On April 16th last, I had the opportunity to present at the National Conference on Cloud Computing and Commerce in DCU. The event was organised by Techspectations and the Irish Centre for Cloud Computing and Commerce.
I have included a copy of my slides in this post along with an overview of the main points from my presentation covering the use of business metrics to track the competitive advantage a company can get from Cloud computing.

The main points I took from discussions on the best practices for using kanban and lean methodologies from London lean kanban day

One of the principles of the Scrum approach to agile development and project management is self-organisation. The benefit(s) that occur when a team self-organises include improved performance and creativity within the team. I have decided in this blog to use two video clips which discuss the principles of self-organisation, how to roll it out in an organisation and some differences with traditional project management.

The scrum process provides for planning at different phases of a project to enable the delivery team and product owner, facilitated by the scrummaster to define product features with user stories and related definition(s) of ‘done’ for each sprint. With this in hand, the delivery team can achieve momentum to deliver working software with no interference.
There is no one solution to rolling out scrum in an organisation. This is understandable as each organisation has its own unique characteristics and challenges. As scrum seeks to complete a project over a series of sprints; organisations can borrow these principles to implement scrum over a series of iterations.
Win-win all round.

In browsing some scrum related topics recently, I came across an interesting document by Michael James in which he lists characteristics and tasks that scrummasters can leave out in the day to day workings of a sprint. What I like about this checklist is it’s format, where the tasks and characteristics are grouped by interactions between the scrummaster and the product owner, the delivery team and the wider organisation. I have listed some of what I think are the more interesting points in the checklist.

In a previous blog, I wrote about the principles and advantages of agile development and I would like to continue on that theme with a post on the role of a scrum master. A scrummaster’s responsibilities The scrum master is; First and foremost, a facilitator to the project team, to ensure that all ideas/views from [...]

When I was completing my scrum master training with Jean Tabaka, we started the course with an interesting discussion on what we thought Agile development and Scrum was and wasn’t about. This discussion illustrated some valuable points for project teams that in today’s business world, have to be more responsive, flexible and creative when delivering [...]

With some Agile methods for project management, particularly in the Scrum approach, the project manager should be more of a facilitator in working towards a series (iterations) of successful software releases. With this facilitative style in mind, I have listed, what I think, are important areas/tasks for an ‘Agile’ project manager to focus on when [...]

In a previous post, I explained the principles of a balanced business card and how it helps to focus an organisation on the expected benefits from an application rollout. The first step in building a balanced scorecard is to develop an overall business strategy for the application rollout that provides a focus on the end [...]

When your company is considering changing it’s website or rolling out a web application, one of the challenges that the management team will face is to ensure that the appropriate business benefits are achieved with such an investment of time and money (i.e. that the rollout of a new system/website will be the right thing [...]