Wednesday, November 26, 2008

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Ok.. its kinda sad thing.. This time Im very unlucky with Amazon.. I ordered the book., Agile Estimating and Planning (Robert C. Martin Series)
by Mike Cohn. A book which I really wanted to have with me after going through many of his blog posts and the book reviews..
But it was never delivered to me. So I made the complain to Amazon.. they sent it again.. Didn’t receive yet.. its over one month now :( ....disappointing … Not a problem with Amazon.. but Im sure its something to do with our internal postal process.. As I checked with one of my colleagues and he said that they dont deliver the books to our doorsteps now . we have to go to a central post office and collect it .. ...:-( whyyyyy ????????????..............But I didnt get a letter like that either... So I dont know......

Do I raise the issue again.. hmmmm..

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Team Work :-)

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Good Luck Guys !!

Thursday, November 06, 2008

Good Bye..

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Michael Crichton had died ??? No I dont think he will die ever....What can I say.. Cant find any words..

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

SCRUM practitioners in Sri Lanka ?

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Today I heard some good news.. We are building some SCRUM community in Sri Lanka ? I heard that one company has already sent 2 IT professionals for Certified SCRUM master training to India and there is another company who has got some professionals down for training their whole team..Its very happy to see that SL IT industry is spending on PM profession more and more nowadays..I still can remember how hard it was for me to learn SCRUM when I practiced it first in 2005 with my very first SCRUM team..(Thanks to Dina Scott who gave me all the help at that time :) ).It has changed now to the positive side.. Its never too late. Recently another group of people in one reputed company went to Philippines for a very good SCRUM training too..
Not Only SCRUM I see lots of professionals get enrolled with PMI too.. The Only problem with PMP certification is that one needs to have minimum of 5 years Experience by managing farley good projects to face the exam well and lengthy study cycles. But for Scrum Master training its just 2 days course most the time.
Ok., for a newbie who is confused on for what to spend time and money its like this…
PMP certification is offered by PMI institute USA and it’s the largest Project Management institute in the world at the moment.
PMP exam covers almost all the aspects of Project Management, Starting from Ethics, soft skills PM technical skills etc …. And the framework is industry independent.
But SCRUM training covers only How you practice SCRUM. The basic guidelines. So you cannot expect to be a certified Project Manager by learning only SCRUM.. I think both these certifications together comes very handy for any good Project Manager in Software Industry.. Its matter of how you find time for all these :) Anyway I wish if we have enough SCRUM professionals in SL to build a SCRUM community.. Most the countries has that. Yes We have a PMI Colombo chapter already..

Tuesday, November 04, 2008

SCRUM ... Issues.. ?

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I had an interesting SCRUM discussion lately.. With one of the visitors who came to office. We had some point to discuss the PM frameworks and then we were discussing SCRUM in detail. He came up with some interesting point …
Will SCRUM kill the creativity of the development teams… ?
Developers produce piece of code.. in SCRUM we go up to the atomic level planning..so this specific task can be done in X number of hours.. true.. But if there is no such time boxes can they be much more creative…….I mean if we don’t look at the daily velocity of the graph… what would it be?
HmmmmmHmmmm….. Hm…. I was stuck…. Yeah there is a point..
While going home I was thinking about this...
I think its like this .. In SCRUM we discuss what the customer wants in detail and in more detail at the Product backlog meeting as well as in Sprint planning meetings.. So we understand what our customers expectations are to a greater extend. So what we all do is producing what customer wants.
No matter what the methodology or framework we use, we design the architecture and we develop the code..With long planned frameworks what I see is that the developers have more time for creativity.. true.. But it enables more risk of over engineering.. Which result much more risk of sacrificing quality or delivery times at the latter stage of the project which results the project failures. May be soem most important part of the project ... who knows...Especially those long planed methodologies commit on specific strict deadlines.
In this case I think by using SCRUM one can eliminate those over engineering and risk of schedule overruns at the latter stage..In the same time it enables the “Defined creativity” :-)

if somebody needs to be much creative about a features or a piece of code, they can even discuss this at the daily scrum meeting.. making it transparent.. adjusting the calories of the sprint backlog. “Yeah I hear you techies.. That’s not the tech thingies work right ...LOL...!!! But unfortunately that’s the way the “bottom line” works :-) there are tradeoffs
Now that I wrote about this, I need to explain few problems I see in SCRUM.. I see some of the practitioners believe scrum like a religion.. But thats not right.,.. As I say in my own words. SCRUM is not god given.. Its still evolving as a framework and still we see many issues.. Following are some of the issues I saw when practicing scrum.
Agile doesn’t fit for everybody . we have few left alone people when we introduce Agile Practice to corporate
The customer needs to be well educated.. Yeah .. they say “Think Agile” but never works that way.. need proper discussions and the understanding with the product owner before providing that much of transparency. Otherwise this will make your project and life miserable.
In the same time it’s a stress to commit to 8 hour work tasks everyday.. I know few guys who plan their sprints with 6, 7 hour tasks. May be that’s a solution.. but teams need to mature a bit to work with that.
Sometimes introducing gaps between sprints also helps and teams needs to be cared more when practicing scrum.
Be a PMP
 

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