raves and rants about agile management consulting, hand lettering, sketchnoting, graphic recording, podcasting, writing, cool software, and what’s going on in my life.
After a rather heroic commute last Friday on my Fietsfabriek transportbike from Dordrecht to The Hague, I'm seriously considering doing that more often. Intrigued by reclining bikes, I googled some this weekend and have selected what I think is an excellent commuter bike: the Flevobike Versatile.
Looking for resellers of this bike brought a smile to my face. As luck would have it, there's a reclining bike specialist right around the corner from where I live. So this weekend, I think I'll pay Maia Ligfietsen a visit.
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.
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:
I am a daily reader of by Leo Babauta's excellent zenhabits blog. He's just posted a "Dead Simple Guide to Beating Procrastination" that's worth reading if, like me, you're prone to checking email, twittering, and other stuff to avoid actually doing something.
After his 10-point plan to get you out of your rut, Leo Babauta notes that if all else fails, just take a nap or go outside and enjoy the outdoors or do nothing. Life isn’t all about productivity. Do less. Which is to say, if you are procrastinating, enjoy it!
Today, I treated myself to a Hanlin V3 eReader from PDAShop.nl, and man does it not suck! It totally rocks, displaying my entire library of ebooks, including some old copies of Crosstalk and Soundview summaries. It even displays the content of the Powerpoint presentations I accidentally copied over to the SD card.
The only thing I don't like is the crappy way the SD card slot is manufactured. It works allright, but when you want to remove the card you have to really pick it out with your finger. It doesn't do a satisfactory click-and-slide thing like most SD card slots.
Update Saturday, March 21, 2009: The SD card slot issue somehow miraculously disappeared today. I wanted to take out the SD card to put it into an external card reader, forgot all about the aforementioned card issue, and low and behold: it did a satisfactory click-and-slide-thing!
A friend pointed out to me recently that, as jobs go, the newly created position of Caretaker of the Islands of the Great Barrier Reef might quite possibly be the very best job in the world. Reading the site, I have to agree. Check it out at http://www.islandreefjob.com.
