Hello to everyone, my name is Peter Hyde and I am a scrumaholic.

With the current push back against the predominance of Scrum in the Agile space I want to go on record and say I love using Scrum for development. To be honest I really enjoy delivering products to happy customers, it’s just that Scrum helps me to do it better. And yes I will also use XP, Kanban, Lean and any other practices that help in developing products but Scrum is truly where my heart is.

My role is to help transform development to deliver faster, cheaper and better systems – the way I achieve this is to implement Scrum. Luckily this also gives us happier workplaces with engineers enjoying the work they trained for whilst avoiding the heavyweight office politics and overweight process that have built up.

I believe we should all be learning continually and improving our knowledge and skills around whatever interests us. I read way too much, utilise on-line resources, attend Agile user groups and conferences, and try to attend as many training courses as I can. I am a certified scrum master, certified product owner and certified scrum professional but I am fairly agnostic about organisations and methods. I dislike scrumdamentalists who have rigid inflexible beliefs and are closed to questions.

I have worked with Scrum on development teams, as a scrum master and as a product owner before becoming an Agile coach and transformation consultant. I am not keen on titles, fixed processes or heavy documentation but I do understand their history and purpose. We need to work within companies to help them transform to an Agile culture and this takes time.

Don’t worry about the web site name, PragmaticScrum.info is not yet another spin on Agile but is simply a blog site for me to be able to jot my thoughts down. My aim is to be able to collate my posts and respond to comments faster.

The Cambridge dictionary defines ‘Pragmatic’ as

Solving problems in a sensible way that suits the conditions that really exist now, rather than obeying fixed theories, ideas, or rules

This description nails it for me, pure scrum is great as a philosophical destination but most projects are not green-field web developments using new teams within a perfect Agile company structure so we need to work hard to get there adapting as we go.

Thanks and please e-mail me with your ideas or suggestions for future posts,

Peter Hyde aka Scrum Ronin