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Hi all,
After leaving town on Sunday late afternoon I arrive in Atlanta (yeah… it was not a hub for me… an actual destination!) and hopped on the MARTA (their train system) to one of the outward bound stations; I arrived around 9:00 PM. Spent the night in a decent Holiday Inn Express (non-smoking, thank you!) and got started at 7:00 AM to head to the training center via the hotel shuttle.
The first class this week was geared toward, “Agile Project Management” and about 14 people had signed up. We had 8 show up.
So.
Eight it would be.
This course talks a lot of Agile from a much different perspective than just “Scrum” — which of course I normally teach to certify new ScrumMasters.
It was a great two day course that I facilitated discussions about topics such as the origins of Agile, Agile Project Management basics, Lean and Agile, XP, Scrum, and a few other topics. As with most of the courses I teach, the feedback was great (OK… so the projector at this site sucked but I could do nothing about it turning black text into blue text).
One good story that came out of this that I feel like sharing includes a story from a company that is implementing XP (Extreme Programming... remember… the Agile Practice that actually talks about engineering practices — Scrum does not by design!). This is not a Fortune 50 company; instead, it is a company that is looking at revenue (religiously??!!) and had brought in Scrum.
What is happening in their shop?
Hmmm…. Something I did not expect.
See. The development team was/is using a modified version of Scrum and XP; and they are blowing away the quality standards that have been measured in the past (however that was).
And.
People starting seeing that the customer was astounded.
That’s a great thing, right?
Uh.
Not really.
Why?
Well…. the company using this modified version of Scrum and XP became so good at producing software without defects that….
… take a breath please….
…. the support team in operations had nothing to do.
The customers had nothing to report as not working.
Fabulous some people would think.
Including me!
But.
The majority of this organizations revenue comes from support and maintenance contracts.
Uh.
See the problem?
Do you?
Really?
And this was from bringing in Agile / Scrum / XP.
Interesting learnings.
I will cover our Richmond CSM class tomorrow.
It was awesome and I did some co-teaching with a non-CST (Certified Scrum Trainers) who should soon be a trainer. Tomorrow I will tell you more about co-teaching with another instructor and why I feel this is something everyone should try.
And try again.
And again.
Again.
I got home from Atlanta at about midnight so I could prepare the for the next days of classes — a CSM class in my home base of Richmond, Virginia. More on the tomorrow. Gotta keep you in some suspense. Or whatever we call that in geek-speak blog worlds.
Have an incredible Friday!
I will be putting in cabinets into the kitchen with my wife. For all those who have taken the course, I’d rate that a 20+ for story points (smile). Hope you understand that reference!
Gotta run….Please send comments, questions, criticisms, ideas, or whatever here.
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3 Comments! to “A Good Week So Far. CSM and Agile Project Management — “Done.””
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February 1st, 2008 at 3:48 am
I was going to reply that “getting the majority of revenue from maintenance and support” is the biggest problem of the whole software industry, but after registering and re-reading I saw that that was exactly what you meant.
Oh well…
First post. Long time reader, now registered.
February 2nd, 2008 at 8:48 pm
Thanks for the comment. It sounds like people get a different view on a lot of things I write about.
Good thing.
I learn a lot!
Hope you all do too…
Thank you for taking the time to comment on this and have a great day/night!
- mike vizdos
February 8th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
I can see how this would be an issue for 3rd party vendors. I have experience working with a vendor who has horrible QA standards and releases awfully buggy code. I have no doubt a significant amount of the money we have paid out has been in operational and support costs…
It drives me crazy working with them, but they are in a niche area where there are few options… so what incentive to they have to improve their QA effort?