Chris Flaat: Scrum and Productivity

Chris’ post reminded me that I wanted to go and attend this course. Chris also raises a very good point.

“If leaders & managers can’t accept the idea that some sprint backlog items won’t get completed, that leaves the team with no real knobs left, other than working extra hours or being deceptive about their status – both of which will lead to serious problems.”

Is your General blogging?

It appears that United States General James Cartwright has started blogging, albiet on a restricted access US DoD network. Thats a pretty progressive step for the head of a military organisation, and what makes it all the more impressive is this quote (source: Defence Industry Daily).

“The metric is what the person has to contribute, not the person’s rank, age, or level of experience. If they have the answer, I want the answer. When I post a question on my blog, I expect the person with the answer to post back. I do not expect the person with the answer to run it through you, your OIC, the branch chief, the exec, the Division Chief and then get the garbled answer back before he or she posts it for me. The Napoleonic Code and Netcentric Collaboration cannot exist in the same space and time. It’s YOUR job to make sure I get my answers and then if they get it wrong or they could have got it righter, then you guide them toward a better way… but do not get in their way.”

I wonder if the Australian Chief of Defence Force (General Peter Cosgrove) would look at doing something like that – in the public domain? Anyway, it got me thinking about who is blogging at Readify.

Almost all of the technical guys are blogging except for Dan Green (aka DotNetDan) our Technical Director. He has a site but since it hasn’t been updated since Saturday, March 27, 2003, I think its safe to say that it is truely dead. Naturally I would like to see Dan resume blogging and the fact that he posted this snippet up to Project Distributor means that he isn’t completely dark!

Who’s left? Well, we have Graeme Armstrong, he is the Managing Director/CEO of Readify (our version of a four-star General), Kim Peacock (our Communications and Logistics Manager) and Jon Post (our Sales Manager). I’ve had several people ask me over the last twelve months where Graeme’s blog in particular is and I’m afraid I just don’t have a good answer – it can’t possibly be because he can’t get a blog set up with all us geeks around him.

So why would I want Dan, Graeme, Kim and Jon to start blogging? Well – I think they would have interesting things to say. Lets start with Dan.

Dan Green

First off, let me say that Dan is smart, and I don’t mean he knows the 1000th prime off the top of his head (its 7919 by the way), I might insightful smart. You can be talking around a particular subject and he can hit right on the issue. The problem is that with Readify being so distributed its hard for everyone to catch up and discuss the technology issues of the day. I want Dan’s blog to be like sitting in a bar chatting over a nice glass of red.

Graeme Armstrong

Graeme has got to have some interesting things to say. He’s managing a small consulting outfit which comprises several senior consultants and developers and balances consulting time with investments in IP development such as courseware. How does he manage the egos and the risk? Graeme should also be on the CEO bloggers list.

Kim Peacock

I’ve always imagined Kim to be like Joan Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank. When a Readify consultant is stranded at the airport she is who we call, and in most instances she manages to get us home! I want Kim to have a blog so that she can share her insight into working with people and equipment transport industries as well as telling us how she helps get a company communicating internally.

Kim also has the distinction of being the only female member of staff at Readify and I am sure that gives her a unique perspective on the company – for example, she is the only person who can multi-task effectively (a skill she requires)!

Jon Post

If you are a developer then your natural to sales guys would be something like a snail when it is poked with a stick. However, for some reason Jon seems to be able to put technical types at ease and get them talking about the issues that they have. I’d love to hear Jon talk about what it is like to work with technical people, both inside and outside Readify.

So come on guys – what do I have to do to get you guys blogging?

 

Architecture Group Anti-Pattern?

Mr. Ed posted up about a potential anti-pattern in the enterprise space around creating “Architecture Groups”. He’s got a point, I’ve been a lot of organisations that have dedicated architecture groups get into real strife when it comes to application and system design at the coal face.

Successful architecture groups in the enterprise are almost invisible and comprise of experienced developers and business decision makers who aren’t unified by a common tag line of their business card but instead by open and high bandwidth communications backbone that spans the entire business.

The experienced developers are embedded into development teams and provide an uplink into the communications backbone. The most interesting characteristic is that anything that travels across the backbone was actually harvested from a team in the first instance – the archtiecture group just acts as a repeater for the information.

Notice that I haven’t mentioned a particular approach or technology? Sadly – there aren’t that many successful architecture teams.

MCAP = New MCP Certification

I picked up this link about Microsoft introducing a new MCAP certification into their MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) line up – its aimed at architects. In this this post about accreditation and the ACS, I specifically mentioned certification.

“in general certification to date as failed to deliver true risk reduction to businesses engaging ICT professionals”

Microsoft is going to have to pull something out of the hat to make this work I think since all the same forces that affect other certification programs come into play. What makes it worse is that the IT developer and IT professional populations are already cynical about anyone who calls themselves an architect – yet its from these ranks that architects will step forward.

I’ll be watching with interest.

Application Sharing?

I picked up a link to this artcle over at the Customer Evangelists blog. Its about some people in the recording industry suggesting that content sharing could  actually be good, and that there is a business model there – go and read it now.

The whole thing makes me think about future models for product sales in the software industry. Apart from a few staple applications (and perhaps even them) I tend to use smallish pieces of software like my blog posting client, or Shrinklet or WinZip or Skype.

Now, just imagine if the concept of programs and data merged. So if I e-mailed someone a ZIP file and they opened it up – they would suddenly have WinZip on their machine.

They could use it to work with the data I sent them, but if they wanted to create their own zip files then the application framework that supports it would allow them to input their credit card details (or alternatively communicate to an enterprise licensing server – software that isn’t registered on the licensing server just doesn’t run).

I wonder if there is a business model there somewhere.