Why it is important to go live a.s.a.p.

At the last sprint retrospective meeting some of my colleagues raised the following concern: “We are going live with a version that is far behind our vision to deliver good service for our customers.” We are now working on a big project and soon the first version will be released. However, as the project is indeed very big, we have decided to go live with a very limited feature set. Is this a problem? Continue Reading…

Why you may not need HR anymore

We are recruitingHuman resources (HR) has become an essential department in many organizations. It is primarily occupied with two tasks:

  1. Attracting new employees
  2. Making sure everything is going smooth with the existing employees on daily basis

HR is a middle man between the candidate and the department manager – typically the manager will write a specification about the type of person he or she is looking for and the HR will start posting it around on different job portals, social networks, etc. This may have worked well in the past years, but it is becoming far behind optimal. Continue Reading…

First steps to Agile

Shifting from traditional waterfall model to agile is a long process that if not mentored adequately could lead to negative consequences for the whole team (and even the organization). I have always been part of a purely production team where we have been applying SCRUM. However, my recent experience includes being part of a more diverse team, where the members have very different background – IT, business processes, marketing & communication, law, etc. We all have the same goal: to change the organization we work in by making it more flexible (to changes in the surrounding world) and independent. Continue Reading…

The death of Agile

Agile bonesMany organizations want to become agile, but few understand this is a long process that requires everyone to change his mind. Being agile is about mindset, rather than tools or frameworks. I want to tell you a story about two cultures. Dev is a small IT company of about 13 people. It has been on the market for more than 10 years consulting other companies from different branches – insurance, ferry companies, housing administration, mobile operators. During all these years Dev has always been a small company, ranging from 5-6 employees to a maximum of 15-16. Continue Reading…