At this month's meeting Jim Benson will describe the distributed Scrum method they use at Gray Hill Solutions to deliver transportation software projects using a geagraphically spread team, mostly made up of temporary contractors.
As usual the meeting will be held at Avanade, 2211 Elliott Ave, Seattle, 98121, between 5.30pm and 7.30pm. Hope to see you there.
The talk will be divided into three parts:
- EDUCATION getting your team of hired guns and clueless clients to embrace agile collaboration,
- EPIPHANY (includes the subsection "OMG! This s*&t really works!"), and
- EXECUTION - Dancing's better with the same music.
Each of these sections will describe our experiences, tools, techniques, procedures, pain points, and victories. Most of the presentation will describe a project from Q4 2006, during which not only was our team distributed, but management was also spread between three continents.
It'll be similar to this abstract written for Agile 2007 (below), but this presentation was aimed more at the spec-based approach vs. a more agile approach - my APLN talk will be more about long-distance scrumming and what needed to happen in order to make it successful.
In December of 2005, Gray Hill Solutions won a large contract from a major transportation hardware company. The one-year project was supposed to start on January 1, 2006. There was a four month delay, but the major delivery deadline of January 15, 2007 did not change. We intended to use a rapid-release agile process and to begin coding right away. The client, however, wanted a detailed spec. We showed them that a spec would take more time than the project could afford. Instead, we wrote a project plan and a release plan using agile practices. The clients saw the documents as they were being written and commented in real-time. In the end, the documents won the love of the client and served several internal needs beyond merely showing a spec. At the end of that process, we had 4 months to do 12 months' of coding. Our team had members in Seattle, British Columbia, Ontario, Colorado and Paris. The project architect was in a Paris cafe working on his laptop for more than half the coding time. In the middle of the project, the UI lead ended up working in a Hong Kong cafe. Utilizing a strong set of development tools, agile coding principles, and constant communication, the development team was able to deliver more than the client expected by the deadline with a very aggressive schedule.
I think what's most important to APLN is the philosophical education, epiphanies, and execution that had to occur in order to take what was certainly a doomed project and achieve a successful outcome.
Technorati tag: Agile, Scrum, APLN+Seattle, Avanade, Project+Management
