Here are some thoughts on multitasking in IT – assigning people to multiple projects at the same time. Multitasking Gets You There Later.
Can Agile work for mainframe projects?
A recent coaching client is a small company that wanted to transition their entire development department to Agile. It was an easy sell to the applications people, harder to the maintenance people (until I told them about Kanban). The ones in the middle were the mainframe programmers. This company is in insurance, an industry that has lots and lots of legacy backend systems.
At the wonderful Agile Coach Camp in Ann Arbor this weekend, I was introduced to Twitter. I have previously dismissed it as an idle pursuit for people with nothing else to do and therefore an infinite regression of banality. Several people claimed otherwise and encouraged us all to try it as a way to keep in touch en-masse. An example cited was one young woman who had a number of useful interactions with a famous person who would otherwise have been inaccessible to her, simply because she was “following” him.
When I am not at a customer site, I work at home. I have cats for office mates. I don’t get that osmotic communication that happens in team rooms and is one of the benefits of co-location. I am wondering if Twitter can get me part way there. I am going to give it a try.
My Twitter name is rwbrown. Send me a tweet.
I just got accepted to the Agile Coach Camp, to be held in Ann Arbor, MI, USA from May 30, 2008 to June 1, 2008. It was pretty easy. I just had to answer 3 questions. Here are my answers.
This event is an open space, meaning that the topics are not announced ahead of time and no one has to prepare presentations. We will decide the topics and discuss to our heart’s content once we get there. I have attended a couple of open spaces held by the Scrum Alliance and I enjoyed them for the most part. I enjoy a good presentation once in a while, too. But this is one is mostly about networking so I am looking forward to it. I have met a few other coaches at Scrum Gatherings and through my work on the Certified Scrum Coach project. I am looking forward to meeting people from outside that community.
If you are an agile coach and have this weekend free, take a look and see if it would be worth the trip. There is no attendance fee, which suits my budget just right. Registration is limited to 100. It looks like there are plenty of slots still open.
There are countless web sites and blogs that discuss agile development. While we have a lot of information on agile engineering practices and agile management techniques, I am going to try to take this to a meta level and talk about coaching. I will probably wander into some technical topics from time to time because those things interest me as well. But my intention is to share my thoughts on the coaching role as I see it and hope that others will comment and share experiences at the same level. I know that there are some great books out there and some good sites and discussion groups. I don’t know about you but I have trouble keeping up. So why would anyone read this one? Well, I get value just from writing down my ideas, firming up those wispy thoughts into words and paragraphs. Maybe someone will find these thoughts in the ocean of blogs and leave me a comment from time to time. We learn from the observations of others, whether we agree with them or not.