Scrum Comes to South America in October

August 25, 2009

It seems that excitement over agile processes and engineering techniques has finally migrated southward. Well, not “finally.” Last fall, Buenos Aires played host to Ágiles 2008, the inaugural South American conference on all things agile. But last month, the official website for Ágiles 2009 went live. This year, the conference moves to Florianopolis, Brazil for four days of “agilidad” in October.

With retrospectives guru Diana Larsen and Agile Manifesto signatory Brian Marick slated to deliver the keynote presentations, it looks like a great program, whether for South American software developers or North American coders looking for an excuse to mix business with pleasure.

Check out the full program here.

Written by admin · Filed Under Agile 20XX, Agile Project Management, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

Only You Can Prevent “Teamicide”

August 12, 2009

If the goal of implementing agile project management is to boost productivity and yield highly performing teams, then the last thing a manager or Product Owner should do in that environment is stand in the way. And yet, this article on InfoQ describes how managers—out of intimidation, confusion, or both—have a tendency to undermine their best teams. Authors Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister have dubbed this phenomenon “teamicide” and Steven Denning, who has been writing on high-performance teams for InfoQ of late, offers two common management attitudes that can kill a great team:

  • “Sometimes it’s murder—death by intent to kill: high-performance teams often achieve what they achieve by breaking the rules of the prevailing corporate culture. Managers can feel threatened and so they disband them, in order to preserve the status quo.”
  • “Sometimes it’s manslaughter—death by negligence: the management doesn’t understand the high-performance team or its mode of operation and so it does things that unintentionally eliminate high-performance, e.g. moving members of a high-performance team to other teams, ostensibly with the goal of creating more high performance teams but typically with the result of eliminating any high performance.”

Have any of you experienced the scenarios described above? I’d be curious to hear if many of you readers have experienced “teamicide” at your organization. And, lest we end on such a negative note, be sure to check out the end of the InfoQ article, which concludes with some great tips from Ominlab Media’s Stefan Gillard for finding individuals who will likely contribute to a high-performance team.

Written by admin · Filed Under Agile Project Management, Scrum | 1 Comment 

Danube Technologies, Inc. is a project success company specializing in the improvement of management and engineering practices for software development organizations.
Continue reading »

Agile Tools

The next generation of agile project management.
Continue reading »

Agile Training

Offering several training options on software process improvement. Our agile project management courses are designed to provide your organization with a foundation in the principles and skills necessary to benefit from Agile methods. Classes are offered both as public and private in-house sessions.
Continue reading »