Scrum User Group Bordeaux Part 1

One of the advantages of working in another country, is I can visit other agile user groups.

Last year I went to the Extreme Tuesday Club (London)

Today I visited the Scrum User Group Bordeaux

 

Interesting about these exchanges, is I get to really see the differences in how these user groups are run.

XTC is running every Tuesday.  Same day, same time, more or less same place (they have changed locations a few times in the last 10 years).

 

Philippe told me he had some challenges finding the right timebox for the user group.

At this moment the Scrum User Group session is from 18:00 till 19:30.

 

People in the Belgium community might be surprised that I was home at 20:50 after this meeting. Yes I’m working on my life balance.

(Not easy if you know that I asked my family to move with me to Bordeaux and at the same time have scheduled 19 days at conferences.)

At least being home so early I could write about my experience after putting my kids to bed.

 

In the Belgium Agile community we have a lot’s of agile games, almost all these Belgium games take 3 hours to run. As far as I remember (hey I’m have been working in EMEA since November 2009) the meeting in Belgium started with a drink at 18:00 and the sessions started at 19:00. The sessions ended at 22:00. (And the discussions ended in a pub after midnight) We always had 3 hours for the session.

I can not imagine what the Belgium Games would have looked like with only sessions of 1,5 hours. Not surprisingly, I found the 1 hour for the retrospective game very short 😉

But that view is very influenced by our culture difference (I’m talking about the culture of the agile community here.)

 

I’ll do two perfection games on the evening:

one on the retrospective game and one on the event.