Running Agile

A Practitioner’s View To Agile

Rally Cafe #3

Posted by Christophe on July 7, 2009

rally-cafe

Rallydev is running a new weekly agile live show every tuesday morning called Rally Cafe.

In each show, they give tips on a different coffee type, find something relevant in the news and get a guest to answer a few questions (including from viewers).

With the tour de France going on, they thought of me as a guest for their third show. It is now available on ustream.

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Majority Report

Posted by Christophe on June 23, 2009

Today, distributed teams are stuck between 3 bad choices:
-use a limited online collaboration tool, and miss human interaction
-use local white boards, and miss real time information sharing

18 month ago, I wrote about Quickies -technology supported sticky notes- to bridge the white board and it’s online counterpart.

Minority Report offered a pure digital version of the white board.

minority_report

According to Schematic, this is maybe not that far away…

Forget the number of LoC (lines of code) metric, here comes the DoG (distance of gesture) productivity metric.

You gotta love progress.

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GM’s bankruptcy

Posted by Christophe on June 1, 2009

car falling over cliff

GM’s recently appointed CEO said this morning at the GM’s bankruptcy press confernce that the new GM will be leaner and moving faster.

Did he just see mary’s video “competiting on the basis of speed” ?

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Scrum Club Event 6/24/09 in Los Angeles

Posted by Christophe on May 31, 2009

scrumclub

Gorilla Nation is hosting another ScrumClub event on 6/24/09:

Scrum and User Experience Design: Bringing Great Design into the Agile Process

Event summary:

Scrum provides us with a great framework for building our Scrum team, implementing the core agile practices and getting the inspect and adapt process started. But Scrum doesn’t provide much for the specific disciplines like programming, testing and User Experience. That’s where our coaches Paul Hodgetts and Patrick Neeman come in.

Join us as we explore how User Experience Design integrates with the Scrum process. We’ll see first hand how each type of activity fits into the Scrum cycles, and how our User Experience researchers, designers and artists integrate into a Scrum team.

Get your ticket with a special discount for RunningAgile readers.

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A picture is worth a wikipedia article

Posted by Christophe on May 17, 2009

First, let me say this is not a technical post.

RAIDs are a fancy way to take several small hard drives, and make them look like a big one – with or without fault tolerance.

Has anyone ever tried to explain to you the subitility of RAID selection?

Wikipedia does it in 15 screens. Precise, rich, informative… but tedious, and out of reach for most people.

Now, here’s another way to explain RAID:

raid

Requirements, story conditions of satisfactions, Documentation…

Are you using the right communication tools?

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Gotta laugh some day

Posted by Christophe on May 13, 2009

I don’t have the habit of ripping another blogpost content, but found this post by Kelly Waters just too good not to pass on.

Enjoy.

Posted in Jokes, Videos | Tagged: | 1 Comment »

Be thankful

Posted by Christophe on May 1, 2009

“Be thankful for your problems. If they were less difficult, someone with less ability might have your job.”
-Unknown

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Pay more, it’s cheaper!

Posted by Christophe on April 21, 2009

save_moneyFinancial crisis. Cost cutting measures. Cheaper vendors. Saving money.

Does that sound familiar? Effective?

Think again.

Here are a few counter examples:

  • a US company let go their expensive $50/h local resources in favor of $20/h [put-a-country-over 6,000 miles away] resources… and encurs heavier expenses. Needed a new local project manager, needed a remote project manager (language problems with the team), needed to add more remote resources -more junior resources-, missed their key deadlines by months
  • a company switched their first tier CDN for a smaller CDN, at 20% discount per Gb… and encurs heavier expenses. Smaller CDN has lower cache rate, creates more traffic to origin servers -with expense bandwidth; smaller CDN hardware creates higher packet loss ration, also increasing traffic.
  • a company cut on good coffeehouse quality coffee… and encurs heavier expenses. Employees leave the office and walk to the neerest [put-a-popular-coffee-place-name], wasting half an hour every day.

and on and and on

Should companies cut unecessary cost in the downtime. Definitively.

Yet, doing it without a deep understanding of the impact on the whole value chain, and hidden consequences can turn disastrous.

The mistake is to confuse rate and cost.

Rather than spending a lot of time on cutting rates, kill your low value / resource intense projects, and focus  on your top products: increase quality, accelerate your delivery cycle and wow your customers.

Posted in Lean, Value Stream Mapping | Tagged: , | Leave a Comment »

Lean Organizations to Support Agile Teams

Posted by Christophe on April 19, 2009

New videos from Agile 2008 are still coming out. In this one, Robin Dymond gives an overview of Lean, how it can help take Agile to the ‘next level’ and why organizations that fail to change will not have successful Agile teams. Robin describes an organizational mismatch between traditional hierarchies and team structures. He believes that organizations will need to reorganize around teams to get the most out of Agile.

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David Anderson on “A Kanban System for Software Engineering”

Posted by Christophe on March 30, 2009

david-anderson1

In this Qcon 2008 presentation, David Anderson presents a brief history of the kanban system through case study reports from teams at Microsoft and Corbis. Kanban acts to limit work-in-progress and focus the team on achieving a continuous flow of value to the customer and innovates on accepted agile management practices by providing an iteration-less process with a regular release cadence.

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