It is really not a choice so much as it is a discussion about how they can re-invigorate their very agile roots. Agile is not yours to keep, to remain agile you must practice the fundamentals. Microsoft has clearly been very agile in the past and acquired very agile organizations. My question becomes — How do they get it back or get it again?

The video is found here.

My comments follow

The word Agile:  We can take it in different ways for different people but, from what I have experienced it is often a mess in understanding. There are very few good stable definitions out there from which to build a know center of understanding. Too often marketing has taken hold of the word and warped it’s meaning for personal gain. Or agile “experts” have not really nailed the term down to anything stable. Nothing is wrong with that, it’s just good business or people learning. However, the result is that it permeates a very messy set of understandings into the community at large.

Clean code and clean tools allow for rapid feedback which enables a quick practice of agile understanding. A good IDE will enable rapid feedback so that the fundamentals are practiced continuously. When I use the word fundamentals it is like in basketball. You are never done dribbling the ball. Unit tests are a way to achieve rapid feedback but, like all of the agile practices not a panacea. Unit testing is a piece to a bigger evolving puzzle.

Common mistake when people view Microsoft is too see it as one company. My experience is they made up of many subgroups or companies within a larger framework. Some subgroups are very agile and some are not. The agility is not evenly distributed and understood within Microsoft. No surprise there, every big company I have consulted with has this problem. Some groups (teams and individuals) within Microsoft are great agilists, not all. They have some of the best in the world.

It was a good quick talk on adopting scrum and agile.

- Doug

VersionOne was kind enough to invite me as a presenter to a small conference event in Austin on December 7th 2009. The Austine keynote went well and I was lucky enough to be ranked as the best presenter at the event. There were 90+ people in attendance and 78 people filled in an evaluation.

Catch me in Austin, TX delivering a Keynote for the Agile Journal December 7th,  http://www.accurev.com/seminar/austin20091208-4

Below in purple is a post from a past attendee at a Hard Times Course I delivered.

I am not sure what to say or how to acknowledge this post. I am very grateful that someone choose to say these things and hope that others will be inspired to do similar things. The other pattern I hope to see more of and encourage others to do the same is to call attention to each others good work. This is social media at it’s best and encourages us all to be better.

Thank you Robert

The real America just stood up

Posted by Robert Merrill on August 29, 2009 under uFunctional Values

Doug Shimp of 3 Back LLC trained me as a Certified ScrumMaster early in 2009. It was some of the best training I’ve ever had.

He’s still training people to be Certified ScrumMasters. But that’s not news.

He’s training people in “Hard Times Detroit” to be Certified ScrumMasters at cost—$249 a pop. That’s news.

I choose to believe that Doug Shimp—not the selfish, short-sighted scoundrels who landed us in this mess, or the politicians who tell us what we want to hear and not the truth, or the journalists who inflame and incite instead of inspire (even when they’re not skewing the truth)—is the real America, and that there are about a half million more where he came from.

Because of that, and by God’s grace (that word gets tossed around a lot—it means “unmerited favor”), we may have a future after all; H1N1 flu, peak oil, eight-month’s-pay-worth-of-debt and climbing (how else do you put $10,000,000,000,000 or 75% of GDP in perspective), climate change, and all. (Sorry if I triggered a stab of fear, or left out the thing that scares you the most).

If you’re a Doug Shimp, please stand up. If you see a Doug Shimp standing, watch, listen, and act.

This past weekend I delivered a Scrum training course to unemployed people in Detroit. The name if this course was “Hard Times ScrumMaster Detroit”. This course has given rise to a concept we are calling HTU “Hard Times University”

HTU’s purpose is to deliver high quality, low cost, open source knowledge, current training, in a community driven way. It has clear to me that large parts of our educational system are simply holding our learning hostage by high price, huge loans and organizational patterns that create barriers to doing it any other way. The people in this course were amazing and the energy to drastically reduce these barriers is there. Expect to hear much more on “Hard Times University” in the upcoming weeks.

2nd

It looks like we have a couple of publishers interested in our book “Advanced Topi cs in Scrum“. Chapter 4 is ready to read and waiting for anyone who wishes to comment on it. Find it here CHAPTER 4

This is another step forward for the Obama Adminstration. I hope they can keep the posts real, timely  and authentic.  There is no doubt that this was a brillant move during his campaign.

Do you think this is a good idea? Will this change the way we run our country?