tirsdag, december 05, 2006

Globalisation, CMMI and Scrum

Uh the joys of globalisation. Had a conferencecall yesterday with Indians, Americans, Philipinos and Danes. It's really interesting and fun to "observe" the different cultures, and they're ways of communicating. The philipinos have a really nice and wellspoken english so that's easy to understand but i have troubles understanding the indians. You also have the feeling that they rather would be somewhere else than in the conference call. But it really gives you a feeling of globalisation.
Still have challenges with combining Scrum and the big consultancy company CMMI processes. The trouble is to have fixed dates in the iteration for metrics. Like now we have a analysis phase that ends after day 3. And then have a issue management process to handle changes to the analysis but that's not the way systems development work. You do a constant mix between understanding (analysis), finding a solution (designing) and implementing.
It's should be so that Scrum is just one of the delivery methods that you can choose from, but the Waterfall and plandriven approach keeps creeping in. I think i'll try to talk to the Auditors because the way it's going right now is like two steps forward and then 1 1/2 backward. I think that we may have a situation where the PM thats going to implement/combine the CMMI process doesn't really know the CMMI process. Will be interessting.
BTW we had our first sprint retrospective, friday and the first sprint planning yesterday. In this project i'm the customer (Architect/PM ....) but i'm spending a lot of time driving the process. It's good for the quality of the project and my resume but it kind of should be the other way around. I'm also using a lot of time on qualifying the development process which shouldn't be the case.
In a weeks time we're going off-shore. That will be interessting. I'm looking forward to se my project participants in their natural habitat :) Hopefully there will be more proactivness.
But on the other side we're having tremendous fun and the atmosphere is really nice. But i haven't played my customer card yet. I have a review session today where i will have to tell a developer that there are a lot of better if's in his document. Lets see how that goes.
Oh BTW in my quest for Scrum in the big company i was invited to the IT management yearly get to gether to preach Scrum and methods but i'm off-shore so that's kind of a drag.
But just to give you an idea of the timing and progress in the financiel industry my CIO responded when i said that i was willing to do it an evening or something but couldn't make the gettogether. Oh lets just do it in april then :) So we're getting there but it's a long ride.