Eating Chinese Food in Norway

I'm on a trip doing some training in Norway. So usually when I visit places I try to eat the local cuisine so it makes it interesting and becomes a learning experience for me.

On the first couple nights here I had my choice of many local pubs and restaurants and I'd pick one and order something that I typically would not have access to in my home in Philadelphia, PA.

Tonight is my final night and I'm flying back to the US tomorrow. I had a craving to eat Chinese food. I felt a little guilty putting my nose up to the locals and choosing to eat Chinese, until I realized they like Chinese food too, or else the restaurant probably wouldn't be here. This was related to the feeling I got when I walked into a McDonald's in Beijing,China!

Anyway, the point is that I like Chinese food and I've eaten it in just about every country I've been in (including China of course). I like the style, the types of ingredients, and the flavors. But in each restaurant that I go to there is always a little difference based on the cook's style, local tastes, and available variants of ingredients. So, for example in Norway the fish dishes are a little different than you would get in Chicago.

Bringing it back to Scrum....when people ask what kinds of projects to use Scrum or not use Scrum I always give an answer that you can use it anywhere it makes sense to you, as demonstrated in my Family Scrum post. Every application of the techniques may have a little twist related to the specifics of the project, but the foundation is very similar. The style, flavors, types of ingredients are consistent; the variations come from the local influence.

Just like eating Chinese food in Norway!!

Interesting Uses for Scrum

Do you have any interesting applications where you've used Scrum?

Recently, I used it with my family when we were having a lot of "churn" in deciding how to re-decorate our family room. Everyone had their own idea of what it would be, but no common goals.

So, over some Dunkin Donuts coffee and donuts we ran a planning session and created a prioritized backlog. From there we went out and executed very efficiently and turned everything around in less than a week.

My wife Sheri was the Product Owner (of course), I was the ScrumMaster, and the rest of the gang was the team. My wife came up with 3 prioritized goals for the room, and then everyone wrote 2-3 user stories. We then sized them, put a value on them, and prioritized the list. From that point it was just a matter of going to a furniture store, carpet store, and a few clicks on Amazon and that was it....Done!

It was very interesting to see how fast everything moved when we had a set of common goals and everyone had a chance to participate in the outcome.

My students love when I show the pictures from this session and it really highlights how Scrum is useful for many different types of projects!

Do you have any interesting applications of Scrum?