Just in case there is anyone out there in China who is looking for a community of people doing agile, this Yahoo group, Scrum China, might be a good place to sign up! Make yourself visible, and find other people. Also, for what it’s worth, I’m running a course in Beijing in February: check the course listing for Scrum Training in Beijing.
Here is a great article on InfoQ about team size and productivity. The basic idea is that a small team, supported by excellent tools and techniques will always do better than a large team. One aspect of this that isn’t mentioned in the article, but which figures prominently in “The Mythical Man-Month” is the idea of communication overhead. It is impossible to house a large team in a team room and therefore communication cycle times, effectiveness and frequency also become a substantial factor.
Hi everyone! I’m currently extremely busy with a Scrum-related writing project. The lack of new articles here is mostly due to that fact. I should be done with the project in a few weeks, but it might take me to the end of the year. I will try to continue to post interesting links or small articles until the new year, but I won’t be posting substantial articles until I am done this other writing project. Sorry for the lighter content, but I hope you will all be patient. I will, of course, make an announcement about my other writing project once it is ready! Thanks!
This is a nice little encapsulation of the Scrum process and the daily Scrum meeting: http://www.effectivemeetings.com/teams/teamwork/scrum.asp. It is described in completely non-technical language and the example used is that of a marketing team. Basically, what is described is the Agile Skeleton plus the daily status meeting without any of the other project management aspects of Scrum.
This is a great presentation on the importance of trust: http://www.agile2007.org/agile2007/downloads/presentations/Larsen_613_613.pdf. I love this sort of thing since it is, to me, so important to building effective teams. I often prefer to talk about truthfulness since that is the attribute or capacity that people need to develop, but the result of truthfulness is trust, so in many ways they are one and the same.
Sanjiv Augustine, agile coach and consultant at LitheSpeed, has a great blog: LitheBlog. Focus on agile project management topics. Good writing and good reading!
One of the Certified Scrum Trainers, Chris Sterling from SolutionsIQ, recently posted a good set of links on Agile Contracts. Hopefully these links will help you understand how to “sell”, set up and execute on agile contracts. Here are the links:
I don’t often write non-agile entries on this blog. Nevertheless, I thought this would be an appropriate change. A couple days ago I invited all 454 of my LinkedIn contacts to re-connect with me on FaceBook. I’m going to stop using LinkedIn after over two years of building up my network there. Here are my reasons:
I ran across this idea of Dynamic Strategic Planning [pdf] a couple nights ago at a meeting where a friend and I were talking about agile applied to non-technology work. He told me about Richard de Neufville who had come up with this concept of making strategic plans that were adaptable. It involves the use of Real Options, negotiation and other aspects of planning. I don’t know anything more than what is written in the paper I have linked to… do any of you have experience with Dynamic Strategic Planning that you could tell us about? Are there any good books about this that you would recommend?
How do we teach people to work in a collaborative manner? How do we help individuals, in our incredibly individualist and competitive society, to learn the skills needed for agile teamwork?