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Too often projects are over-managed to the point of inefficiency with complex tools such as Microsoft Project. For those of us enlightened in the world of Agile, we have Scrum.

One of the key elements of Scrum is the simplicity of identifying tasks, prioritising them and working throught the most important ones first. There are various tools available to support Scrum, but a simpler application that can implement some of these key concepts is SimpleTODO - project management software.

An interesting little application that can be used for all kinds of task management and it’s free.

PROS

CONS

Craig Murphy - The Social Programmer has just posted a blog entry “Blog it, write it down, publish it: communicate and organise” where he mentions that he likes the idea of using blogs for project teams.

Whilst blogs can indeed be useful for teams, Wikis and collaborative tools such as eGroupware and Microsoft’s Sharepoint are stronger tools to be using within the team space. RSL has been a convert to Wikis since being introduced to them by Abdel and Jon Mountjoy over at eXtreme Wednesday.

We’re in the process of using eGroupware in a government sponsored collaborative project. More on this later once it is all done and running!

After initially becoming certified nearly a year ago, I would always state CSM as “Certified Scrum Master”, but within a few months I became aware of more experienced CSMs and ControlChaos, the definitive source of information on Scrum, stating it as “Certified ScrumMaster” - no spaces inbetween the Scrum and Master.

However, today I noticed a topic on one of the Scrum mailing lists that showed the community of CSMs, and more importantly the Gurus of Scrum, stating it in the spaced form. A quick search on Google revealed both spellings in existence in the wild.

Mike Cohn has informed me that the non-spaced version is the pure form. Or should that be the spaced version is the incorrect spelling?

This is now an interesting dilemna! To get maximum coverage on search engines both forms will need to be used judiciously… so here goes ….

John A Thomson - CSM - Certified Scrum Master - Certified ScrumMaster - Edinburgh, Glasgow, Fife, Scotland, UK

… and oh yes, “for hire”!

Went along to the Feature Driven Development talk being run by Agile Scotland. An excellent session, by one of the FDD leaders David J Anderson, who talked for nearly two hours about his experience of building software and how FDD helps. He went on for a further thirty minutes answering questions, one of which was from me on tool support, before we all retired to a local drinking establishment where the I.T. talk continued.

It would also appear that a week is a very long time in I.T. and software development. On Monday, David had no idea of any available tools for FDD, but today saw the Agile Alliance announcing a tool designed for just this task:

FDD Management Tool

In preparation for next week’s Agile Scotland event, a copy of Agile Management for Software Engineering by David J. Anderson has been duly purchased. By this time next week it will have been autographed by the man himself and we will all be much the wiser on using the Theory of Constraints (ToC) to build software systems.

Clarke Ching is the regular Agile Scotland Theory of Constraints advocate and expert. He has presentated on this very subject to both Agile Scotland and the Tayside branch of The British Computer Society.

Thanks go to Computer Manuals for a very efficient delivery service and the special offers they currently are running.

Hubert Smits has announced another well known speaker from the international agile world is coming to Scotland. David Anderson will be visiting us at 7pm on July 19th to talk about Feature Driven Design. Many thanks go to Clarke Ching, who managed to persuade him to come and speak for the Agile Scotland group.

The meeting is in the usual venue: the offices of Currie & Brown (ground floor), the address of which is:
1 Osborne Terrace
Edinburgh
EH12 5HG

Route description: 2 minutes “out of town” from Haymarket Station, turn left, the office is app. 200 yards down the road just before Donaldson’s School/College.

Subject: Feature Driven Development (FDD).

Speaker: David Anderson

Author of “Agile Management for Software Engineering - Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results” will be discussing Feature Driven Development and where it fits in the agile world.

Biography -
David Anderson’s Online Bio

David has 22 years experience in the software development business. Until April 2004, he held the position of Director of Emerging Technology at 4thpass Inc - a Motorola subsidiary in Seattle, WA. David was a member of the team which created the agile software development method known as Feature Driven Development in Singapore between 1997 and 1999. David introduced FDD at Sprintpcs.com, the Internet business unit of Sprint PCS in Kansas City, MO, where he reported to John Yuzdepski, VP & GM. He was one of a core team of 8 senior managers and junior execs who created the technical product offer for the launch of PCS Vision. He also launched the Sprint Application Developer program for wireless data applications in October 2001. David had brief spells working as a consultant for Nokia USA in Irving TX, and Eircell in Dublin Ireland.

Earlier in his career he held managerial positions in two startups in the UK - Rombo, a video imaging company - and MDi Systems, a document imaging company. Prior to starting college, David was a leading computer games developer with Ocean Software in the UK with over 20 titles published including the game of the Sylvester Stallone movie “Rambo”.

David holds a degree in Electronics and Computer Science from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. His first book, “Agile Management for Software Engineering” was published in September 2003 by Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference, Upper Saddle River, New York.

In our previous post, which is titled “No1 ScrumMaster for Hire”, we reported a rating of number 3 on Yahoo when using a Yahoo search for “scrummaster+for+hire”. By placing this as a news story, we have improved our rating on Yahoo and are now number 1 for this search.

This posting will surely strengthen our position on the vast majority of search engines for “Scrum Consultant” and “Certified Scrummaster” searches being performed by people looking for companies capable of performing consulting services on this important Agile methodology!

Hubert Smits of Agile Scotland has announced that Mary Poppendieck has decided to come to the UK. She’ll be visiting Edinburgh in the week of 11th October and will be providing training in Lean Software Development. The full course details are HERE.

The training will take two days, and will be provided on the 11th and 12th of October (depending on the availability of premises). Hubert will confirm the venue in the next weeks, but expects to go to one of the Universities, as they provide good facilities in a nice atmosphere.

The cost for the training will be £ 300.00, including all course materials, lunches and refreshments. Dinner and hotel are not included. Hubert expect to go out for dinner with the attendees in a local venue, details will follow once he knows how many people will attend.

If you’re interested in attending this course then reserve your seat in an email to Hubert Smits.

More information on Lean Software Development and Mary’s work can be found at http://www.poppendieck.com.

Was sitting this afternoon having a coffee with Tony Payne of Payne Associates when he commented upon the Roundtrip Solutions Blog. We discussed various topics from the blog, but he was most intrigued to know all about this ScrumMaster thing. This has stimulated RSL to think that many of the readers of this blog may also be in the same position. Let’s try to rectify this situation, but remember it takes a two day course and many hours of self study to really get to grips with Scrum!

Put simply, Scrum is an agile, lightweight framework for Project Management that uses incremental, iterative practices to deliver! It is worth noting that Scrum can and has been used in many different companies and project types throughout the world, including marketing campaigns, new product introduction and software development. Put simply, Scrum can deliver anywhere project management is required and it rocks!

Here are some useful resources which more fully describe Scrum:

• Agile Alliance

• Agile Scotland

• C2 Wiki

• Control Chaos! The Home of Scrum

• Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum Log

• ScrumAlliance

Hope these links help explain Scrum. Feel free to email me or post a comment on this blog if you have any questions about Scrum.

Please feel free to contact the Roundtrip Solutions team if you’d like to hear more about how Scrum can deliver for your organisation. Our consultants are available for hire and can assist you with any element of Scrum adoption within your project and organisation.

NOTE:
RSL are not liable for any links from this site or the fitness of purpose. As always, use at your own risk!

Just been speaking with Craig Murphy whom has taken up the “no 1 ScrumMaster for hire” challenge as laid down in the previous blog entry. He was last reported as saying, “I’m off upstairs to work on my blog!”.

Let’s now see how Google deals with this competition over the coming weeks and months.

No cheating now Mr M!

Our little experiment on Google has finally worked in the favour of RSL. We are now numero uno “ScrumMaster for Hire”. Try the Google Search: “scrummaster+hire” for yourself.

Only seems fair considering that John A Thomson of Roundtrip Solutions Limited ( RSL ) was the first Certified ScrumMaster ( CSM ) in Fife and one of the first in Scotland. He is also for hire as a ScrumMaster or to put it another way, is available for hire for Scrum project management. The last few sentences should improve the weighting of this blog on search engines.

Our old friend, Craig Murphy has been pushed down into second place. He will surely try to improve this situation over the coming days, weeks and months. The search engine optimisation (friendly) competition begins … bring it on!

RSL are also number one on Yahoo. However, changing the Yahoo search to “scrummaster+for+hire” reveals Mr Murphy as number one and RSL as number three. What a difference a “for” can make!

One of my associates has been running a little experiment on Google. He has made a post on his blog to fool Google’s search bots into placing him at the top of various results.

For example, a search for “scrummaster+hire” puts Craig at no 1! But Craig is in full time employment, which would make it very difficult for him to be a consultant CSM for hire! Search engines and their bots are easily fooled, but does this make them dumb?

A search on “scrummaster+fife” has my personal blog as number 1 of 2.

Now let’s conduct a little Google experiment, ala Craig’s style:

John Thomson consultant of Roundtrip Solutions Limited Fife Scotland for Agile software development including test driven design and development (TDD) certified ScrumMaster .net CSM award winning postgraduate of the University of Abertay undergraduate of the University of Strathclyde formerly Motorola Sun Microsystems Micronas providing and available for consultancy for hire and weddings (my little joke).

Some of my search engine optimisation colleagues will surely inform me of many other ways to improve the ranking, but this is a little experiment and the results will speak volumes. I’ll check back with Google later on and report the results.

I expect to be number 1 or 2 within the next day or so!