Øredev 2010 Wrap Up

Someone should give Michael Tiberg a cape!

I’m just back from Øredev 2010 and it was awesome! I am very fortunate in that I have the opportunity to attend and speak at a lot of conferences but none of them are like Øredev.

For the unfamiliar, Øredev is held each fall in Malmo, Sweden. It is put on by Jayway and organized by Michael Tiberg and Emily Holweck (who should also get a cape). This year they drew over 1,000 attendees from all over the world. The primary focus of the conference is development, but the topics addressed cover such a wide range that there is never a moment when you can’t find something that will spark your interest.

The conference kicked off with a Keynote called Mission Critical Agility by Dr. Jeff Norris from NASA. He gave a great presentation on innovation, failure and how unlikely events drive success. It was very inspiring and included some fascinating anecdotes about Alexander Graham Bell, as well as some very cool ARToolKit material about the moon landing. (There is no way I could explain ARToolKit and do it justice, but here is a random YouTube video that will help: http://bit.ly/41Wg0x).

The theme this year was Get Real and the tracks included Java, .NET, Smart Phones, Architecture, Cloud and nosql, Patterns, Agile, Web Development, Social Media, Collaboration, Realizing business ideas, Software Craftsmanship and, the conference’s secret weapon: Xtra. The speakers are encouraged to make their presentations as challenging as possible, so there is rarely a session that doesn’t make you feel like you’re watching a TED video. (And in fact, they taped every session and they will be posted in a few days.)

The Xtra track was an experiment this year and I really hope other conferences start to include tracks like this. Along with the sessions about HTML5, Java Provisioning in the Cloud and Agile Release Planning, the Xtra track had sessions on Understanding hypnosis, the lifecycle of a coffee bean as it makes it’s way into your cup, MIDI, Photography and using your voice and body to become a more effective speaker. While these topics may not seem to fit with the rest of the conference, they provided a balance I’ve not seen before and it made an awesome conference even better. The technical talks I attended challenged me from an intellectual perspective and I can definitely say that being asked to sing part of a human chord in Kathy Compton’s session “Music: the language of the eternal kinderkind” definitely put me out of my comfort zone – but in a good way.

I’ll post an update when the videos are live. If you missed it this year, you may want to start planning to make the trip next year. It is a truly unique thing.

Øredev 2010

In just a few short days Øredev 2010 will kick off in Malmo, Sweden. I’m really looking forward to getting to participate again. It is hands down my favorite conference to be a part of. The material presented is usually quite challenging and the attendees are a very sharp group.

ProjectWizards Meetup in Malmo, Sweden

While I am are there, ProjectWizards CEO, Frank Blome and I are hoping to be able to meet up with the Merlin users in the area. So if you’ll be in Malmo next week, and would like to join us for a drink and a chat, please respond to this post and let know and I'll get in touch with you to give you the details. We have not set the date or time yet, but will do so as soon as we have an idea of how many folks to expect.

Dave’s Presentations at Øredev 2010

I’ll be giving two presentations at Øredev this year., so if you feel like stopping by, please let me know so I can say Hi. The topics I am speaking on are:

• The Burning Man, The Empty Pool and Sit Down Failures in Framework and Collaboration (Track: Agile, Wednesday 16:40 - 17:30)
• Social Media and Personal Branding as Project Leadership Tools (Track: Social media, Friday 13:10 - 14:00)

Interview with Riaan Rottier from Cochlear Ltd.

An interview with Riaan Rottier from Cochlear Ltd. Dave and Riaan discuss how Cochlear has used Agile practices in a traditional project environment, the challenges that approach can present, Agile 2010 and the certification question.

An Interview with Brian Rabon from BrainTrust Consulting (Audio Only)

An interview (audio only) with Brian Rabon from BrainTrust Consulting. Brian discusses his approach to Project Management, his work in Agile and his experiences in working towards becoming a Certified Scrum Trainer.

Interview with Fred Kluth from Funny Garbage

Several weeks ago ProjectWizards held our first NYC Tweet Up and Frank Blome and I had the chance to meet Fred Kluth. Fred works as a Interactive Production Manager in NYC for Funny Garbage and last week he was able to take some time out of his schedule for a brief video interview about his role as a project manager, his rules for Facebook and how he was able to use social media to land his gig.

Why You Suck at Offshoring, Even with Agile 
(Recap and Retrospective) - Part 2 of 2

Thushara and I have had a great response to our presentation at Agile 2010.  Because there seemed to be interest, we did a recap of our presentation and also held a retrospective. This is part 2 of 2.

Why You Suck at Offshoring, Even with Agile 
(Recap and Retrospective) - Part 1 of 2


Thushara and I have had a great response to our presentation at Agile 2010.  Because there seemed to be interest, we did a recap of our presentation and also held a retrospective. This is part 1 of 2.

Project Potion 17 - Death of the Phone Call

Offshoring and the Technology Gap

Next week I'll be co-presenting at the Agile 2010 conference in Orlando, Florida with Thushara Wijewardena. Our presentation is called "Why you suck at off shoring, even with Agile". The plan is to discuss and debate some of the issues people run into when they are doing offshore projects. Thushara, who lives in Sri Lanka, will be covering the offshore side and I'll be handling onshore. We've both got a fair bit of experience in the area, but in order to make sure we'd covered all our bases, we interviewed a number of people to get their take on it. Heading into it, I felt pretty confident, based on my experience, that the majority of the difficulties that onshore managers and teams struggle with are brought about by their own approach and an assumption that offshore must learn to adapt to the onshore way of working. My basic argument was that the onshore teams really had to find a better way to adapt how they approached working with an offshore team if they really wanted to get the most out of them. Working with teams spread across the globe, in different time zones, from different cultural and educational backgrounds is never easy, but I do believe that the responsibility for enabling the offshore team falls largely on the onshore team's shoulders.

The most interesting interview I had was with a gentleman I know who comes from India and has been in the U.S. since the 70's. He has years of experience in testing out different ways to make offshore successful. Some of the lessons he has learned seemed to be directly counter to my assertion for the talk, but he had some very solid explanations of how and why he came to those conclusions.

One of the things he said is that there are certain job functions that an onshore team should probably never send offshore. Architect and BA were among these roles. By way of explanation, he offered a story...

The company he ran had been contracted to develop a POS system for use in retail stores in the U.S. He had one of his top leads head over to India to spend time with the team they had formed. The requirements had been fully defined, all the developers were trained and things seemed ready to go. During the discussion of the requirements, the lead asked the team how many of them had ever worked on a POS system before. None of them had. The second question was how many of them had ever seen a POS system before. Only one team member indicated that he had and when he was asked to describe it, he described the back of a cash register. So, while the team was comprised of experienced developers, and they had a full set of requirements, none of them had ever had experience with anything like what they were being asked to develop. Now, while this would not prevent them from actually executing the requirements, without some level of familiarity with what it would be like to interact with such a system, or what the job function of someone who had to use it was like, how likely is it that they'd be successful in their implementation? In this case, they were fortunate that their lead, although born in India, had spend several years in the U.S., knew the client, how they worked, etc. Without his knowledge of how this POS system needed to be used, the team would have been lost no matter how good they were.

What I found most interesting about this was that while I had been focusing on the idea of culture as being a significant stumbling block for onshore teams who are unable or unwilling to adjust how they work to adapt to the offshore teams, I had not considered how the implementation of technology in the day-to-day life of people in one country or another could have such a significant impact on the work. It wasn’t just a matter of the onshore and offshore teams respecting one another, or making sure they all knew how to develop in the same programming language, or that they had well defined requirements. In this case, the fact that none of the team members had ever run across a system of this kind presented a huge challenge and no amount of cultural sensitivity, or training was going to cover the gap created by the varying levels of technology implementation on a day-to-day level.

If you are planning on attending the Agile 2010 Conference in Orlando and would like to hear more of what Thushara and I have learned during our research for the presentation, please join us on Thursday, August 12 at 11 AM in room A-4.

And if you have any feedback on the above, I'd love to hear it.

Project Potion 16 - The Yeti