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Navigating Nexus

Nexus (n): a relationship or connection between people or things

Approximately six months ago, this discussion could be heard in in our office:
Product Owner: Well, show me the way that this would actually work in real life.
Development team: No, this review just focuses on the UI of the what you have requested.
Product Owner: What would be the point of that exactly? I want to see how it would work. Why can I not see the full flow?
Development team: We have developed the front-end for this product. The back-end team is still busy developing their part. We can’t integrate without the back-end.
Product Owner: This is useless to me.

Very seldom do project teams have the good fortune of being able to develop an entirely new product, from scratch, within only one team. Oftentimes, several teams are required to collaborate; having to anticipate dependencies and integration points. Frequently, these teams work in isolation of each other hoping to get to a point in the development where the code would all be merged and magically everything would just work. The thing is: we all hope it will magically work, sometimes we really believe it will, but in practice, it almost never does.

We were faced with this challenge very recently. Five teams. One product. Three global geographic locations. After much reading the answer was apparent: Nexus. Scaled Scrum. It made sense because we have been implementing Scrum and could see the value of scaling the way things were currently working well. And so we dove right in and did it!

This presentation will touch briefly on what exactly the rules of Nexus are. Thereafter, I’d like to share the learnings that we have experienced thus far: from the “we will never try that again” aspects to the “this is amazing, we should do it with all our teams” aspects. The Nexus Framework for scaling Scrum has, for the most part, been very good for us and has taught the value of early collaboration in order to integrate almost from the get-go.

About the speaker:

A Scrum Master at Hello Group, Della passionately and tenaciously advocates Scrum and Agile values. Della particularly enjoys coaching and training; and has been known to “… use practical examples [that] help us understand the foundation of Scrum so we can best implement the framework.”

Della is deeply pro-innovation, and “truly lives Agile” in the way that she approaches professional situations. Della believes, “If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you’ve always got.” – Henry Ford

*As quoted by colleagues and workshop attendees.

For more information and to RSVP: Navigating Nexus