Thursday, June 25, 2009

NLScrum with Jeff Sutherland

nlscrum_20090624_012, originally uploaded by laurensbonnema.

Yesterday, I was at the NLScrum in Hilversum, The Netherlands, together with approximately 65 other Scrum enthusiasts. Jeff Sutherland, inventor of Scrum and Agile Manifesto original signatory, worked his magic on the audience explaining what Scrum is, why and how one should implement it, and then went on to answer all (yes ALL) questions from the audience.

It was an absolutely great gathering of Scrum enthusiasts. If you're doing Scrum, or if you're interested in doing so, and you live/work in The Netherlands, you should attend NLScrum's meetings.

Friday, June 19, 2009

Interdependency Injection, Turnaround Strategies For Troubled Waterfall Projects

On Thursday, June 18, 2009, I presented at the Integrating Agile Conference from The Agile Consortium Benelux in Hoofddorp, The Netherlands.

IT projects are infamous for delivering late and way over budget if at all. Studies show this is due to a fundamentally flawed development process. For IT projects to deliver on time and on target, a radically different development process is required. Over the past two decades an impressive array of improvement strategies have been suggested, hyped and eventually integrated into the ever expanding body of knowledge available to us. To date, the most succesful strategies appear to belong to a distinct group of development processes known as Agile. A full-blown agile approach will reduce your time to market by 40%.

In the first part of my talk, I explained why and how to implement agile methods in an organization.

So you've heard about agile, and are intrigued by it. You hope that someday soon you'll get the chance to participate in one of those supposedly hyperproductive projects. But you're stuck in a "normal" project with defined process control, gantt charts, decision gates, and project boards. How do you break free from that? Well, you actually don't have to.

In the second part of my talk, I explained how one can inject agility into your existing waterfall project. That will not make your project textbook agile, but it will cure it from an acute lack of common sense. Better yet, it will set you free to try some easy turnaround strategies in your current project that will work in any project, be it agile or waterfall, enabling you to reduce your time to market by at least 20% within six months.

Check out the video of my presentation on YouTube: