Posted by Ronan on Oct 2, 2009 in LEAP, startup | 2 comments
So who needs project management?
Ger Hartnett (far right) of CoClarity says so – and I couldn’t agree more. He knows a thing or two about project management and we covered quite a few techniques from Get Things Done to Scrum.. which I have to say I like and fits in what we’ve being doing.. but just didn’t know it.
Bits from Wiki and Ger:
Scrum is an iterative incremental framework for managing complex work (such as new product development) commonly used with agile software development. Though not an acronym, some companies implementing the process have been known to adhere to an all capital letter expression of the word, i.e., SCRUM.
Ger defined two roles that fit in two distinct groups–pigs and chickens–based on the nature of their involvement in the development process. These groups get their names from a joke about a pig and a chicken opening a restaurant:
A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The chicken looks at the pig and says, “Hey, why don’t we open a restaurant?” The pig looks back at the chicken and says, “Good idea, what do you want to call it?” The chicken thinks about it and says, “Why don’t we call it ‘Ham and Eggs’?” “I don’t think so,” says the pig, “I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved.”
The Pigs are the ones committed to the project in the Scrum process – they are the ones with “their bacon on the line.”
Chicken roles are not part of the actual Scrum process, but must be taken into account. They are people for whom the software is being built.
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Work is divided into Sprints -
Scrum works on effective meetings. Meeting are categorised as follows:
Because you are startup the scrum of scrums will only become part of your routine when you have teams of works.. for the moment the daily scrum seems enough for us. We organise further meetings/calls when we need it.
How do you present a Sprint ?
Simple .. Piece of Paper and Yellow Sticky notes..
Have a column for
Assign the work to each of the team players and review the board on the daily meeting.
Have a little fun and the work won’t seem so bad..
Ah taking lessons in common sense I see!
Interesting the way they call it a “scrumban”, looks like you’re also leaning (pun intended) towards kanban! ;o)
The biggest danger I see with people getting excited about Scrum/Lean/Agile etc is that the core concept can be forgotten in an effort to follow a process or desire to be “Agile”.
The key to good project management is change management and the willingness to tailor these guides to fit your own style and ways of working – once you start enforcing Scrum practices you end up with a process and a static process brings with it all the failings of every other software engineering methodology out there.
There’s a nice saying from the Lean community which captures the most important thing about your poject… *success*
In Kanban/Lean we focus on being successful and thus hopefully get to be agile. In Scrum/Agile we focus on being agile and thus hopefully get to be successful.
O, I agree – you need to be flexible. Being a startup, you have the ability to react quickly and respond without going through a huge chain of command!
the thing is and point of the post is that you need some sort of Project management.. otherwise it’s bound to fail! The concept or framework of scrum suits us @ Cauwill – so we use it. In fact we were kinda always doing it – but didn’t know it was called SCRUM!
R