus point for people who want to do projects better, faster and have more fun. The clients I’ve worked with, introducing Scrum, have all seen a surge in employee satisfaction, customer collaboration and focus on team effort. Xebia is entrenched in Scrum and we host certification, events and training. Together with some gurus like Jeff Sutherland and our colleagues we’ve trained hundreds of people in the Netherlands in using Scrum. After all this positive responses and experience, here at Xebia we thought there should be more ways of sharing Scrum experiences. So we think it’s time for a “Scrum User Group” in The Netherlands.
We’ve set up the Dutch Scrum group and named it nlscrum. We have already hosted our first meetup last month and it was a great success! We hope our next event will even draw a bigger crowd and more inspiring ideas!

The nlscrum community is now three months old and has over 50 members. Our first event was a few weeks ago, on the 3rd of September. About 25 nlscrum members attended our Open Space meetup. The event got a great rating of 4,5 out of 5! Most of the people were Scrum Masters or people starting with Scrum. The Open Space format needed some getting used to as it was new to most people, but after a while it turned out great. There were lots of discussion, sharing of experiences and new insights generated. I was glad to hear people thought is was a great gathering.
Discussing Scrum I noticed a few things. Some people were talking about doing multiple projects with one team. Apparently most Scrum customers aren’t used to feeding their teams with a single task. Serge has done some great work with multiple team setups, so he could help out there. Another thing that came up is the unique way we at Xebia combine project management with Scrum. We should talk about that more often as it will help people get a more mature Scrum process faster. Listening to the attendees I noticed the Product Owner role is still a bit of a mystery. I expect that role will get some extra attention next year.
That’s why our next meetup on November 4th will have a Product Ownership theme! Check the nlscrum.org website to apply and sign up for our next meeting. There are also pictures of the last meeting and a mailing list for burning Scrum questions. I’m curious what your experiences with Scrum are and I know we’ll be able to learn from sharing.