I applied for the prezi beta testing like you recommended. I might post an example if I manage to do something cool.

It was nice meeting you at AP2009. I wish you good luck with developing your presentation skills. And I hope to do the same. I hope we will meet again in the future. Maybe as speakers at rhetoric conferens

I also wonder why I wrote this in english???

Best regards,
Johan Jacobsson, Motorola

Some would claim you are not doing Scrum if your team is not co-located. I believe you can achieve good results despite not being co-located, but it’s definitely harder.

My experience is that team communication gets magnitudes better if you meet at the start of the project for some kick-off activities, such as workshops as well as some leisure time. Depending on the distance and the travel costs I would try to get the team together regularly. Perhaps for a common planning day at the start of each sprint, or something. But at least once in the project.

would you say that nordic countries are dealing differently in using SCRUM because of different management style and culture to deal with people?

How would you see intercultural scrum teams (communicating only over web)?

BR
Miriam

Hur gick det på Nordic Scrum? Jag är nyfiken på dina tankar och ditt material. Har du något du kan/vill skicka över? Är du intresserad av Lean-for-Managers så kan vi ju byta lite :)!

Vi har två uppdrag i Köpenhamn under hösten, dels Telia Sonera och Post-oTelestyrelsen så det börjar kanske bli läge för en site i Köpenhamn - vi får se.

Ha det bra - Anders

I miss Eric nowadays

Cheers
Raj

this is an interesting post. Another way to look at CMMI is as a set of related best practices or a checklist of development project risks.

So as you say just working for a level 5 label may be not worth the hassle. But using the knowledge to avoid problems seems a good idea to me.

Asa matter of fact CMMI offer lots of flexibility and the level 1,2,3,4,5 is only one of the ways to use CMMI and not always the best way to do so. It is more often the leadership of a company that dreams of the level 5 label, but as I said CMMI is meant to list the risks for those in the tranches and help them survive.

No how I see Scrum work with CMMI well when you run a company you Scrum will give you way to manage projects. CMMI will give you clues to identify the roots of your problems and perhaps some guidance how to work around the problems.

Now the bureaucratic part of CMMI building and sustaining tons of “process assets” - well once you uncover a good way to do things, why not document it and share it with the rest.

I hope this all does not sound too weird, but CMMI is what you make of it. It is neither agile nor waterfall, nor cyclic or anything like this. It is a tool, a checklist, a set of practices that one can use for his benefit or demise as one chooses.

To say it in another way CMMI does not limit you to doing things in particular way it only tells you when you miss critical activities. You are free to use this info to set up an improvement program to solve or your problems or to obstruct your work in needless paperwork - that is the choice of the organization.

As a matter of fact I believe some of the practices in the latest editions of CMMI were borrowed heavily from Agile, XP and so on. Like for example peer reviews - done for example by peer programming.

Nice to have you back on the arena again. You seem to have a lot of fun at your new job.

Try to keep lean over the vacations.

Cheers Anders

-Thom

I’m dealing with more general business improvement issues now, not just IT related. Which makes it just as highly interesting.

I’m also putting together some internal LEAN instructional material, that might benefit from that.

Cheers,
Jens

Any process runs into problem when the scope is really large. By having minimal inventory (non-delivered code) in the process the kanban buffers make sure we get really quick feedback on where the bottle necks are and where to put the efforts.

Like you say it requires constant attention. I guess you still run several parallell pipelines that is delivered onto a product pipeline. As you see it boils down into a delicate CM challenge in the end anyway…

Merry Christmas!

I really like your thoughts about this. I think the time boxing in SCRUM actually creates (some kind of) waste since you have to deal with scope issues when the development teams run into problems.

However, I am curious about the buffer thoughts. In a large organization, it is natural to work in parallel tracks. The picture that forms in my head when I think about handling and constantly optimizing these buffers is humongous. It would be really fun to read about this in a future post, if you can’t make a brief explanation of your thoughts here and now.

My IRL experiences are from FDD and SCRUM, and I may very well be totally out of line here.

br
Christian

Btw there are some great spectrum emulators out there

I stumbled upon your site after visiting Methods and Tools and I was immediately reminded of a gent in the States by the name of Damon Poole who is an expert in the area of Agile development and has his own software development company, Accurev. I think you two would hit it off if you haven’t already ‘met.’ The company has a big following in Sweden, so I wouldn’t be surprised. Seems there are a lot of great CM folks in Sweden.
http://damonpoole.blogspot.com/

Good luck with the new job!

Mark

I really liked your article and your view on how CM can help companies in their move to agile/lean.

I’d like to discuss it further.

pablo