Scrum vs Traditional Project Management

	Scrum	Traditional PM
Emphasis is on	People	Processes
Documentation	Minimal	Comprehensive
Process style	Iterative	Linear
Upfront planning	Low	High
Prioritization of Requirements	Based on Business Value and regularly updated	Fixed in Project Plan
Quality assurance	Customer Centric	Process Centric
Management Style	Decentralized	Centralized
Change	Updates to Productized Product Backlog	Formal Change Management System
Leadership	Collaborative, Servant Leadership	Command and Control
Performance Measurement	Business Value	Plan Conformity
Return on Investment	Early and throughout project life	End of Project Life
Customer Involvement	High Throughout the project	Varies depending on project lifecycle

Why Use Scrum?

Some of the key benefits of using Scrum in any project are:

• Adaptability—Empirical process control and iterative delivery make projects adaptable and open to incorporating change.
• Transparency—All information radiators like a Scrumboard and Sprint Burndown Chart are shared, leading to an open work environment.
• Continuous Feedback—Continuous feedback is provided through the Conduct Daily Standup, and Demonstrate and Validate Sprint processes.
• Continuous Improvement—The deliverables are improved progressively Sprint by Sprint, through the Groom Prioritized Product Backlog process.
• Continuous Delivery of Value—Iterative processes enable the continuous delivery of value through the Ship Deliverables process as frequently as the customer requires.
• Sustainable Pace—Scrum processes are designed such that the people involved can work at a sustainable pace that they can, in theory, continue indefinitely.
• Early Delivery of High Value—The Create Prioritized Product Backlog process ensures that the highest value requirements of the customer are satisfied first.
• Efficient Development Process—Time-boxing and minimizing non-essential work leads to higher efficiency levels.
• Motivation—The Conduct Daily Standup and Retrospect Sprint processes lead to greater levels of motivation among employees.
• Faster Problem Resolution—Collaboration and colocation of cross-functional teams lead to faster problem solving.
• Effective Deliverables—The Create Prioritized Product Backlog process and regular reviews after creating deliverables ensures effective deliverables to the customer.
• Customer Centric—Emphasis on business value and having a collaborative approach to stakeholders ensures a customer-oriented framework.
• High Trust Environment—Conduct Daily Standup and Retrospect Sprint processes promote transparency and collaboration, leading to a high trust work environment ensuring low friction among employees.
• Collective Ownership—The Approve, Estimate, and Commit User Stories process allows team members to take ownership of the project and their work leading to better quality.
• High Velocity—A collaborative framework enables highly skilled cross-functional teams to achieve their full potential and high velocity.
• Innovative Environment—The Retrospect Sprint and Retrospect Project processes create an environment of introspection, learning, and adaptability leading to an innovative and creative work environment.

Technical Co-Founder Wanted for Social Healthcare Startup

My friend and successful entrepreneur Emily White is looking for a Technical Co-Founder to help execute her new venture in social healthcare. She has intellectual property and ready markets. She is building her team and is looking for the right person to lead the technical development. Could it be you?

Heroic People Emily White, Founder/ CEO

Problem

Sixty five (65.7) million caregivers make up twenty nine percent of the U.S. adult population providing care to someone who is ill, disabled or aged. [The National Alliance for Caregiving and AARP (2009), Caregiving in the U.S. National Alliance for Caregiving. Washington, DC.] - Updated: November 2012 Half of them are employees, many are long distance and all of them have urgent questions.

Most family members and older adults do not know even know what resources are available or what to look for in an answer because they are under so much stress and overwhelmed.

We have a patented solution with validated business process and methodology including telehealth and would love to meet folks who have:

1. passion about the field of aging
2. hands on mobile with audio-video, web experience with successful launches
3. experience leading a team
4. Hippa compliance experience
5. creative, strategic, super smart

Please contact emily@heroicpeople.org

Worst Methods for Enterprise Architecture

On the opposite side of the spectrum, Burton outlined her baker’s dozen of “worst” enterprise architecture practices. The EA methods that Burton said muddied efforts and missed overall business returns are as follows:

1. No link to business strategic planning and budget process.

2. Confusing "IT Architecture" with "Enterprise Architecture."

3. Lack of governance.

4. Too much standardization.

5. Focusing on the art/language of EA rather than the outcomes.

6. Strictly adhering to architectural frameworks.

7. An "Ivory Tower" approach by IT and EA team members.

8. Lack of communication and feedback.

9. Limiting the teams to IT resources.

10. Missing performance measures.

11. Picking a tool before understanding business needs.

12. Focusing on the current state first and primarily.

13. Thinking that implementation equals completion.

via information-management.com

What is Enterprise 2.0?

Enterprise 1.0	Enterprise 2.0
Hierarchy	Flat Organization
Friction	Ease of Organization Flow
Bureaucracy	Agility
Inflexibility	Flexibility
IT-driven technology / Lack of user control	User-driven technology
Top down	Bottom up
Centralized	Distributed
Teams are in one building / one time zone	Teams are global
Silos and boundaries	Fuzzy boundaries, open borders
Need to know	Transparency
Information systems are structured and dictated	Information systems are emergent
Taxonomies	Folksonomies
Overly complex	Simple
Closed/ proprietary standards	Open
Scheduled	On Demand
Long time-to-market cycles	Short time-to-market cycles

The Principles of the Global Workforce

1. Distance doesn’t matter.

Employees now expect to be able to collaborate in real-time with any co-worker. They expect to have access to whatever data or services the company offers no matter where they happen to be. Where in the world that co-worker actually works is irrelevant. They may be working from home, different offices, at airports, manufacturing facilities, or even on a ship somewhere. Knowledge workers need the flexibility to work wherever they must in order to best complete their jobs. That may mean on-site, at a customer’s office, or even from the quiet of their own home. IT must be an enabler for the way business needs to operate. Waiting 20 minutes for a file to be sent between workers – even if they are across the world from each other – is no longer acceptable for the employee or for the customer project that they are working on.

2. Business never stops.

With a globalized workforce – and a rapidly globalizing customer base – businesses cannot afford their operations to be stopped for even a few minutes. Responsiveness to disaster or failure – often characterized by recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) – must go far beyond responding to common problems like a failed SAN or a downed fiber connection. Issues like hurricanes or a flu pandemic might force workers to operate from home for an unspecified period of time. Compromised data centers may require enterprise to rapidly switch operations to secondary locations with no loss in information.

3. Applications and data must be available everywhere but all in one place.

With organizations working harder to protect their valuable data and sensitive customer information, many IT organizations are engaging in IT consolidation projects. Consolidating data makes it easier to track, protect, and restore. Beginning with remote tape backup and progressing to more complicated projects like file servers, document management applications, PLM systems, and Web applications, CIOs are demanding that data be brought back from remote offices. At the same time, businesses recognize that the data and applications were “out there” for a reason – that’s where they needed to be accessed. So while consolidation is an important strategy for data protection and cost control, it can negatively impact business operations unless LAN-like performance can be maintained everywhere.

4. Knowledge must be harnessed – and data must be managed.

Consolidation goes a long way to eliminating the islands of storage and data that evolve over time. But with organizations being required to react quickly in the face of
change, or move in order to take advantage of an opportunity, flexibility in moving data and applications is essential. CIOs must be able to quickly move massive amounts of data, and potentially set up application infrastructure in remote locations overnight. New offices and merged/acquired businesses must quickly be absorbed into the fabric of the existing organization by providing them immediate access to new systems and data.

5. There are no second-class enterprise citizens.

The days of the “important” people working at corporate HQ are rapidly fading. Employees everywhere are now empowered to make important decisions. Whether it is designing or manufacturing a product, working with a customer, or working on a localized version of an advertising campaign, work happens everywhere. And the work of the distributed employee isn’t less important than anyone else’s work. Just as importantly, these workers need to interact with their colleagues, applications and data everywhere. CIOs and IT managers may no longer prioritize workers based on their geographic location. Every member of the enterprise needs to have access to the same applications, at the same level of application performance.

from "The CIO's new guide to design of global IT infrastructure"

Cynefin Framework

The Cynefin framework has five domains. The first four domains are:

• Simple, in which the relationship between cause and effect is obvious to all, the approach is to Sense - Categorise - Respond and we can apply best practice.
• Complicated, in which the relationship between cause and effect requires analysis or some other form of investigation and/or the application of expert knowledge, the approach is to Sense - Analyze - Respond and we can apply good practice.
• Complex, in which the relationship between cause and effect can only be perceived in retrospect, but not in advance, the approach is to Probe - Sense - Respond and we can sense emergent practice.
• Chaotic, in which there is no relationship between cause and effect at systems level, the approach is to Act - Sense - Respond and we can discover novel practice.

The fifth domain is Disorder, which is the state of not knowing what type of causality exists, in which state people will revert to their own comfort zone in making a decision. In full use, the Cynefin framework has sub-domains, and the boundary between simple and chaotic is seen as a catastrophic one: complacency leads to failure.

via en.wikipedia.org