Calendar of Events

Speaker: Alexander Frumkin

Topic: Looking for a black cat in a dark room with no cat: hamble planning explained.
Summary:
Imagine bringing your newborn child home from the hospital. Could you accurately map out every step to raise them until they turn 21? It’s nearly impossible—parenting is inherently complex. Now think about how often you’re asked to plan and commit to every detail at the start of a complex project, despite limited initial knowledge. This is a challenge that many traditional waterfall projects, particularly in government, often face.
Join my highly interactive session to explore how the Cynefin sense-making model can help you better understand complexity. You'll learn why a "plan and predict" approach is more suited to obvious or complicated problems, while complex challenges require a "sense and respond" strategy. Misapplying a rigid plan-and-predict method to a complex problem can lead to chaos—let’s make sense of complexity together.

Bio:
I am a recovering developer and a Scrumoholic. I started programming in Algol-60 in the 9th grade and still write code just for fun. As a developer involved in waterfall projects, I remember the pain of working long hours and weekends to meet deadlines that were enforced on the teams and the shame of sacrificing the quality of the product to “deliver on time and on budget”. I was constantly asking myself – are there “better ways of developing software?” My professional life made a dramatic turn in 2007 when I had over 40 developers reporting to me. It was a great privilege to learn about Agile Manifesto and XP directly from Martin Fowler, one of 17 founding fathers of the manifesto. I have lived and breathed Agile since that time. I've learned agility by doing it and helping others to thrive. This was a long journey of successes and learning opportunities. These days I had a chance to design and orchestrate multiple successful Agile transformations, including large scale ones. As a coach, I am not looking for a cookie cutter approach. Instead, I partner with my clients helping them to find an approach or a scaled framework that works best for them, to create the guardrails so they avoid the common mistakes.

My other passion is Scrum training helping others discover a wonderful world of agility. By this time I helped over 200 Scrum Masters to get their first Scrum certification, I conducted hundreds of non-certified Agile workshops. As a certified Training from the Back of the Room (TBR) trainer, I make my workshops interactive, engaging and fun.
I share my passion about agility with the community facilitating multiple Agile MeetUp groups and speaking at different events. In 2022 I was invited to speak at the Global Scrum Gathering in Lisbon, Portugal. My personal mission is to unleash creativity and happiness by bringing psychological safety to the workplace. If by the end of a day I can look at myself at a mirror and feel that I was able to help somebody - it was a good day.