This post can now be found here.

This post can now be found here.

I co-presented an experience report at the Fall Scrum Gathering recently.  The presentation describes how Yahoo! International, and in particular, the Yahoo! Europe, has moved from having a very waterfall inspired process framework to having one which is very lightweight and flexible, and thus compatible with Agile methodologies.  This was achieved through Agile teams collaborating with the Process Group in its own iterative inspect and adapt cycle.  The Process Group has evolved from being a control-oriented team, with a process-centric framework, to being a coaching-oriented team, with an organisational-centric framework.  Thus, rather than telling teams how to run their projects, they help teams ensure their peojects are meeting business needs using appropriate practices.

Saint or Sinner, I’m now a certified Agile Project Leader. Well I did pass the exam at the 2007 Agile Business Conference. Surely this means that I qualify to apply for any Agile role in the market, welcome to my world.

This year’s conference was in my opinion the best yet - new people, new votes and new presenters on some varying topics. Connections, once again, was a key sponsor of the event and next year will again be sponsoring to a higher degree.

The main observation from this year was that there were still some underlying points:

• Still a wide variance of knowledge and wisdom
• Companies are struggling to cope with the surge of required experience in hiring the right people
• Mentoring/Coaching is the key to enabling your existing team
• The “Agile” word is only going to get bigger, broader and more widely used
• The definitions of the word “Agile” are so blurred from person to person and company to company

2008 will see Connections going to Toronto, to join in and engage with World Community, similar to the recent event in Washington DC.

Going forwards currently I’m seeing a sizeable demand for contract and permanent resource in the following technology areas:

• Selenium
• Spring
• Fitnesse
• TDD
• Ruby
• Java
• .Net

And job positions such as:

• Project/Programme Management
• Development
• QA/Testing
• Business Analysis
• Transformation and enablement

Should you be looking for work yourself or be in a position that you’re looking to recruit people yourself, please give me a call:

Simon Voice – 07774626249

simonv@connectionsrecruit.co.uk

Connections are one of the proud sponsors of the Agile Business Conference 2007. Connections have always been a keen supporter of these events and this will be the 3rd year that we have supported the event. Our goal is to continue being the leader in the Agile Recruitment arena and sponsoring these events continues our commitment in this area.

Having been asked to present at the World Agile Conference in Washington 2007, it proves that Connections name and reputation is a global brand, moving across and between industries and domains.

Agile Business Conference 2007 - 2 - 3 October QEII Conference Centre - Looking forward to seeing you there !

Don’t miss out…!

2nd & 3rd October 2007
QEII Conference Centre , London, UK

Europe’s premier Agile event is only three weeks away. This year’s best opportunity to explore the full range of Agile approaches under one roof is running out.

With a rapid acceleration in the uptake of Agile methods – both within and beyond the IT context - the market now clearly recognises that “Agile Works”.

The 2007 program incorporates stories on the experience of Agile adoption and development from the top drawer – including Allied Irish Bank, the BBC, British Telecom and Munich Re. There are presentations from leading thinkers in the Agile field (Ken Schwaber, Mary Poppendieck and Chris Avery) and skills-honing workshops.

Parallel to these is the opportunity to meet with the world’s foremost  Agile consultants, service providers and training organisations including: Valtech, Exigen, Fronde, Borland, LShift, Lamri, RADTAC, Exoftware, Keith Richards Consulting, SQS, TCC, Connections Recruitment, APM Group, Cutter Consortium, Global FN, UNICOM.

We are also delighted to announce our close collaboration with the Agile Alliance who are co-ordinating specific streams focusing on Agile Customer Perspectives and Agile Business Flow & Lean Thinking.

Add to these a prime opportunity to network and this year’s Agile Business Conference is a “must” for anyone interested in Agility.

<Book Here>

Stop Press!
 Special Delegate Offer!

Save £175 at the conference … if you sign up quickly once you are at the conference, you can take one of the limited number of places available to sit the new Agile Project Leader Level 1 (Foundation) certificate.  This is a multiple choice test based on a set of competencies listed at www.dsdm.org. A Level 2 experience based Agile Project Leader qualification will also be piloted at the conference, and will be open for public entry soon after.  Bookings may also be made for this at the conference and special discounts will be available for delegates.

<Conference Program Here>

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CIMG2642
Originally uploaded by sjb140470

I’ve been working in the social networking domain for the last year and Jason Gorman had the initial idea of setting one up to see what interactions and collaborations might flourish. So I created a network called Delivering Value

Actually I’m not sure where it will take us, perhaps nowhere, but I thought it might be interesting to find out. While there continues to be plenty of interaction on the Extreme Programming and Scrum Development groups over at Yahoo, I’m sensing some apathy out there. Are people disengaging from the wider community? Sometimes it feels like it. Steve Freeman says “we are being sucked into the corporate morass”.

So give it a go. What’s to lose? Come and connect with other people, talk about stuff, exchange ideas and experiences, and create stuff and share it. I’ve created some photo albums with pictues of planning boards, bullpens, games, etc.

Anyone read Scott Ambler’s article Coming Soon: Agile Certification. He says “certification of agile practitioners is already here”. And he’s got some scathing words about the Scrum Alliance and it’s Certified Scrum Master programme.

I don’t want to be certified and I don’t believe that I need to be certified. I would much rather you sit down with me and we talk some. Then you can decide if I’m trustworthy and actually know what I’m talking about and possess real experience, or that I’m full of it. Give me a trial if you’re still unsure. But don’t try to pigeon-hole me with certification. And if your recruitment is influenced heavily by certification then I don’t want to work with you anyway.

I’m on the fence as far as the Scrum Alliance goes. It seems to be more successful within its community than the Agile Alliance and I’m wondering if this is down to its increasing commercialisation. What I don’t like about the Scrum Alliance is the fact that the Scrum Master training is price-fixed. A nice little cartel going on there. So I will pay the same rate for a less experienced or poor trainer as I would for a very experienced and effective trainer. What happened to healthy competition?

On Wednesday 4th April I was the guest speaker at the Agile Practitioners Forum, organised by Les Oliver and Simon Voice and sponsored by Radtac and Connections Recruitment. For the third time, the venue was aboard the HMS Belfast, moored on the Thames River. The idea for this session was to build on the thinking that was done in the previous two sessions, and move the forum beyond sharing experience and into innovating new techniques to address some of the problems encountered in initiating and running Agile projects.

The forum has a high proportion of long-toothed silverback agile gorillas. With such deep and broad experience, it’s impractical to capture every anecdote and analyse them for common themes. To simplify things, the session was split into two parts. The first part of the session attempted to simply capture observed constraining behaviours, and the second part looked for the underlying motivation and drivers that cause these behaviours. The sessions were time limited. Although this meant that some behaviour would inevitably be missed, the sessions captured the issues that the forum felt most passionately about. To give a general structure to session, behaviours were written on a post-it note and stuck to the wall under these broad categories:

• Human Behaviour
• Organisation Behaviour
• Systems (Technology)

The (sometimes surprising) results from the session were:

Human Factors:

Systems - Technical Constraints:

Organisational Constraints:

Conclusion

The results as shown have a lot of potential. With further analysis, it should be possible to convert this into some useful tests that improve the chances of agile surviving in a hostile environment. One practical thing that could be achieved is an organisational scoring matrix. This would be list of checks and measures that would show how easily an organisation could adopt agile, and highlight any potential pitfalls that should be resolved before attempting agile adoption. Part of the scoring matrix could also include a set of must-have preconditions that are necessary to avoid failure. If an organisation finds it difficult to conform even to the preconditions, then this shows clearly communicable obstacles to adoption. The matrix could also include a continuous risk analysis that gives an early warning system for when agile is going badly. This would be useful for PMs to monitor changes in an organisation that might impact their projects.

Just because I happen to find it interesting, I intend to have a go at building an agile scoring tool I could use every day. There are a lot of other uses for the results shown above. I would welcome anyone’s ideas on what else could be done with the information.

At the end of the session we came up with several topics for future discussion:

1. Command and Control - what are good ways to manage strategic leadership with self organizing teams? How can you check the big picture?
2. Transition to agile – what are good ways to do this? How do you know when you’ve done it?
3. Sustaining agility – what make Agile stick?
4. Agile metrics - can some of points raised generate metrics that can be built into an agile tool?
5. Selling agility – are there good ways to do this? Pitfalls?
6. Education – certification?
7. Strategic agility – agile principles at board level?

We probably have enough to discuss, but here are a few more:

1. Dysynergy – the antagonism that exists when behaviours work in isolation but royally screw things up when you put them together. What are they?
2. Do the Agile Manifesto values and the principles it encompasses need to be refactored to take account of the issues of adoption?
3. What are the good ways to manage the tension between high level commitment to objectives and low level reacting to change? Are time boxes time bombs?
4. “If your not doing this, you’re not doing agile”…What’s the best way to communicate this to the outside world to stop labeling projects as agile, when they clearly aren’t?
5. Do we need an agile practitioner’s charter? Would everyone in the forum sign up for all the agile principles? Which principles would you be unable to swear to and why?
6. Agile bad press: It’s a cult? It’s elitist? It’s a dogma? What do we do about that?