Any (company/individual) Project Manager cannot execute a project to meet three goals at once like “High speed-Low cost-Best Quality”! Any comments?
Scrum is an agile software development framework for managing software projects or application development. Agile just means an iterative, incremental development approach with realistic calculations and self-planned approach. A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need.
I’ve worked in a multi-site Process Improvement Team that adopted an Agile way of working.The team used a set of “Golden Rules”. These rules helped them to understand the agile approach, and to work together in a smooth, efficient and positive way. These golden rules were formulated based upon principles from the Agile Manifesto, EVO, Open Space Technology, Solution Focused, Root Cause Analysis, and Retrospectives.
Due to the low wages in Eastern Europe, Dutch companies like to work with them. Yet there are pitfalls discovered by Hugo Messer.
Sometimes, accidental meetings are the start of a successful company. When Hugo Messer worked eight year ago in a printing office, he could not imagine that a meeting with two IT guys from Odessa (Ukraine) would turn his career upside down. ‘I already had seen enormous opportunities for IT-outsourcing in India. I just started my own company when those guys told me more about Ukraine. A country with 47 billion residents and a huge offer of highly educated IT-professionals. Every year, 7.000 to 10.000 young people graduate from technical universities. Next to that, there was no sight at all that the country would join the EU very soon and that is favorable for the wages.’
IT is viewed by many people as being something technical. They have a vision of managers with lot’s of plans, documents and spreadsheets, and nerds that are sitting behind their computer doing the “real work”. It may be out there, but I don’t see that often. What I see are people working together to deliver software solutions that work, which help their customers in their daily work, and deliver business value to the company. Communication and collaboration is essential to make the people that are doing this successful. So for me, soft skills really matter in IT! What do you think?
Last week, I wrote an article about lean distributed startups. The past months, one of the startups within our company that has taken most of my attention is ‘hire a nerd’. The main goal of this project is making a product out of our current core service (building offshore and nearshore dedicated teams for software firms and departments). Yes the name is provoking, we’re also contemplating launching a second version under our Bridge brand. We try to achieve two things for our customers:
The agile manifesto proposes that a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. But sometimes teams struggle to figure out what an agile retrospective is? And they wonder why they should do them? Without further ado, here’s an introduction to agile retrospectives, to help you to get started with them.
The Agile Retrospective
An agile retrospective, or sprint retrospective as Scrum calls it, is a practice used by teams to reflect on their way of working, and to continuously become better in what they do.
The past months, I have been experimenting with the lean startup method in a distributed setting. Let me explain this, because if you are not an offshoring insider, this could sound like gobbledygook.
The lean startup method you probably have heard about. The essence of the method is: if you have a (software/internet/app) product idea, develop a minimum viable product as fast as possible. This could be an ‘alpha’ version of your software, but even better is a ‘simulation of your idea’.
Are you a doctor with your own practice and you are wondering why you ought to consider taking advantage of medical billing outsourcing? It is no secret that doctors are considered to be very smart individuals, but when it comes to medical billing, lots of them are totally clueless. It is as though a lot of those who are in the medical field have actually given up hope of ever effectively handling the financial part of their practice and decide to have their billing department handled by just “anybody” – in the long run, their practice ends up suffering…badly!
Organizations want to mature their IT or R&D software development and do that by using CMMI for example. They set a goal: we have to get at CMMI level 3! And expect that their employees do whatever they can to achieve that goal. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always go like that. Why do you want to mature, “what’s in it for me” is the question an employee will ask himself. What does work is the improvement of skills, by helping employees to become more capable. The CMMI continuous with CMMI Roadmaps makes this possible.
This week, I launched my first ever book. The book is written together with some experts from all over the world. It is part of a series of ebook on managing remote teams. Our aim is to help people who plan to manage or already manage a remote team. I have found in the past years, that many people struggle when part of their team is working offshore or nearshore. The challenges in managing remote teams are a.o. managing the distance, cultural differences and different time zones. Many offshore or nearshore providers today use methods like scrum to bridge the challenges. But Scrum tells you only a small part of the story, it helps a lot to manage a remote team, but there is more to it.
Once considered a controversial topic, outsourcing is now embraced, not just by technology organizations but with information technology (IT) departments of companies in various industries. I can confidently say that the volume of technology offshore outsourcing – where small and large organizations in economically developed nations send work to companies in developing countries – has risen since this approach became common during the mid 90’s economic boom. During that period, the standard of the practice remained pretty much the same.