In Hannover currently the GAMES FOCUS HANNOVER 2009 is taking place. I was impressed at how many international people we have seen there. I was asked to give a talk about Scrum and how you can improve the professionalism of organizations, teams and individuals using Scrum.

In my presentation I showed that the biggest problem of games companies might be the fact that they need to grow to be able to survive. In UK, Ian Baverstock argued that the business model of going for the development margin (developers for hire) survives only through the economy of scale. Growing larger.

His argument was, that you need to utilize your developers all the time. And this is only possible, if you have more projects at the same time – that leads to the need for more people again. At least doubling the people. So you need to grow.

My argument is – that you have only two possibilities: a) you go the traditional way -> structure, process and centralization of resources, or b) agile, fast, re-inventing and human centric. I showed that Scrum would be helpful if you want to take the second path.

So this would lead to an organization that will run several independent development teams, and be just a container for such development teams. A concept that Ian Baverstock described, when he talked about his Company Kuju.

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