sds_admin's blog

You may not be playing planning poker, defining user stories, or leading retrospectives. You may not yet even be contemplating how agile development practices could help your organization. But that doesn't mean aspects of agile principles are not coming for you.

There has been a running thread on one of my LinkedIn Groups that has made me chuckle every time it pops-up in my updates.

"We are struggling to make our teams self-organizing. Any suggestions?"

So how long did it take for you to spot the irony?

From reading the author's post, he appears genuine in his description of the conundrum. (Yes, I first thought this had to be sarcasm.) He really wants to know how to make their teams self-organizing, as current top-down efforts have not proved successful.

Save $149 when you register for the Cincinnati Cloud Conference before April 14, 2012 and pay just $99. Visit http://cincinnati.intelligence-conferences.com/index.aspx today.

About the Cloud Conference:

Here is an entertaining example of the power of iterations in finding better solutions. If you want your team to be more agile, you may need a marshmallow to help get you there. Check out the brief, six minute video below to see how.

Tom Wujec shares his findings about "The Marshmallow Challenge" at a TED Conference:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0_yKBitO8M

Author: Stacy Sheldon, Director

Very interesting article from Fast Company. Read the full article at: http://www.fastcompany.com/1822971/why-the-pc-will-die.

You may already agree with the thought that the PC has enjoyed its day in the sun and those days are now behind us. The author of this article certainly does present some compelling arguments to support his point-of-view (POV).

Some updated Agile metrics to share.

The NKU Digitorium is an amazing place to hold a conference. We were so impressed at our recent Agile training event, February 3rd. Below is a photo of the cool presentation screen as we were setting up for the day. We sure hope to be back there again soon. Thank you NKU for a great conference!

While driving into work yesterday, I found myself reflecting on this past year coming to a close. OK, it was really more like, “Holy cannoli, we’re almost halfway through December already! Where did the year go? That was way too fast.”

 This led me to also recall it has now been three years since the infamous reversal of fortunes the market abruptly experienced in fall 2008. Three years.

In a CIO Innovators video interview* on SearchCIO.com, Frank Wander, CIO of The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America, shared his thoughts on collaboration and innovation.

The interview contains several poignant points. But one thought, shared by Wander, was especially profound: embed IT in the business. According to Wander, at Guardian, they don’t run “IT projects,” they run “business projects.”

This point highly resonates as a refreshing evolution from the past ten years of CIO’s striving to get IT aligned with the business. Now we can finally see IT for what it is: an actual part of the business that can significantly contribute to business value—not a separate cost center that drives up budgets and goes past deadlines.

Here is some Friday humor for you if you have ever encountered the infamous phrase, "Agile won't work here."

View this quick (under two minutes), funny (at least we think so) movie depicting how the conversation tends to unfold. Let us know if this has happened to you to. Please share your conversations too.