Brian Rabon
An interview (audio only) with Brian Rabon from BrainTrust Consulting.
Brian discusses his approach to Project Management, his work in Agile and his experiences in working towards becoming a Certified Scrum Trainer.
Thushara Wijewardena and I have had a great response to our Agile 2010
presentation, “Why You Suck at Offshoring, Even with Agile“. In an effort to respond to some of the requests we have received, we put together a video recap of our presentation along with a retrospective. The video is broken up into two segments because of the size. Please let us know what you think. Continue reading
Next week I’ll be co-presenting at the Agile 2010 conference in Orlando, Florida with Thushara Wijewardena. Our presentation is called “Why you suck at off shoring, even with Agile”. The plan is to discuss and debate some of the issues people run into when they are doing offshore projects. Thushara, who lives in Sri Lanka, will be covering the offshore side and I’ll be handling onshore. We’ve both got a fair bit of experience in the area, but in order to make sure we’d covered all our bases, we interviewed a number of people to get their take on it. Heading into it, I felt pretty confident, based on my experience, that the majority of the difficulties that onshore managers and teams struggle with are brought about by their own approach and an assumption that offshore must learn to adapt to the onshore way of working. My basic argument was that the onshore teams really had to find a better way to adapt how they approached working with an offshore team if they really wanted to get the most out of them. Working with teams spread across the globe, in different time zones, from different cultural and educational backgrounds is never easy, but I do believe that the responsibility for enabling the offshore team falls largely on the onshore team’s shoulders. Continue reading
When I am working with Project Managers who are in the throws of trying to learn Agile, there are a certain discussions (debates), which can indicate that the person is going to have more of a struggle with making the change. These are usually the PMs who quickly grasp the flow of the process, but immediately begin second-guessing the system, and all of this usually happens without the PM even realizing it. After all, if you have been around a bit, and you are a halfway decent PM, you look at everything that enters your path as a potential threat to your project and start working out how you are going to get around it. This is what we are taught to do – find a workaround.
I think the bigger issue though, usually stems from the fact that the PM often does not recognize how their own expertise can be the obstacle. One of the ways this often manifests itself is through
a question or declarative statement/argument about how the PMBOK is clearly, already Agile and these iterations or sprints we are talking about are nothing more than mini-waterfall projects.
Just in case any of the mini-waterfall people happen upon this… I mean you mo harm. I spent about 8 years inside that argument. Please bear with me a few minutes and this will make more sense.
I have learned my lesson about trying to engage in an argument against the perception that a sprint (or iteration) is just a mini-waterfall. I don’t agree with it, but it is perception, and my experience has been that getting pulled into this one kind of like trying to debate whether Sammy Hagar was a better front man than David Lee Roth. Continue reading
How do you learn best? Some people learn best from lectures and books. Others find interactivity, or personal tutorials better. Some prefer silence, while others need specific music to concentrate. Surely everybody has an individual study system, but most of us learn well when having fun.
So do you want to learn more about Agile? Try playing a game for a change. Check out TastyCupcakes.com and find there loads of recipes for funny games with various learning points.
Do you rather prefer Elephant carpaccio? Play the game of Alistair Cockburn and  learn to write 1-2-page use cases to describe the size and shape of the elephant, so you can slice it into carpaccio for development. You don’t know who Alistair Cockburn ist? Alistair Cockburn invented Crystal Clear and is one of the authors of the ‘Manifesto for Agile Software Development‘
It has never been that easy to learn more about Agile. So enjoy and learn 🙂