Tom Mellor
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 00:37
Who is Tom Mellor?
Speaker: Tom Mellor 00:40
Oh, that’s a really good question. I’m nobody special, I just happen to be in the right place at the right time, many years ago. I didn’t know anything about agility or what was going on, I happen to have been promoted to a project manager in one company. And I already knew the futility associated with being a project manager. This idea that you’re going to predict the schedule of something and programming. And I was new to programming. I came from the business side and knew very little about technology when I transferred over to the technology field in my company. So I came into my company’s IT department as a business analyst. Because I had told the person there, I don’t know anything about programming, I know very little about technical products.
And they said, well, we can put you to work as a business analyst. And I didn’t even really know what that was. But they said, you’re really going to work with the business side to try to figure out what they need and products that we build. And they didn’t use the word products at the time. That’s a term that we use now. But they used applications or systems. And I said, okay, and they said we call those requirements. So you’ll gather these requirements that people need and it sounded so easy, just go talk to them and ask them what they want. And then transfer that back to the programmers and the programmers build it, and then we deliver it back to the business people. And everybody’s happy.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 02:45
That always happens, right?
Speaker: Tom Mellor 02:50
And it seemed to me that it’s a type of manufacturing process, right? It had a kinship to that to me, in that you determined what you were going to build. And then you went built it, and then you delivered it, like building a house really, and it was explained that way to me in our department, that it’s effectively like building a car. And I went through some pretty rigorous training as a business analyst. I taught many classes and I mentored with people. But as I was developing an aptitude for that and becoming familiar with the acumen and that sort of thing. I also started to detect sort of this underlying tension that maybe things don’t always go as they think they’re going to go. And as I moved along in the process of becoming a business analyst, I quickly learned that things often don’t go that you think they’re going to go. And it didn’t take me long to figure out that’s because there’s a disconnection between what people want or what they think they want, and what’s delivered to them. And this is back in 2001, 2002. And we had a very rigorous process that we followed, we actually used a form of Cooper and Lybrand summit de methodology. And it was brutally bureaucratic. The irony behind that I later found out was when Ken Schwaber and I were developing a working relationship and a mentoring relationship, I asked him, what were you building when you first started using Scrum?
And he said, well, we were working for a client and we were actually automating some processing for Coopers and Lybrand, summit de methodology. And I just exploded and laughed at him, and he looked at me very strangely. And he goes, why is that so funny? And I said, that happens to be the methodology we used at my company. He started laughing. And he goes, oh I feel for you. It was horrible. And very bureaucratic, I don’t know how else to describe it. So I had been a manager on the business side, stepped out of management, stepped into what we call, a business analyst position. And then I was encouraged or enticed or coaxed, however you want to characterize, into becoming a project manager. And I had worked with project managers for a couple of years and as soon as I got put in that hot seat, I was promoted. That’s what they called it. I was sentenced to become a project manager. And as soon as I got put into that hot seat, I immediately understood that they’re often in a no-win situation. And I had mentors, of course, and I went through probably one of the most extensive and exhaustive training regimens in project management in private industry, I essentially went through two years, the equivalent of two years of academic training and project management.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 06:57
How much of that did you use?
Speaker: Tom Mellor 07:02
Yeah, we were expected to use, so it was very defined, right, the process was very defined. And we were expected to align our learning with the methodology and to, and we had a methodology book, you’ve probably seen those Milan, flip them open, and they tell you exactly what you have to do the process manual. And we were expected not to deviate from that and we were audited. To assure that we didn’t, or, if we did that we had, I guess you would call it the permissions to do that. And, so it was probably six months after I had become a project manager, that I picked up an old copy of software testing and quality assurance magazine, STQA was called. And it’s now called Sticky minds. And it’s been around years and years, but it was laying on a coffee table in a room that I happen to be taking a break in so, in the back of it was an article by a guy named Ken Schwaber, who was describing this process that he used, it’s probably a four- or five-page article. And the magazine was a maybe a year old, so I was probably reading it in November of 2003. And it was probably late 2002 edition.
So I looked at the cover, and I said, this has been around a while because it was all this magazine was already a year old. But at the bottom of the article, it said if you want further information, please email Ken Schwaber, and they had the address down there. So I emailed him, I jumped on a computer and I said, this sounds fascinating and I work at a huge company and I’d like to try it here. And we’re having trouble delivering things under the traditional way. And we’re expected to comply with all of the compliance sections of methodology and I said I’d be interested in your opinion. And I don’t have the email response, but I remember it struck me because he, I’m paraphrasing here, but he basically said, hi, Tom, you’re either the dumbest person I’ve ever heard from or the craziest. Either way, give me a call and you put his phone number down.
So I picked up the phone and I called him immediately, and I said, hi, this is the dumb crazy guy that read your book, using Scrum at a big company. And we talked for probably 45 minutes. And basically, he did everything, I think that he could do to convince me not to do it. Oh, he told me this is going to be dangerous for you. I’m sure you’re just loaded down with processes that you have to follow, you probably have a rigorous compliance division, you probably even have a project management office and he goes, look, all those things that these huge companies use to govern their software development is exactly opposite of what we do. And so, I got to thinking and, he finally got to the point, he goes, Look, I think if you use this there, and you’re caught, you could get fired, based on what he told me. And I’m thinking fired for using this? Wow. I just paused and, there was one of those awkward silences, and I finally said, I’m going to do it anyway. And he goes, okay. And he said, well, if by chance, you get fired, and you need a reference, I can probably pitch in one for you.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 11:43
That’s nice of him.
Speaker: Tom Mellor 11:46
He doesn’t even know me. And he’s go out on a limb for me. So I said, Okay. And then he said, if you try it, let me know how it goes for you. And I said, Sure, I’ll, oh, I got your email, I’ll drop you a line. And we started keeping that connection open. Because I tried it. And it worked. I mean, I felt that it worked. And we actually stunned some people at my organization, because we delivered a program much faster than they anticipated. Without the deviation and quality that you would expect. Now I will say we did avoid or even circumvent some of the auditing procedures. And I had told my supervisor, we were going to do that, because they were demanding this system, be delivered in a pretty short period of time. But we’re also working for a vendor, you may know the vendor EDS, the Rosborough’s old company. And they had no idea. Anything about what we were doing. As far as the processing, right? The process of building none of the nomenclature they knew the people I was working with, was, in any way familiar to them, they were sort of reticent to use the vernacular, the vocabulary, because it wasn’t broadly understood. And interestingly, it wasn’t full of acronyms.
Because all of these methodologies have nothing to do. [inaudible 13:33]. And it’s funny when you use an acronym, and then you look at somebody you go, do you know what that acronym actually spells out? And, they’re like no, I only know that the acronym. I don’t know what the entire phrases. So anyway, it worked. And I stayed in contact with Schwaber. And we started forming a relationship, mentoring wise. He was fascinated that I’d actually tried it fortune 50 company. I said I didn’t get fired, obviously. But I said, I think there will be some challenges and problems with this, because we’re not culturally, organizationally set up to do this very well because his concept, even back then was to have an encapsulated team. Right, an autonomous team that was dedicated to that work. And he closely aligned with the theory of constraints.
We talked about things like that a lot. He said, the reason we can’t get things done in these organizations is people are multitaskers . They’re working on way too many things at once. And I said, well, that’s a problem we have. He goes, if you just allowed people to be dedicated to work, you get that work done so much more efficiently and effectively, that you would amaze them. But because their minds are married to this manufacturing mindset, they don’t really want to do that with people. They think it’s going to actually slow work down. And he asked me one time he goes, you have way more work than you can do, don’t you? I said, Oh, God of course. I mean, would they want us to cook all of the meals on the menu and I said, we bake, we can basically get to one side of the menu any kind of lab. Well, you’re not in any unique position.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 15:56
I mean, Ken likes to from the get go, he even invited you to serve on the Board of Scrum Alliance. How was that experience serving on the board?
Speaker: Tom Mellor 16:08
Yeah, I as we got to know each other, I had been involved in nonprofit boards since the 90s. In the early 90s. And in passing conversation, I talked about that, and I think that’s what caused him to ask me to come on was, we’d already had one board member, fellow named Steve Fram, and his dad was actually a university professor, and had written several books on nonprofit governance. And so Steve made his way onto the board, Steve was an aficionado of Scrum. And I think had been trained by Schwaber in it. But along the line of conversation, he discovered that Fram, his father, basically expert in nonprofit board governance and working so he asked Steve to come on, Steve was a startup entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, was extremely bright, and very even keel emotionally and everything. So, I think it worked out well, for the board to have Steve on there. And the other people that he had on the board were, I would call them qualified professional level people. He had a vice president from key bank. In fact, when I looked around the board, my first meeting, I’m thinking, if you really want to categorize people by level of position in their companies, I’m a peon. Yeah, I was a project manager and then Scrum Master. I mean, I was sitting next to people who were startup entrepreneurs, Vice President of a development in a bank, large, huge bank, and he didn’t really care about that. But to me, it was sort of a little bit on nerving that, and I think the thing I fell back on was, I’d had many years of experience serving on nonprofit boards.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 18:35
So what type of stuff did you guys talk about? Yeah, what was some of the challenges? So, from 2008, 2010. And then he even asked, you served as a chair of the board, as well. So what are some of the, what do you if you reflect back, what are some of the biggest decisions that you guys, challenge that you had to deal with, just in general, like, as a board?
Speaker: Tom Mellor 19:01
So in nonprofits, the board is responsible for acting in a fiduciary capacity to manage the financial functions and the operational functions of the nonprofit. And there are certain state and even federal laws, like we have to publish a 990-tax form, and there’s quite a bit of leeway about whether you can make money in a nonprofit. And that’s been a discussion in associated groups that you and I belong to for many years. What’s too much money? And those are called reserves and it’s not unusual for nonprofits to have large cash reserves. And the interesting thing about that this nonprofit was it did not have a, what I call a fundraising division. In other words, if you look at the Red Cross or nonprofits like that, they typically have a fundraising division that goes out and solicit contributions, donations, things like that.
Here, we didn’t have that, because we had a fairly steady supply of income through certification fees that were coming in, because we were providing at that time, a unique certification, and it was highly in demand. And so we didn’t have to go out and solicit money from anybody. We didn’t have to solicit contributions. We didn’t have to get financing for things. We just had a steady cash flow into the business. And the thing was, is when you look at our operations, we had very little in expense, we didn’t own a building. We did all of our staff was contracted staff at the time, we had, I think, three employees, so when you looked at those kinds of things, we were really in a very unique position and an enviable position for many nonprofits. We were cash rich, and getting richer, and we were expense. We had strong expense management there, because we just didn’t have a lot of expenses. And that so really, the problem was serving on this board was, many of the people on the board didn’t really know how to function on a board. The by-laws were not always clear as to the specific duties, they were pretty generalized.
And the chair of the board, Schwaber was intimately involved in the operations, you hardly ever see that. Typically, you try to keep an arm’s length distance from operations, I mean, usually have a director or somebody that reports to you, right, and then you stay out of their business, you manage his performance, we typically reviewed performance twice a year and, I wasn’t on that committee but there was a committee that reviewed and Jim Kondo, when I was on the board, Jim Kondo was the managing director. And Jim had come from the Indianapolis Chapter of the American Red Cross. And he was a certified nonprofit executive. So I mean, he was a very capable, competent director, he knew how to handle the deal. And these directors know the political fraud that’s inside these organizations. There’s always politicization of what’s going on but it was paramount in this organization.
And really, the politics of it stemmed from the fact that one of the founders of the organization was so intimately involved in the management of the organization. In fact, basically did not believe he could make a move, I would say a strategic move, or even a tactical move in support of any kind of strategy we had without getting the blessing of Schwaber. And we on the board, were somewhat oblivious to that. I mean, we functioned I think as a typical board functions. We went through an agenda at our meetings, we had answers, looked at strategies, but we really didn’t have a lot of strategic thought because this growth of certifications was growing exponentially.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 24:24
It was crazy.
Speaker: Tom Mellor 24:28
And $50 is a pop and sometimes they were certifying 10,000 people a month Milan, think about 10,000 people a month times $50 is $500,000. And that wasn’t every month, yeah, it was steadily increasing to the point where that was going to be the norm. And I remember having a conversation with Steve Fram around our concerned about are we going to get to the point where, we basically have so much money, that we’re going to draw unnecessary attention from the Internal Revenue Service. And so, we had a treasurer and he said, not really, because as long as we’re not profiting, in other words, no person is profiting from it, the institution, the organization can basically hold in reserves a lot of capital. We call it reserves, but, like he said, Dan Hansi, was the Treasury guy. Dan said he goes, Look, what happens if the economy suddenly takes a big dive, and this starts to dry up? Yeah, we still have ongoing fixed expenses granted, not a lot. But…
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 26:00
So what happened in 2010 rolls around you as a board member? And have to get Ken or you ask him to leave or [inaudible 26:17]?
Speaker: Tom Mellor 26:18
That was September of 2009. And I can’t really go into the minute details of that. We found some problems. Well, I wouldn’t say we found problems, problems were brought to my attention specifically, by some people. And it doesn’t matter who it was, it was somebody with knowledge, obviously. And so, I was at a conference in Denver, and I got this information. And I’m thinking, wow, this sounds peculiar. And so I called some other board members and I said, maybe we should get together and talk about this. I think I emailed them and made a call a couple of them. And I said, let’s get together and find out or at least figure out what’s going. And we did. So, we got together and I happened to be in Denver, with a couple of other Certified Scrum trainers guy named Lowell Lindstrom, who later became the interim Managing Director of the scrum Alliance for a while, and a lady named Michelle Slager.
And Michelle and Lowell and I were putting on a presentation at this insurance conference about agility in Scrum. Because, most of the people there, this is 2008, Most of the people there was that were not familiar with the concepts or anything. So we were going to have them do some fun things. And, just introduce the concepts too. So they weren’t really involved in anything except that I had to tell them I’ve got some scrum Alliance business I need to attend to here and there, and we were only had one session. So we did our session, and that was that. But we had some meetings, that we actually got together on a conference call while I was there, the person who had the information explained what had happened. And I remember thinking, and I wasn’t the only one that, what if the information now suggests that some impropriety had taken place?. And we, molded over for about, I don’t know, 10 days, what action we would have to take. And the conclusion we came to was, at a minimum, we would have to ask Kench Schwaber to step down as chair from the board. Because to us, the circumstances presented a clear conflict of interest for his service on the board.
And we were all in agreement of that, so well. I guess they’re sort of an irony here, but Schwaber was supposed to come to my company and speak. And I got a call from his wife, Christine and this is after I got back from Denver. So I got a call from Christine and she says Ken is not going to be able to make it to your meeting. He’s been in a serious accident with his bike and a car, he was riding his recumbent bike, and it collided with a car. And I said, is he hospitalized? And she said, yes, he’s hospitalized. So he was in the hospital in Boston, we continued to have discussions. And it basically came down to, we agreed he’s got to leave. We need to tell him that the best way is to get his agreement to leave, his voluntary leaving, that’s what we thought. And so, they said, the rest of the board said, you’re probably closest to him Tom, why don’t you facilitate the discussion? Meaning why don’t you talk to him? And, we called him and he was in the hospital. And he and Chris, his wife was there. And he wasn’t really reluctant about stepping down, but he immediately wanted to negotiate. And one of the things he wanted to negotiate is he wanted to keep authority over a new program that he was developing with Microsoft called the Certified Scrum developer program. Right, so he wanted to retain, for lack of a better word ownership of that. And I was sitting in my company space, right, this is on a conference call so I couldn’t see the, other board members. But I was thinking to myself, no, that’s not going to happen.
So I just woke up. And I said, we’re not going to do that, Ken, when you step off of the board, the board and the operations management, meaning Jim Kondo will take over all ongoing strategic initiatives, basically, is what I said. And he didn’t like that, of course, right. So the phone call ended with his resignation. I wanted it in writing, but he was in the hospital. So I said, I’ll follow up with an email to you. And I’ll confirm that you’re resigning from the board of directors of the scrum Alliance effective at 5pm, Eastern time today. And whatever date that was, September 17, or whatever it was 2009. So I did that. And I didn’t get a response. So that was notice enough for us. Yeah. so he’s off. And then it was about, I don’t know, there was, of course, the news of his departure from the board spread like wildfire through the organization, there was no way you were going to, we’re going to keep that from getting that. That wasn’t going to happen. And so I immediately began fielding inquiries and questions, and what about this? What about that? No. Okay. And we can manage that. I mean, that was be expected. But then I got a call from Steve Fram. I think we had our meeting on Wednesday with Schwaber and , late Friday morning, maybe early Friday afternoon, because I was in Central Time and Fram was on West Coast time. He goes, I want you to enter this URL into your browser, and I want you to look at it. And the URL was www.scrum.org. And I put it in and I was shocked. And I’m like, what? Steve’s on the phone. I go, what is this? And he goes, welcome to Ken Schwaber’s new business. And so I’m navigating through the thing, and it’s obvious that it’s a training business.
And it’s obvious to us and in fact, he’s already announced certifications. And I incredulously tell Fram who laughed at me. I said he can’t do that. He’s a certified scrub trader that’s against the contract. And I can remember Fram effectively telling me, do you think he gives a damn Tom? That made me even angrier, so that put into process, a link the [inaudible 35:05] call it a process, there were letters and, you’re in violation of your contract as a certified scrum trainer. You cannot represent competing organizations blah, blah, blah. Never heard a word back from him, Miljan. Never heard anything. The only thing I heard was he had posted. Well he sent me one email reply. And it said at [inaudible 35: 38]. That was the only thing it said, obviously inferring that my allegiance and loyalty to him are madly violated, right? But he condemned me publicly called me [inaudible 35:55] said I had no business, even being in the organization. I mean, this coming from a guy who didn’t beg me to come on, but I hope pretty good insistently asked that I come on the board.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:10
And he liked you too , so he probably felt betrayed, right?
Speaker: Tom Mellor 36:13
Oh, he felt horribly betrayed? Of course he did.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 36:18
But you had to do it I mean, what was going through your head? Obviously had a conflict too, you had a good relationship with him. But you also wanted to do what’s right.
Speaker: Tom Mellor 36:25
Right. I knew I had to sacrifice our relationship, because my duty as a board member specifically, called out in the by-laws. Yeah, it was clear to me. In fact, I guess my only regret looking back is that I thought we should have taken more serious action. And I did not support that at the time. Yeah, I didn’t. And that sits crossways with me sometimes. Yeah. Because, I thought what he did was great [inaudible 37:13] that there should have been more done than just asking him to leave the board. I know.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 37:20
But if you look, with good, there’s bad with bad, there’s good, right? None of us would be where we are, if you take Ken out of the scrum picture. So, more than anybody else, I think even what he did, and his personality, we would not be where we are. Scrum wouldn’t be agile probably for at the moment wouldn’t be what it is, and what has become without Ken. So what are some of the things if you reflect back, you really appreciate about Ken? The things that, well proud to be his friend, maybe proud to, like hey, I’m associated with this guy. That’s yeah sometimes is, you going crazy with things and sometimes.
Speaker: Tom Mellor 38:25
I think pride is a little bit of a strong statement, I would say that I felt indebted to him. I mean, he really went out of his way to mentor me, I think more so than he did other people. I don’t know, because my relationship was quite personal with him. And we didn’t really talk about what his relationship was with other people. Whether he was helping other people or tutoring them or mentoring them, however you want to characterize it. I know it was quite close to Mike Cohn, because they trained a lot together and they actually started the scrum alliance together. So but his relationship with Cohn was more professional. That’s what I thought. they trained together. And they were friendly and continued to be even after Schwaber left the board and left the scrum Alliance. They continued to remain in contact. In fact, lots of the information that I got about how Ken was doing and things like that came from Mike. Because Ken would not respond to me. I reached out to him probably about six months ago by email just to see, never heard anything back. So and I think it really stuck in his craw.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 39:53
What would you tell him if he did pick up?
Speaker: Tom Mellor 39:58
I don’t know. I would, my intentions would be to repair a relationship that went sour, over 10 years ago. I remember I ran into Sutherland in an agile conference. And he jokingly said, you should come to the coffee shop in Lexington where there both lived [inaudible 40:19]
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:20
I know.
Speaker: Tom Mellor 40:24
And I said, it would be interesting if I walked through the door. What would happen?
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 40:29
And Lexington is a dear place to me too, because that’s where I learned about agile. I went to school in Rhode Island and Lexington is this trip between Providence and Boston where all the big companies were so…
Speaker: Tom Mellor 40:43
More known for its revolutionary war history than anything. They just both happen to live in that area. And they meet in Lexington, they have coffee. So one time I was out at an agile games conference in Boston, and I drove by his house. I just wanted to see, I don’t know, for posterity, I guess I just drove by and looked and the lights were on. And I’m thinking I don’t have the nerve to stop. And I don’t think it would even be appropriate to stop. Here I am, probably within 100 feet of him. And I’m not going to be able to talk to him. And he taught me a lot. In fact, people will tell you when they take my classes and when I interact with other people, I can recall conversations I’ve had with him at least my recollections of them very vividly. Things that he told me, things that he instilled in me and I’ll never forget that I once called Tim to his face a mystical. I said, people see you as mystical. And he laughed, and he goes, what the hell do you mean by that? And I said, I don’t know you sort of mesmerize them. And the biggest time I ever saw that happen was in Minneapolis at a Scrum gathering. We were in the closing circles. So this is back in 2007, I guess.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 42:18
Is it this one, you had to have two circles instead of one and people and people were freaking out?
Speaker: Tom Mellor 42:22
No, I’ll explain to you. So we’re in the closing circle, because Esther Derby, Diana Larson where there facilitating. And Esther had had a falling out with Ken, over whether the scrum Alliance should be nonprofit or should be for profit. Esther was quite insistent, it be nonprofit. And then she eventually bailed out of it. And she went over. Basically, Mike sided with her and said, we should we should keep it nonprofit. And of course, Diana was there and I don’t know what kind of relationship Diana had with Ken. He often had precarious relationships with people that had big names in the movement, often on kind of relationships. And it wasn’t for me to pry, and I didn’t get in the middle of them. But anyway, for some reason, he was not at the closing circle. He was actually at in the bar of the hotel. And at this scrum gathering we had, I want to say exactly 70 attendees. Now, I might be off a few. But that’s just the number that comes to my mind. There were 70 there. And there was a big roar over this notion that 70 people was way too many to have at a gathering.
That there’s no way and we certainly should never have more than 70 at a gathering. And it was getting pretty tumultuous in the room about this. Some people were like, well, wait a minute, we’re a growing community. Don’t you think we would expect to have more people and other people go, we’re going to ruin it, it’s just going to be overrun. And then pretty soon we’re into one of these big conferences and blah, blah, blah. And it was. So I went up for grabs, and I left the room and I went and I found him and he doesn’t drink. He was having a coke, he’s not a drinker. And so I said, I think you need to come into the room. And he looks up at me, he’s got those straw with coke in his mouth and he goes, he doesn’t even take the straw out and he goes, why? And I said because there’s a big argument going on about whether 70 people in scrum gathering is too many people. And all he said was, oh dear, he gets up. He doesn’t say a word to me. He just gets up and walks away. And he walks towards the room, the hotel, I guess you’d call it a conference room or whatever, right? And so I just get up and followed behind it. And he walks into the room and you would have sworn that the Messiah had walked into the room, honestly, the whole place just went immediately dead quiet you could hear a pin drop on the carpet in there.
And he went into this sort of Soliloquy about, think about it, we’re trying to grow a movement here. We’re trying to embrace people’s entrance into our community. We’re trying to help people gain traction with this blah blah blah, and he went on. And I remember he got to the end, and I’m thinking they’re in a trance, Milan, they’re in a trance. He’s got them in a trance. And he goes, who knows, someday, maybe we’ll have 150 at a gathering. Maybe even 200. And you can hear some of the gasps in the room like, wherever it ends up, let’s be a community, let’s help people understand and embrace what we’re doing here. And with that, that was it and everybody was happy, you would have thought we all drank the Kool aid. And I can remember I standing at the door thinking to myself, my God. I have just seen a deity completely in trance, his followers. I don’t know, I’m sure Diana and Esther were sort of standing back going, Oh, boy. But that’s the kind of belief that people had in him. It was surreal in some ways. I have had people ask me was cult-like? And I go, no, because in cults basically, there’s evil in those . I mean, if you think of Jim Jones, when he had the cult down again most people ended up committing suicide. I mean, this was not a cult, because I didn’t see it as nefarious or as evil. No, I just saw it as people really sort of like the minions, attached here to the god and anyway.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 47:57
Now that’s really interesting. What would Jeff Sutherland done during this time I know he was CIO, a company around this time, right? He got involved maybe around 2010. When did Jeff……..
Speaker: Tom Mellor 48:13
Yeah, no, Jeff was involved early. Here’s the deal with Jeff. So if you go back, this is Schwaber telling to me that when they went back, when Trooper said, we need to get scrum out in the public. And he said that Sutherlands attitude was, if that’s what you want to do fine. I’ve got things to do. But that’s not a quote, that’s yeah, I came across. Jeff was about doing Jeff’s thing. That was, one making money, which you don’t blame the guy for that. But two it was, helping companies he was associated with, deliver products faster, better and that’s what he saw here. He did not see his position as being any kind of altruistic one. Where I need to get this out to the rest of the world to save the world, that he could care less whether anyone else used Scrum. And this is 94, 95, so Schwaber is the one that presented the paper on scrum OPSLA [inaudible 49:24] Programming conference, Sutherland as I recall, Sutherland really wasn’t involved with that. And Sutherland wasn’t involved with the creation of the scrum Alliance. I don’t think he was even involved with the creation of the Agile Alliance, although I may be wrong about that he had signed the manifesto. Yeah. Oh, but he did that. I think because he wanted a voice in having scrum be part of that voice.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 50:05
Yeah. I was talking to Mike Cohn. And he said, I didn’t know this but he said that scrum Alliance came out of a program within agile lines. And which was interesting. I don’t think many people know that.
Speaker: Tom Mellor 50:24
Yeah. In fact, that’s how Esther and Mike and Ken got together because they were members of the Agile Alliance. And I grew up. The inspiration of it was Schwaber. In the Agile Alliance at the time, it was really an infant organization, trying to find its way. And my sense was, this never told me, but my sense from talking with Schwaber was, Schwaber was not going to have an influential position with that organization. In other words, if he started his own, and got some buy in for that, he would be able to guide that in that organization the way that he wanted it, that’s why, I won’t call it the dark side of Ken. But this is the side of Ken that was probably fought by Esther, cause Ken could probably see some money here. Right. And it did notch. It only made us laugh that scrum.org is a for profit organization, even though it has.org. URL, we laughed at that so hard. I can remember Dan Hints going, Oh, boy. He’s just taking it to the extreme. He’s put, the typical handle on the URL that you would see for a non profit. Yeah, holy profit
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 51:59
I haven’t thought about that. But that’s a really good observation.
Speaker: Tom Mellor 52:03
Oh, yeah. That irony hit us like, bricks in the face, man. We were like, oh, my God, he’s playing it for all it’s got. And it’s one of the things we never took away from the man was his shrewdness and his intelligence. And he had probably what most people would deem a fairly balanced combination of those two things. He was relatively shrewd. And he was also quite bright. And you had to sort of understand when he was being shrewd, and when he wasn’t. So. Yeah. And so Sutherland was never really interested in the scrum Alliance, his only interest was money. And this is the certification which just drove Esther crazy. It drove her crazy that somebody would pay for a certification that was effectively meaningless. That showed no competence, that had no way of assessing knowledge. We didn’t even have a test Milan, basically just got blessed at the end of the class, and you felt really good. And you boasted and you go, I’m a Certified Scrum Master. What does that mean you can do? I don’t know. But I’m a Certified Scrum Master.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 53:47
But it was a good timing though. Because at that time, I mean that is now any different but certifications were a big thing, right?
Speaker: Tom Mellor 53:56
They were starting to emerge, I actually chalk it up to Schwaber as driving the certification process even more. So PMP had been around a long time. And it was the leading certification in the IT industry. But there…
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 54:13
I mean in any industry like PMP and what PMI did, and I remember getting my PMP back in the day. Well, not back in the day, I guess it’s been 11 years ago. So in grand scheme of things is now but it was a big deal. And the standard the PMI set, it’s like your you get respect from others, and when you get your PMP and it was, something that PMI did I think really about the position and to make it what it is.
Speaker: Tom Mellor 54:49
I asked Schwaber I said so well, how did you come up with certified scrum master? And he goes well we were starting to do the class and people that graduated wanted to know, what am I? Am I a certified scrumer? Am I a professional Scrumer? What am I? I don’t know the exact details of the deliberation I think Cohn was involved with it maybe but maybe not either. But I do remember Schwaber specific telling me that it was a thumb of the nose at PMI that they came up with CSM and he goes, if PMI can have the PMP we can have the CSM ,we will show them. And I said they’ve got, I don’t know. There’s 400,000 PMPs Ken. And he goes, we’ll have over 400,000 Certified Scrum Masters Tom.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 55:55
Which is just crazy. I was looking at the report by indeed last year, and certified scrum master overtook the PMP. He must have been laughing but it’s also like, to have that vision and to…
Speaker: Tom Mellor 56:13
And of course, people love it when they laugh at your vision. And then later on it’s like, when I heard Jeff Bezos talk in 98 in Seattle, and he goes, you know what our vision is for this company called Amazon? If you can sell it, you can sell it on Amazon. And the whole group of about 150 people laughed at it.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 56:34
You can just think about what people can , all the jokes that they can come up with, just after he said that.
Speaker: Tom Mellor 56:40
I mean, I can remember sitting in the audience and a guy couple seats down from me said this guy is certifiably crazy. I’m wondering how certifiably crazy is he now? He’s crazy because he got divorced and gave his wife $36 billion.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 56:58
But still, yeah.
Speaker: Tom Mellor 57:01
I don’t know. It’s these kinds of entrepreneurs I call Schwaber that he had his company ADM, application development methods. His company ADM. In fact, originally, this scrum Alliance is operating under the ADM moniker? Yeah. Because it was, and that’s when they had to basically separate it out and take it nonprofit and stuff. But, when I say was shrewd, some of these things, you think the foresight of them is just remarkably brilliant. But sometimes it’s just a throwing of the dart at the dartboard. And thing sticks, and you go, wow, and it stuck. I can remember being on the board and looking at, I don’t remember the numbers, but I remember the trend line, go crazy going up, like there was not going to be. And everybody would say, we’d have a board meeting, they go, damn, we’re looking forward to level off, leveling off, just increasing at an increasing rate. So…
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 58:24
So, what do you think, based on words from alliances today serving on the board? How would you rate, what do you think? Where are things right now? And…
Speaker: Tom Mellor 58:36
Well, [inaudible 58:37] it’s a mature organization now. Right? So it’s gone from developmental. It’s even probably gone past cash Cal .And it’s now a mature business. It’s a mature organization. And the problem with these kinds of organizations is what happens when your population of potential purchasers starts to decrease, either due to competition or due to market penetration, what happened? And so, in some ways, and some trainers would agree with this, they’ve been their own worst enemy, because they kept putting more and more trainers out into the world. And people would say, let’s say there’s 300 trainers now, I don’t know what the number is, but people would say, in a world of 7 billion people, 7.5 billion people, two or 300 trainers is not very many. And even if you reduce that population down to let’s just say, technology people, right, there’s probably, two or 300 million technologies people in the world. So have you really penetrated your market? I don’t know. The problem is they haven’t differentiated themselves very well. And I think Schwaber’s organization has done that. Now Schwaber has stepped out of Scrum .org’s day to day management. I don’t think he’s doing all that well, health wise, but he’s effectively turned it over. And I think their current management is doing a good job of promoting it. And the other thing that I don’t know, for better or for worse, the CST is now allowed to be a PST, a professional scrum trainer.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:00:40
Or any for that matter can teach save classes, you can teach whatever you want.
Speaker: Tom Mellor 1:00:45
So the branding has taken a hit, because it’s not that exclusive anymore. In any time, your branding, it’s like, when Coca Cola was an infant company, and that was the big thing. And then all of a sudden, Pepsi Cola comes along, and RC Cola comes along and now there’s Colas all over the place. Coke is still a dominant player, because it’s done a really good job of protecting its brand, promoting that. But, the same thing could be said with beers, Budweiser, King of beers, blah, blah, blah. But now craft beers have taken a pinch plus the population, the market has changed. You don’t have as many people drinking beer as you used to. So, and now people are…
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:01:42
Now people have doing the other drugs and things like that.
Speaker: Tom Mellor 1:01:45
Yeah, there’s competing substances . Don’t you legalize marijuana? No, I’ve got nothing to compete. Yeah, it and so those kinds of things, I think, affect the brand. But this, it’s an unusual situation, because its largest stakeholder group, its most vocal one, most political one ,is its trainer group. That’s the one with the most vested economic interest in the organization. And when it starts to feel pain, it becomes very vocal, and there will be people that drop out. I’m probably going to drop out in the near future, because I’m old enough now to work. I don’t want to train like that anymore. But what happens to a person like you, or even younger, I’m mentoring people that want to become CSTs. And they still have many years left of working life. So what’s going to happen with them, these things are going to evolve, they’re going to ebb and flow, but it makes people uncomfortable, uneasy about what’s going to happen with their future, because a lot of them have either heard or actually seen people like me make really good money off of this. And not just me, many. Right? So if there’s no doubt that this, that I was a huge beneficiary of this organization’s economic model,
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:03:34
I think we all are, that’s why I said we as much we’ve all benefited, it’s just not just people that are associated with Scrum Alliance, but just in general. It’s created a whole new set of opportunities for a lot of people that otherwise may or may have not, if I had to guess probably not. But it’s been very interesting from that perspective. And I’m not sure, what would I mean, what do you think is coming? If you look at the next five years, what do you think, what are some of the obviously we can just guess, but what do you think is something that people might not be expected?
Speaker: Tom Mellor 1:04:20
Here’s what I think is coming. So you’re seeing this, the pace of this increase rapidly, and I’ve talked to friends that are still heavily involved in programming, so you’re going to see no code programming taking over. People won’t be writing code anymore. So that’s the first thing you’re going to see. So you’re going to see the, longevity of solutions shrink way down, if it was long enough when we were doing it the old way, but now and it’s going to give you the opportunity to change things. You’re also going to see systems become simpler and less intertwined or coupled. Now, some companies are going to still have difficulty decoupling things. But as those companies start to fade out, like the company I worked for, they got highly coupled systems. But they’re either going to uncouple these things, decoupled them, or they’re going to go the way they’re going to vanish. Some of that’s going to happen. But younger companies, companies that are more organically institute these kinds of changes are going to drastically affect the market. So there’s still going to be processes that need to happen. Anytime you do work, you have processes in place. But I think what’s going to happen is in the next 10 years, people are going to look back and again, remember that thing we call the agile, remember that? People go now I don’t remember that. I read about it in a book. And I don’t know what’s going to come along. But I think that the cultural manifestation of what we call agile now, and that’s what I’ve pushed for the last three or four years, right? I don’t think Agile is a way of doing work. I think Agile is a way that organizations institutionalize themselves.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:06:30
Being agile, right, rather than writing.
Speaker: Tom Mellor 1:06:35
And I think that’s going to become archaic as well. People aren’t going to say we’re agile, they’re going to say, Yeah, this is what kind of culture Yeah. We have a really open, strong culture, we have a very organic culture, things like that. The sense that you’re going to categorize it in the sort of dichotomized ways like we do now, either I’m so tired of this where you’re either waterfall or you’re agile, right?
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:07:09
Like buying [inaudible 1:07:10].
Speaker: Tom Mellor 1:07:11
In fact I am not sure you may do this, but I do this in my classes, I go, okay this is for a full refund of the class, identify where the term waterfall came from? Without researching, just off the top of your head, tell me where it came from. And I’ve had people go Winston Royce, and I go wrong. I said Winston Royce first described a process that was later called Waterfall, but he didn’t call it Waterfall. He called it sequential development. And it’s actually a paper written in 1974, by a business analyst that coined the term waterfall, which was four years after Royce wrote his paper, and I have the paper. So I pull the paper. Look at it, they go, look right here, it says waterfall. And I have this paper there. And they’re thumbing through it, they go, it’s a waterfall, ., but it shows this thing. And I go, you could call that the stair step process. I mean, he doesn’t call it anything except that he calls it sequential.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:08:24
Which waterfall sounds just so much better ?
Speaker: Tom Mellor 1:08:29
[inaudible 1:08:29] yeah. So and I go, waterfall should never have been used to describe a culture. What you’re talking about is a traditional, autonomous culture, driven by traditional management, that’s what we’re talking about, and I said, there’s still a place in the world for defined sequential development. There is, and there’s still, there’s always a place in the world for empirical based development, but an organization that we would call agile would, as I always say, would hand the problem to a group of people and go, here’s the problem. Go figure it out and solve the problem as quickly and effectively as you can. And we’ll support you, that is what was the basis of the new product development game paper, right? In that paper, these autonomous teams were fully supported by management. Like, what can we do for you? What is it that you need from us, so that you can solve this problem? Because they put a timeframe around the problem, typically 90 days, they go, we got to have a new print out in 90 days. We have to have a new concept vehicle in 90 days. So, and that’s why Schwaber told me one time he goes, I’m glad that they fight with each other over waterfall versus agile. But he goes it that isn’t the fight, Tom.
And I’m like, what’s the fight Ken? He goes, the fight is do you give people the authority and the autonomy to figure out how to do the problem? Because organically, they will do that in the way that we describe. They will do it that way. And I’m like, wow. And he goes, absolutely. He goes, they only do it the other way, because they’re told and forced to do it the other way. But he goes, if you just gave them the freedom and the latitude, to organize themselves and approach it how they should, which is exactly what we did in my organization, we just said, we’re not telling you, you have to use Scrum. And we’re not telling you, you have to do any kind of defined process, we’re not telling you, you have to do that. We’re telling you, you figure out how to do this. And what does your experience and your intelligence tell you about? We got things done a lot faster, Milan, and a lot better. Right? And did we use Scrum? I don’t really give a damn whether we did. All I know…
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:11:21
This is a means to an end, right? In a sense, it’s about agility and having options rather than …
Speaker: Tom Mellor 1:11:29
Agility, Schwaber told me is the ability to move Omni direction quickly.
Speaker: Miljan Bajic 1:11:36
Which is having options.
Speaker: Tom Mellor 1:11:41
When you’re in sports, you’re agile because you can move quickly, one direction or another. Right? That’s what an agile athlete does. When somebody goes, that guy’s really agile. What they’re saying is that guy can move, change directions on a dime. Whether he’s dribbling a basketball, or he’s dribbling a football, a soccer ball or anything like that, whatever he’s doing his agility suggests that he can move quickly, in any direction that he wants without changing stride. And that’s why, and see this is the shrewdness of Ken Schwaber coming up. He thought [inaudible 1:11:23], I was like, it just drives me crazy [inaudible 1:12: 26] you’re fighting, cause it shouldn’t drive you crazy. It should enlighten and please you. I hear he’s so yeah, he’s a lot brighter than I am. And I’m looking at him. He goes, think about, the more they fight, the more we stay out in the front. Right? If we were to change the world overnight, and everybody was to suddenly do Scrum, we would lose all the traction we ever had. But because we have resistance, it actually helps us. And he goes that’s why I condemn what they do, but I don’t fight them.
