Ian Burgess

In a project most of the stake-holders are only interested in the amount of work completed and if things are on track. In a Agile/SCRUM environment the best tool for showing this is the burn down chart. These are extremely simple to create with any Spreadsheet software, I commonly use both Excel and Google Docs for this. I will try and outline a simple way of doing this below: Continue reading

I have been giving this presentation as a introduction to project managment with a focus on introducing companies to the basic concepts of Agile. The presentation is aimed at PM Newbies and explaining agile to the managment teams more than the developers.

The key to building a good software development team is to focus on the development of the staff. In most software teams many learning opportunities are removed to focus on the commercial or time-line of the project. Practices such as the two weekly demo or paired programming are drop to free up more time. Agile is full of learning opportunities which will improve the individuals, team and then the software they produce. lets look at benefits to learning and the software created by Pair Programming in more detail.
Continue reading

Clarke Ching from Agile Scotland invited the members of Agile Scotland to an event in Toshiba Medical Visualization Systems in Edinburgh, the speaker was Nancy Van Shooenderwoert. Nancy has been active in the Agile world for some time and is in many ways a evangelist.

The presentation was focused on software development in a safety critical environment, which is of interest to all of us as we all know the pain of software that has been developed with bugs in it.

Continue reading

The one phase that is most often neglected in agile development is the retrospective, fulfilling the same role as lessons learned in other methodologies such as Prince2. Only paying lip service to the retrospective will have noticeable effect on the delivery of the project it is in this phase that misunderstandings are outlined and process that have not went well are addressed.

Some Project Managers focus on this in a very structured way moving from one defined stage to the next, I have over time come to believe that a structure is important to focus the meeting but a strict agenda has never really achieved the best results.  What I want to outline are general principles that should be included in any retrospective, remembering that each section will naturally flow together and it is the PM job to bring them back to the necessary stage and maintain relevance and focus.

Lets look at what a retrospective should include:

Continue reading

“100 grand spent on half finished software is worth nothing” This statement sums up the problem with conventional long cycle development, In the current commercial environment the ability to change focus and deliver value is more critical than ever. Agile development will allow a company to Having been an advocate of Agile development and project management for some years now it is good to a increase in the adoption of these methodology in the mainstream commercial arena. From working with clients over the last few years the main reasons for adoption is: Continue reading