Blog
McKenna's Law states "The cost of change is inversely
proportional to the confidence to change".
I'm very flattered to have been nominated for "Most Valuable
Agile Player (UK)" in this year's Agile Awards.
It's been really refreshing and reassuring over the last few days to see some of the changes that are happening within the Scrum Alliance. If they really do follow through on some of the discussions that are taking place, it will make it a much better organisation :)
It struck me the other day that we have recently had a good
opportunity to gauge the commitment of our teams because of
the bad weather.
I've recently encountered a situation which has made me step
back and re-assess a view I've held for a while, namely that
the Product Owner role is the one that companies usually
struggle to get right.
I was driving home from Cardiff on Saturday (a long story
which I won't go into here) when another driver nearly
pulled out in front of me on a roundabout. The fundamental
reason that this other driver very nearly caused an accident
was that they couldn't decide whether it was safe to pull
onto the roundabout or not, and therefore they didn't commit
one way or the other until it was too late. Their
indecision, as I said, very nearly caused an accident.
I'm now on twitter but not promising to tweet regularly or
frequently. The bizarre thing is that since I joined twitter
and before I tweeted for the first time, someone I have
never heard of started following me. If you do want to
follow me (and I'm not sure why anyone would) then you can
find me @project-success.
I've recently been visiting a few of England's universities with my eldest son, looking at computer science/computing undergraduate degree courses. So far none of the universities that we have looked at have done anything that comes close to teaching about agile methods, indeed at one university a discussion broke out between 2 of the tutors about whether or not they still taught SSADM. They were totally surprised when I said that agile was mainstream with many banks having adopted agile methods. If universities are really going to produce the workforce of tomorrow, surely they need to be embracing the working methods and practices of today?
Yesterday I attended the CBI conference where it was very
refreshing to see that in a straw poll about 25% of the
audience indicated that their companies were likely to hire
new staff in the coming year. It was even more interesting
that in another straw poll nobody indicated that they
thought the much talked about "double dip" recession would
materialise.
I'd really like to thank Alex and Anna from Connections Recruitment for a fantastic day out at Royal Ascot yesterday. Not only was the company first class, I also picked 5 out of the 6 winners and won some money into the bargain :)