Today in the TenSpot, we are taking Agile to a new level. Members of our staff recently underwent ScrumMaster and Product Owner training with Certified ScrumMaster extraordinaire Mike Cohn.
Cohn is a leading Agilist, having been involved with the process on an executive level since 1995. He has authored three books and led Scrum conferences and events around the world.
I recently went through Mike Cohn’s Scrum Product Owner training. I was a little worried I wouldn’t learn too many new things since we have already read all three of Cohn’s books. Mike, however, did not disappoint.
I originally listed several take aways from the training in this post. Then realized it was too long and that many of the take aways were a post unto themselves. So my plan is to cover each one as a separately.
1. 21st century Product Owners are now pigs
There's a project management revolution going on today, and it goes by the name of Agile.
Agile project management methodologies are an alternative to traditional waterfall project management, which is the style of project management used in the majority of web development and design projects today.
Large companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, and Salesforce.com have already made the switch to Agile.
Why?
In this week's TenSpot podcast, we get down to the nitty gritty. Kayla Wren discusses running the Scrum process with a blended product backlog, and Dustin Currie discusses some of the problems with project estimation, and some strategies for creating better estimates on your next project.
Contrary to popular belief, I say the best day of the week is Monday. Not Friday, not Thursday, and certainly not Saturday... Monday. Why is it my favorite day, you might ask? Because on Mondays, I get to review and edit our fantastic weekly podcasts. Sure, I usually know the topics ahead of time, and most days, I even participate in the podcasts, but in a world where yesterday's news may as well be last year's news, a refresher is always good.
DFW Scrum User Group
LevelTen will attend the DFW Scrum User Group on Tuesday 10/27/2009 at 6:30PM CT for an on-site presentation and Q&A from one of Scrum’s greatest thought leaders; Mike Cohn. Mike has graciously offered to come to Dallas for this one single event and assist our DFW Scrum User Group advance their knowledge of Estimating in the Agile world.
Our production team recently made the switch from waterfall to agile. While there were some initial hurdles, it has proved to be a good move. But one of the biggest challenges we have using scrum in an agency environment is deciding who should be the product owner.
There are two camps: Client as Product Owner and Account Manager as Product Owner.
It has almost been a year since LevelTen decided to go agile and implement the Scrum process to tackle development and marketing related projects. Throughout the learning process we have made some slight alterations tailored to fit LevelTen’s needs. Most recently, we have introduced an “Internal Scrum” to keep track of the never ending tasks that need to be taken care of around the office – fixing IT equipment, documenting processes, documenting software, office organization, decorating, etc.
In our very first episode of Webintensive, we pull out all the stops!
Webintensive is our new monthly podcast where we have an in-depth discussion about an important industry topic. These discussions will frequently feature a variety of guest interviews with topic experts.
For almost a year now LevelTen has been making a slow transition from the traditional waterfall development methodology to an agile one. Our team had read about the benefits of Scrum – visibility of progress, increase in team morale, more accurate estimating of required effort, lightweight specs and requirements documentation. We were all on board to try it, so what took us so long?
