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Joseph Pelrine was present when XP took its first steps, was Europe's first Certified Scrum Trainer, and today is still breaking new ground. In this 2007 InfoQ interview, Joseph talked about Network Analysis and how Social Complexity Science informs his work with teams; the usefulness of the Dilbert archetype; & a speed-dating technique to help teams get started (creating software, of course).
Facilitation on Agile projects seems to involve much more than the primary responsibility of improving the effectiveness of the work that the teams are doing. The responsibility of a facilitator can become so broad that over-facilitating becomes common, thus leading to burnout. An interesting Group Facilitation newslist discussion takes a closer look.
Your organization is adopting Agile Development and your Managers are trying to find their new role. Prior to the adoption Agile perhaps management was involved in the production specifications and assigned the tasks. Now that teams are self organizing and the stories (instead of specs) come from the product owner, what does management do?
Danube Technologies has just released the 3.0 Release of ScrumWorks Pro, last mentioned in August 07. ScrumWorks Pro is an Agile Project Management tool that help track team(s) progress through individual iterations and whole releases. In this release changes focused on two areas: usability improvements and the use of MySQL as the backend database.
The Agile “self organising team” paradigm demands new skills of team members – including the people skills for which they may once have depended upon their Project Managers. Far from being redundant, management can now play an important role in helping teams learn new ways to communicate and collaborate. This article proposes some strategies for imparting new skills and suggests some resources.
Coach Michael Spayd tells us that both contractors and permanent employees can play a "consultant" role, and should think about developing consulting contracts or "designed partnerships" with their clients - not about the exchange of money, but to help create stellar results for the client while working in a manner that adheres to their own values and preferences.
InfoQ presents a one hour video from the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile2006, where a panel of business leaders spoke about their experiences: Bud Phillips (Capital One Financial), Israel Ganot (BMC Software), Steven Ambrose (DTE Energy), Peter George (Cronos Inc.). Topics included top-down vs. bottom-up adoption, making the leap of faith to enterprise adoption and the value of the PMO.
In this presentation, recorded at QCon, Burton Group research director Anne Thomas Manes talks about how to make the business case for SOA. Her talk covers explaining SOA to non-technical business people, various approaches for selling SOA to management and gaining funding for SOA investments.
Of course, "anything more than 'barely sufficient' process is waste," but what does that mean for your team, or my next project? In this 60 minute presentation from the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile2006, Todd Little shared a model to help choose the right "flavour" of Agile for different kinds of projects, and discussed the importance of 'steering' throughout the project's duration.
