Jan Van den Nieuwenhof's blog

PMI Chapter event | 9-Mar-2011
Speaker: Jan Van den Nieuwenhof

BENEFITS

High level understanding on how to introduce Scrum in a traditional IT governance environment.
Better understanding of the risks and pitfalls.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Attendees will

People who apply PMBOK know that Earned Value is a key concept in the ‘Monitor & Control’ area. For some, it is a technique / tool that is really difficult to understand. Let me give you a ‘EVM 101’ introduction.

Earned Value Management (EVM) is based upon these key formulas and concepts:

Last week we posted part 1 of this testimonial. Read that first to get a good introduction. We already covered:

1/ Identify the product owner

2/ Assemble the product backlog

3/ Identify the team (or teams in our case)

Now on with the rest of the story.

 We have a new customer  - with about +/- 10.000 employees - that wants to validate Scrum as an alternative to the traditional approach. Our advise: 'Start with a pilot project to discover how this can be done'. Our question: 'What are the organizational impediments potentially hindering the roll-out of Scrum?'

Some characteristics of the pilot project: (we altered the facts a bit to protect the anonymity of our customer)

Not the most evident choice! A more easy pilot project would be

Einstein was a Scrum pioneer; look at his quotes and see how they all included a lot of messages from the Agile Manifesto or Scrum process & philosophy

“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.“

Einstein was a Scrum pioneer; look at his quotes and see how they all included messages from the Agile Manifesto or Scrum process & philosophy

“I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.”

This post is the third and final post in a series of three about Scrum in offshore projects.

In the first post, we explained some of our experiences in setting up a Scrum project with an off-shore team.

The second post detailed how to setup contractual agreements with suppliers in an off-shore Scrum project.

This post is the second post in a series of three about Scrum in off-shore projects.

In the previous post, we explained some of our experiences in setting up a Scrum project with an off-shore team. In this post, we explain the contractual implications.

Question:       

Name two things that slow down your project. 

Answer:         

1/ Switching to a new way framework like Scrum

2/ Outsourcing to save costs 

Wrong:           

Do both and it will go faster!

We’ve all read the blogs, handbooks & whitepapers about Scrum. They state that working with off-shore people is difficult, not ideal and should be avoided...

So what else do you need in order to deliver your project within the classic ‘triple constraint’? For your sake (and mine) I will limit myself to my personal top 3.

From what I learned at the largest Belgian telco, there are 3 important aspects besides the ‘usual suspects’ (issue/risk/budget management, planning … and all the stuff you get to know by reading the methodology books).

In large organizations it is extremely important that you: