Project Management Offices serve no purpose in scrum. You are either a product owner, (not a manager), scrum master (not a manager either) or your in the team, (no technical leaders here either). How can an organisation migrate from central control to self directed scrum teams? What are the challenges to our former project managers?
The scrum stand up meeting, is sometimes renamed to “the scrum”. This is fine but remember you are supposed to stand up. The reasoning behind this is it keeps the meeting short. People do not become too comfortable. The idea is very simple. Quickly broadcast any information from the scrum master, then whizz around the [...]
Probably one of the most common mistakes in Software Development is to allow Estimates to become Commitments. This article looks at story point estimation in scrum, and how velocity is a better tool for monitoring progress through to delivery. If your interested in the arguments that can be presented to the business for velocity metrics over estimation for setting delivery dates, read on.
As you achieve more experience with the scrum process, you come to realise that there is very little if anything you can afford to leave out. If your conducting scrum and considering leaving out a practice, its worth considering what is to be gained and lost. So continuing with the scrum and agile theme this year I plan review some of the scrum practices highlighting the benefits and some of the errors that are made. The first of these focuses on the Sprint Review and within that in particular the Software Demo.
I have just finished reading Groundswell by Josh Bernoff of Forrester Research. The book has been around for awhile but its concepts are worth understanding. Its a great book about how Social Technologies have changed the way companies relate to their customers. Not only that but how companies can benefit from Social Technologies within their own organisation. Its a good read, get hold of a copy. The book is rich with Internet law, marketing tips, research and good practice. It gave me some ideas on how Groundswell could be used to provide a product owner with some powerful tooling.
I went along to the London Scrum User Group Monday evening. We decided to put together 15 tips for scrum that every team should try. Its was an optimistically large number of tips given that the meeting is held in a pub. Even so, we did produce 6 very good tips. Read on to see what we came up with.
I have done quite a bit of XP and Agile. Not as much as I would like to be honest but enough to have a personal opinion about it. At first I just did not get pair coding. My initial introduction was within a self directed team practicing Scrum and Agile. I have come to realise that without self-directed teams, you don’t have scrum. You can scrum without pair coding but without these, you have thrown away two very effective techniques. What is left just turns into inefficient micro management. For some reason, these two techniques get resisted hardest. Yet they are the key and the dynamo behind the success.
Joe Morrison and I have another article published in eBizQ that discusses on how clients and customers can help developers do a better job in delivering better functionality in a quicker timeframe. See also our previous article published in Computer Weekly.
Projects come in different shapes and sizes. Within the sell-side of finance there are two streams of projects; those run by IT following fairly standard IT practices, project plans, estimates, and an waterfall/agile process. The alternative are business lead projects which usually ignore anything IT related – I’ve often seen desk build their own IT departments and ignore existing corp. IT departments completely. These business lead projects are often run by a desk, where 4 weeks is a “long” project and estimates exist in hours. The business projects are always aggressive, mainly because they are essentially to the underlying bonus culture of the desk. Desk projects follow a rule of attempting to break ever IT rule in the corporation (sometimes for good reason). One characteristic of business vs IT projects are the style in which they are run. IT projects normally use standard project management techniques (possibly because the PM is an ex-developer), whereas the desk run projects are more like fire fighting projects (possibly because the PM has no knowledge of IT). Both styles offer an interesting insight into the politics of the sell-side that is driven by a bonus culture.
The article The Good, the Bad and the BS by Larry O’Brien is a sad truth. We always want to do the best possible job, but how can we prove we really did? How can we compare if one developer/team/firm is better at cranking out software than another developer/team/firm? From estimation to hiring to delivering systems, we could definitely use some metrics to advance the software trade. After all, us software developers have been terribly good so far at doing impossible things, judging by the saying You can’t manage what you can’t measure (looks like Tom DeMarco said something like this as cited here), so we might as well start doing the mundane: collaborate on meaningful metrics, establish industry benchmarks, and use them. There are of course difficulties, many of them stemming from the young age of software development profession.
The 2006 Economics Nobel Laureate, Edmund S. Phelps had an interesting article in the WSJ yesterday (thanks to Bruce Fancher for forwarding it on). It speaks to the degree of dynamism, innovation, and productivity emergent in truly capitalist free market economies (U.S., U.K., Canada) compared to social market economies (Germany, Francy, Italy, and the rest [...]
So, apparently New York City does not need the $207mm it had last year to defend itself from terrorism. Last week the Dept of Homeland Security cut NYC's budget by 40% to $124.5mm citing that “the region had no “national monuments or icons,” four banking or financial firms with assets of over $8 billion, 28 [...]homemade gay teen moviesmovie great scenes sexfree post largest movie black sexmen licking pussy moviessex movie stars havingsharing movies filegirl nude moviespooping movie Map
Will be interesting to see how the market for weather derivatives develops. The range of applications for these products is endless. Thanks, John, for this site on these financial products. At the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 328,000 contracts were traded between January and April, up from just 4,200 a year earlier: article here.
One of the things that I am looking for in my next company is a strong and well-founded philosophy in the treatment of clients and employees. I have always said that you need to look after your current clients first (ahead of future clients). There is no point in burning any bridges with a client just [...]
Many of us have tried to create a better workplace for everyone and to optimize the organization for success. Having the appropriate functional sets of role and responsibilities and providing people with autonomy and accountability, are very important to people and their general happiness in their jobs. However, if you don't trust your people and feel [...]
Creating and fostering a culture that is truly energetic, interesting, collaborative and social is no easy task. Doing that within a consulting firm where 80% of the employees are on client site is even tougher. As Matt referenced in his blog, a culture cannot be manufactured… One of things I have been told by many of [...]
Most of the challenges some of our projects teams face are generally not technical — they tend to be business (or political) issues; a new team getting to know one another and evolving their style as a team; or, the team getting to grips with the business domain they are operating in. This is mainly [...]
Client: Let's build a credit risk calculation engine for regulatory capital reporting purposes. We know this will take a lot of analysis and design, together with 12 months of development. We have preselected Hibernate as the technology of choice to help us with access to the Oracle DB. We know that we will have to [...]
