The main SCRUM tool for Your success: get a physical task board

team on the glass task board

Originally uploaded by Stephan’s Place.

As mentioned before, we were doing Scrum just a while, but we used a software as main basic tool for the project management. Still we had many questions about Scrum, some occurring problems and insufficient results. When I was asking some of those questions my Scrum trainer, Boris Gloger, his answer was often short: “Get your self a physical task board.” Or: “That won’t happen with a task board”

So after the training, we started to look for a physical task board right away. As already told, we finally used a segmented glass wall as our new task board.

First steps in Scrum

How it began

While we saw, that the old way of developing software was full of adversities, like missing the milestones, getting things that nobody needed or just a general bad quality of software without documentation, we decided to try something new. The team-leader, Rene , picked Scrum as the most hyped methodology to meet our problems.

So we started by reading books, blogs and other sources and picked Agilo as basically cost-free software to work along that line.

To be honest, the only good result was that the programmers liked the 2-week sprints because of the better prepared job definition and tasks. At least for that short duration they got clear messages what to do. We didn’t use a task board and relied pretty much on the free Agile features.

But still I did not saw major improvements. To increase our professionalism, we decided to get a coaching with Boris Gloger.

The real start of practicing SCRUM

Now we returned excited and enthusiastic with new knowledge and many ideas.

Certified Scrum Product Owner

SCUM CPO training with Boris

 

Originally uploaded by Stephan’s Place.

In October I attended the above training hold by Boris Gloger. (left guy on the photo) We had in our team already started to implement SCRUM, we used Agilo as software tool and tried to get some advantage out of the procedure. Today I would call that attempts noobish. Mostly because we had no idea whats the philosophy behind so that we celebrated it in a more ritual manner. It wasn’t impressive either.
This course lead us not just to a certification, it was a ground breaking experience and shifted our understanding into a new level.
Personal for me, it was a breakthrough to understand that Scrum is forcing a team to act as a team by improving interaction and communication and team responsibility. Second, I was impressed that the use of a plain taskbord with post-notes brings such a lot inspiration and different experiences, so we use today Agile just as Editor and Backup.

In some lather posts I’ll try to show how we implemented Scrum a second time and what major successful steps we experienced.

back

Well, I’ve been away a long time now from this blog. To be honest, the main reason was that I was a upset when the investors forced Mindquarry to close it’s business. I’m still not over it since it was a fairly good idea and had a very good team as well.  And so I discovered that blogging needs passion and inspiration and trust as well.

Anyway, I think I will getting back some fun in blogging and so this might be the restart for keeping the world up to date on my live, struggling to to find or create software for a better communication and real work support.

Animoto photo videos – pure fun for your ordinary flickr collection

I’ve recently discovered Animoto, a service that lets you easily create inspiring photo presentations, with music and motion. You just have to deliver some photos from your laptop or from services like flickr, select a music from Animoto or again your laptop, and done. Animoto analyzes both, photos and music and creates a inspiring video which you can distribute by email, download or post in your facebook account or blog.

Even some less good pictures make a good presentation, like my poor shots from Silvester 2007. Unfortunately the posting to my blog didn’t work out, so you have to go to Animoto.com to check it yourself.

It is plain fun. It is easy to use. And it does the artist part for you.

Echoes

macro water drop

Originally uploaded by Hypergurl.

Most of my old friends might think by this title of “Pink Floyd” with the identical title from the B side of their album “Meddle”.
Anyway, the Echoes I wanna talk today is Microsoft’s latest platform offer for telco’s.
Mary-Jo Foley writes in her ZD-blog that summary I’ll quote at first:

“1. Echoes will assign a local mobile number to each Windows Live contact
2. Via its Address Book sync capabilities, Echoes will push these new new contacts into any mobile phone (no client required)
3. The user will be able to compose an SMS or place a voice call to these contacts
4. Echoes will ensure text messages are delivered to Windows Live contacts as chat conversations, and replies will be sent back from Messenger as SMS
5. Voice calls can be connected through Echoes directly from the mobile to the Windows Live Messenger user’s PC
6. As the mobile user will appear always “online” to friends (using Echoes client emulation server), conversations also will be able to start from the Windows Live cloud, pushed to the mobile as SMS.”

some remarks on that:
1. The idea is simple and great. SMS and chat are basically the same:
short messages between 2 people. To combine computer chat with sms is just a extension to an other device.
They by Microsofts nature try to push only their own chat service (Messenger). Thats short thinking. Soon other providers will deliver the same with any chat system. Guess what the telco’s will choose?

Salesforce dumping 4000 PC’s

massgrave

Originally uploaded by Zunkkis.

Rumors told, that Salesfore is dumping it’s PC’s when the lease runs out and replace them by macs. All 4000. I’ve heard that from smaller companies already. Salesforce might be the first big one doing that. It is not only a good reference for Apple, it’s a good one for Salesforce too. Because it shows the platform independence of their business applications. (I suppose they only use their owns web based software)
So they replace the hardware by some more reliable low administration demand macs which will streamline their employees work.
Smart move at all.

Consuming news change

Daily News

Originally uploaded by swanksalot.

I was inspired by Mathew Ingram’s post “If the news is important, it will find me”. Let that line sick in for a while:

“If the news is important, it will find me”

It signals a slight change in news consuming. The traditional way was that you have (at least one) a trusted source like times magazine, CNN, or “Der Spiegel” and “Tagesschau” in Germany which you read/see from start to end to get the information, which is important to you. Those “trusted sources” did the filtering for you, they decided what’s important and what not.
Today, some keen folks are part in social networks where they get kind of alerts like:

OpenCoffee Club Berlin

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Originally uploaded by Stephan’s Place.

Last Friday I’ve attended at the OpenCoffee Club in Berlin, a place for monthly meetings with (mostly) entrepreneurs. The guy on the left side of the picture is Oliver Beste, a entrepreneur by himself who organized the meeting.
It was a interesting mix beyond my usually software stuff and therefore very inspiring to see the wide range of ideas coming to live.

Sleeping Beauty

SSL22878.JPG
Originally uploaded by Stephan’s Place.

This Easter Monday we used the nice weather to have a walk in the landscape behind Mühlenbeck in the Brandenburg March. Like in the romance of the sleeping beauty behind the Mühlenbecker lake we stumbled upon that forgotten manor-house “Dammsmühle”. It has seen during its history people like Napoleon, Wilhelm II. , Nikolaus II., Harry Piel, Heinrich Himmler and Hildegard Knef.
Now it’s abandoned and mostly forgotten deep in the forest. Too bad. But still a beauty.

For those who can read German here is a short summary of it’s history.