This month at the Tampa Bay Scrum Masters Guild, we followed up on the vision for the Guild that we decided on at last month’s meeting:
To take an active role in building up Tampa Bay as a major technology hub.
That’s a pretty tall order! Before we can decide how to make it a reality, we needed to decide how to recognize when we achieve it. We used a variation of brain storming called “Brain Writing” to generate a list of ideas, then used dot voting to select the five best indicators of success:
- Increase in startup funding for tech companies/actual tech startups on par with major cities like San Francisco or NYC
- Major technology conferences are hosted in Tampa
- National media start to report on “Tampa Tech”
- Increase in tech-related degrees awarded at area colleges/universities
- IT salaries increase to be competitive with existing tech hubs, i.e., the Research Triangle or Austin
The next step will be to decide what steps to take to make those indicators happen. It’s a topic on the Trello board; vote for it if you want to see more progress on turning vision into reality.
We closed the meeting with a report on the Agile Alliance conference in Atlanta. Sam Falco (that’s me!) talked about two themes that cropped up in several Agile 2016 sessions: making work a safe space for experimentation and innovation, and the future of Agile. Both topics fed into a group discussion of “Modern Agile” and how its four principles map to the values in the Manifesto.
Next month’s guild meeting will be held at Grow Financial on September 7. Don’t miss it!
Sam Falco 