Andy's Mind

I have been in Warsaw yesterday to meet with Dave Prior, chair of the PMI‘s IT&Telecom SIG who was there attending PMI’s Polish Chapter annual conference. We had a very interesting discussion on agile, project management and… Banana Scrum, most of which was videotaped by Dave and will be made available as a part of IT&Telecom SIG videocast.

This is part of Scrum practitioners and traditional IT PMs trying to come closer together. This will be a hard effort, because of cultural divide (which we discussed too) but it will be definitely worth it and traditional PMs are very attracted to agile. When it comes to getting work done knowing other methods can’t hurt.

Dave, it turned out, is also a huge fan of our humble Banana Scrum tool. It was really cool to meet someone who likes and uses what we have built. Gave me another incentive to make sure our fall hiring campaign will allow us to get more resources to work on the tool. I’d like to finally add a few bigger features to Banana that have been waiting on the backlog for weeks now. It would be good to have something for Christmas for our users.

For those of you unfamiliar with PMI SIGs a few words of explanation. PMI is the most known organization of project managers (yes, those dreadful guys with Gantt charts, shamanic metrics and ugly waterfalls), inside of it there are Special Interest Groups – groups that focus on a certain aspect of project management or projects in general. IT&Telecom SIG is the group that is most interested in agile – they know best how miserably waterfall’s record in software development has been.

During the last Scrum Gathering Jeff Sutherland delivered a talk on hyper productive Scrum teams. One of his interesting points was that extreme data points (extremely well performing teams) are worth looking at, as people behind them must be doing something right. And that makes sense – if we are all to look for improvements in the way we do our projects we must look at those who make it better.

Another interesting thing Jeff described was how some companies – like Xebia – do Scrum with dispersed teams with productivity that is on par with co-located teams, which is quite an accomplishment. I found this very interesting, because for now we have whole our team in one office, but with time we might have to do something like this too and it is good to know how to do it well.

Luckily I don’t have to recount all that myself, as I just found that Jeff delivered the very same talk at Google a month earlier and they did put it on YouTube, so you can just enjoy the original.

So I’m at the Scrum Gathering in Stockholm right now.

Did my talk in the morning – it went reasonably well, did get some very good questions at the end. I think I could improve it now also after what I learned at another talk on the same subject. That talk itself wasn’t very inspiring but the discussion with other participants was very good and informative. Many companies now are thinking how to sell agile software development services, especially how to sway clients away from the fixed bid culture that is doing them no good. Another common problem is how to formulate “agile contracts” – that is contracts that are helping form this kind of relationship. I think we have pretty good standard agreement and model now, but I did pick up a few nice ideas from others that we could possibly use.

Jeff Sutherland had a very interesting lecture on “super-performing teams” that got me thinking seriously on how we could improve the way we measure our productivity. The thing he is saying – and many others have been for some time – that you can achieve more productivity while at the same time cutting the number of hours worked. Seems like impossibility, but from my own experience in agile I know this is true. I just wonder whether we did all we could in that area.

This was also my first time I could see Ken Schwaber in person. In the video from his talk at Google he comes across as a drill sergeant in civilian clothes – when you actually talk to the guy it turns out he is much nicer a person than that. Same with Jeff Sutherland, who also has this kind of military-“warrior”-like appearance – but at least Jeff was actually in the USAF once.

I’m overall positively surprised by the whole event, it will probably be much more valuable for me than Agile Development Practices was a year ago. I think I’ll seriously consider skipping this year edition of it.

As we all know (and if we don’t better get informed) a deep financial crisis is slowly engulfing our globalized economy and some countries start to sink. Iceland was doing what the bigger economies were – money-printing driven bubble pumping. Now a reality check came and Iceland’s PM went on national TV to announce the whole country might go bankrupt. Naturally, feeling the heat they turned for help to their traditionally allies, which we may safely assume included the US. But those allies refused having the very same problem on their hands. So Iceland turned to… Russia and Russia will give them €4bn loan.

Icelandic officials quickly denied that their “new friendship” with Russia includes any kind of military cooperation, for example giving Russians access to an airbase vacated by the US Air Force in 2006. Well, a 19th century Russian diplomat, prince Gorchakov used to say: “I don’t believe in news that are not officially denied” – and I think it very nicely applies here. Have a look on the map and see where Iceland is, how big it is and what resources it can offer. The fact is the only thing Iceland can offer is its strategic position. Except for some fish there is nothing there and I don’t think Russia is in particular need of Atlantic fish. But assuming Russians would get there it would allow them to control strategically important sea routes on the North Atlantic and would help them in their bid for control over the Arctic.

This just shows how wise Russia is playing its cards since Putin’s clique of ex-KGB officers took helm from the ailing Yeltsin. A very, very wise move on their part. And also very worrying for Europe, especially its eastern part.