Lean, Scrum & PMI go hand in hand

At least for me personally. This week I got feedback on my proposals for both the leankanban2011 event and the PMI Benelux day! They both accepted my talks.

• So on Saturday, 1/10/2011, I'll be presenting my case on 'challenges of introducing Scrum in corporate environments' on the PMI Benelux day.
• And on Monday, 03/10/2011, I'll be talking on setting up a lean / agile organization, a testimonial from the Belgian trenches.

 I'm willing to give some sneak previews. Just contact me and I'll answer all your questions (the Scrum, Kanban, lean, PMI related ones... of course ;-)); or follow my future blog posts.

Below you'll find a link to the event websites:

• http://www.leankanban2011.be
• http://www.pmibeneluxday.org

Risk Management, I do it my way

Risk management is not one of my favourite aspects of project management. However it is one of the most important ones to ensure that your project stays on track and deliver what is required, within the budget that you receive and the time constraints that are set by the stakeholders;

In this blog post I explain how I tackle risk management in my projects without spending too much effort on it
http://www.pmscrum.com/blog/2011/06/risk-management-risk-rule-three

Done, 'Really Done', 'Done Done' ...

It's quite a common practice in agile or scrum teams to have a Definition of Done. However many teams (especially project teams in larger organizations) define their DoD in their 'political' context within their boundaries of control. This probably makes sense but often these DoD are not "complete" enough to immediately offer the completed stories to the customers. And that is why extra statuses or definitions of done are created and why terms like 'done done’, 'really done' exist. I've created another one: DoRR

Definition of Ready for Release; it helped me a lot in bigger projects in complex corporate environments where the DoD of the agile teams was not sufficient.

More details on our company blog: http://www.pmscrum.com/blog/2011/06/dorr-definition-ready-release

Moving to SaaS and lean / agile organization mode...!

For one of our products (pmScrum) we've implemented recently the infrastructure and processes to offer and promote it via the SaaS model.

You can now try out the product via a demo site (click here to start) and we have a free subscription model available to evaluate our product more thoroughly.

Setting up the website was easy, but the whole logistics behind it required actually lots of work and quite some business process re-engineering. And the good thing is that this triggered a movement in our company to do full monty Agile (mainly Scrum and a bit of Kanban) ;-)

I'll be posting our experiences on becoming a real lean and agile organization here and on our pmScrum blog

So follow me or bookmark the site, if you're interested to know what we do.

cu
Jan

Feedback on previous talks

In February and March, I gave 2 talks about introducing scrum in corporate environments.

• 1 for a group of experienced 'scrummers'
• The other for a group of certified project managers (pmi pmp)

It was very interesting to see the difference in interests, questions, approaches of the two groups
I posted a little retrospective note on our company blog, including links to the slideware that was used during those talks.

Follow this link to read the details: http://www.pmscrum.com/blog/2011/04/retrospective-%E2%80%9Cchallenges-when-introducing-scrum-corporate-environments%E2%80%9D-talks