In this project I was brought in after a restart of a project that was lacking any development methods, although the rest of the organisation had a heavy RUP adaptation. My role was again as a Business Analyst collecting requirements from the business people, but this time I also had to create requirement working routines. I was also asked to help creating a working overall development method. I took the liberty to introduce some agile ideas.
I gave them the 30 day iteration, the product backlog, the sprint backlog, the Scrum meeting and helped them with planning day and created all the planning templates. It was well received and I had hopes of introducing the rest of Scrum, but unfortunately the project manager never understood the full picture and as soon as I turned my back on him he copied the plan into MS Project, forever hiding it from the rest of us. I guess he felt the threat of being obsolete and that’s understandable.
I was also met with the challenge that the project was spread over three different locations, which is not ideal in agile projects. I suggested that each site had their Scrum meetings and then the site responsibles had a “scrum of scrums”.
One experience I can draw from this is that it’s probably easier to introduce Scrum being the project manager myself.

Update: The project Manager has, shortly after my assignment ended, decided to leave the company, leaving the project in a total mess.

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Posted by Jens on Wednesday, January 11th, 2006 at 2:11 pm.