Toko Okamoto serves as the Chief Administrative/Accounting Officer (CAO) at Odd-e Japan, while also pursuing her primary career as a traditional Japanese painter. Her contributions to Odd-e Japan extend far beyond administration and accounting; she has created numerous design works for the company and its affiliates.
Currently, we design and produce logos and merchandise for our affiliated companies. This includes the "Planning Poker (Girls Version)," which is one of the items available for purchase at the "Agile Goods Scrum Shop."
On InfoQ.com, she shares the background story behind the creation of the "Scrum Primer" process overview diagram (anime version)—one of her most widely recognized past projects.
In this feature, Bas Vodde of Odd-e Singapore answers questions in an interview. (This article was published on InfoQ.com on March 4, 2013.)
Bas Vodde is one of the co-authors of the "Scrum Primer," which is available on InfoQ.com and the official Scrum Primer website.
On the Scrum Primer website, the scrum process overview diagram (overview graphic) is available for download and can be used freely under a Creative Commons license.
Recently (Note: as of 2013), an alternative version of the overview diagram was added to the website, which illustrates the Scrum process in an anime-style design.
We asked Bas about this new graphic.
Bas It all happened by pure coincidence. Over the past few years, I have been working extensively in Japan, primarily delivering certified Scrum training and courses approved by Scrum Alliance®.
One day, Hidetoshi Kanuka, an active participant in Shibuya Trac and the Sukusuku Scrum community, showed up with a set of anime-style poker cards he had made himself. Seeing them, I thought they were absolutely amazing! So, I asked him if we could replicate them. However, he had only created four illustrations at the time, and we needed a unique image for each card. In other words, we needed an artist.
It turned out that an Agile Coach from Odd-e Japan had a friend named Toko Okamoto who was exceptionally skilled at anime illustrations, so we reached out to her. We had her create an anime version of the planning poker cards, and today, they have become incredibly popular among both students and clients.
Planning poker revolves around the theme of Scrum. One day, while looking at the planning poker cards, I suddenly realized something: all the necessary graphics to build a complete Scrum overview diagram were already right there! I immediately asked my colleagues at Odd-e Japan what they thought. They loved the idea, so I started putting together the diagram. I'm excited to see what we can create next. It just feels genuinely fun and cool.
Bas Her name is Toko Okamoto, and she is also a traditional Japanese painter. She is a wonderful partner to the Odd-e Japan team and consistently helps us out with a great many things. As you can tell, she is a truly phenomenal artist, and we consider ourselves incredibly lucky to have the opportunity to work alongside her.
Bas Before finally publishing it, we went through a very long cycle of reviews and revisions. Since everyone was constantly busy, it was quite difficult to keep the communication moving smoothly, so I believe the whole process took about a year and a half. My Japanese language skills still have a long way to go!
In the end, we released three color versions: blue, pink, and green. The creation of these variations was also accidental. Originally, we only had the pink version (which is the cutest), but then we wanted a blue one, and later I brought back the green version. I'm still not entirely sure why, but I really liked the green one too, so we ended up with three variations. Fortunately, this worked out great because now anyone can pick whichever style they like best (laughs).
Bas So far, it has been extremely well received! The most common piece of feedback we get is simply 'kawaii' (cute). One of my personal favorite pieces of feedback came from an American friend of mine who works in the financial industry. Every time he looked at a card from the planning poker deck, he would gasp, 'Oh, No!' In the end, he said he really loved the cards, but noted that they probably couldn't be used in a corporate environment in the US. I found that comment very fascinating. Since I rarely spend time in the US...
Bas We published them under a Creative Commons 'Attribution' and 'NoDerivatives' license. 'NoDerivatives' means you cannot alter or modify the illustrations. 'Attribution' means you must credit Odd-e or the Scrum Primer website. Since the images themselves are permitted for commercial use, you are completely free to use them in your presentations and materials.
Bas Vodde is a coach, programmer, trainer, and author specializing in agile and lean product development. He is the co-creator of the LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) framework for scaling agile development. He coaches organizations at three essential dimensions: organizational, team-level, and individual technical practices. For more than a decade, he has trained thousands of people in software engineering, Scrum, and modern agile practices.
He is the co-author of several books with Craig Larman, including: "Large-Scale Scrum: More with LeSS", "Scaling Agile and Lean Development: Thinking and Organizational Tools for Large-Scale Scrum," and "Practices for Large-Scale Agile and Lean Development."
Bas mainly supports product development improvements in Asia through Odd-e Singapore.
Born in the Netherlands, he previously lived in China and Finland before making his current home in Singapore. Earlier in his career, he worked at a startup operating within an incredibly traditional environment. This far-from-comfortable experience thoroughly convinced him that agile and lean development, regardless of how large-scale the environment might be, offers a far more human way to build software products.
He had the opportunity to introduce agile development (specifically Scrum) at Nokia Networks (formerly NSN), which required him to relocate to Helsinki. There, he witnessed numerous product groups successfully adopting Scrum and other agile practices. Moving south from freezing Finland, he eventually returned to China, where he focused deeply on the adoption of Scrum within a massive product group.
While Bas takes a special interest in Scrum tailored for large enterprises and large-scale product development, he also thoroughly enjoys hands-on technical work, particularly Test-Driven Development (TDD) (especially within embedded environments) and Continuous Integration (CI). He continues to work actively as a developer, driven by his strong conviction that a well-factored codebase is absolutely vital to maintaining agility and flexibility. His research interests lie in lean production, quality management, and, naturally, programming.
Bas is also one of the creators of "CppUTest unit testing and mocking framework for C/C++," a framework for C/C++, as well as "Osaka a Mac UI automation framework," written in Ruby.
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