Scrum Masters of the Universe

Featuring Matthew Paradise. Veteran technologist with 20+ years in the trenches who led the Google Cloud Platform rollout at INDOT, paving the way for AI-driven solutions that save time and sharpen decisions.

INDOT’s AI journey in plain terms. How a RAG workflow on Vertex AI and Gemini turned scattered docs into usable answers, saved 360 hours, and met a 30-day mandate. Challenges included data cleanup, guardrails, and change management. Wins included accuracy, speed, and a repeatable model.

Scrum is evolving — and AI is leading the change.

In this hands-on session, discover how Generative AI can:

• Improve story readiness by suggesting acceptance criteria
• Auto-create user stories, sub-tasks, and sprint summaries
• Draft retros, daily updates, and sprint reports in seconds

And how Agentic AI takes it further — acting on your behalf in Jira and Confluence: spotting blockers, updating statuses, and ensuring your sprint stays on track.

If you’re a Scrum Master, PO, or Agile Leader, this session will show how to blend agility with intelligence — making Scrum smoother, faster, and smarter.

Gunther’s life of Scrum started in 2003. Throughout those 2+ decades of Scrum, Gunther feels that he has gathered many, many pieces of a puzzle without being unable to see that puzzle. Many of those ideas seem to have been lingering somewhere in his head.

In 2019 he described his observations of what most so-called ‘Agile transformations’ deliver in a paper called “The illusion of agility”. Since that publication he has shared ideas, views and thoughts-in whole or in part-on how to avoid or overcome that illusion of agility at events, meetups and gatherings (including several SMOTU-sessions). Today, Gunther believes he has finally pieced together a lot of those ideas into a more cohesive, holistic vision.

Today, Gunther is happy to share his views in a presentation called “Re-imagine your Scrum”. It is the "adaptation" part of his views following the “inspection” of the illusion of agility. Gunther will show how, in order to get unstuck and effectively increase their agility, organizations can revert to a strategy they should have used to adopt Scrum from the start anyhow. They can re-imagine their Scrum and firm up their agility. It is also the way forward when struggling at scale. Using Scrum to grow Scrum makes big changes small and manageable again and allows to grow and expand iterative-incrementally.

Although it is not the complete story of how Gunther looks at the future state of Scrum (he is working on compiling that), he strongly believes it is more than enough to get many people, teams, and leaders to start thinking beyond their (current instances of) Scrum.