Danko Kovatch will be giving free evening lecture on 28 May 2013.
When: 28 May 2013, 19:00
Where: Festa Sofia Hotel, Bulgaria
Who: Danko Kovatch is a renown agile expert and inspiring speaker and he’ll will be visiting our country by that time for delivering a Management 3.0 Course.
I’ve managed to attend a few such lectures with Danko in past – and it has always been a great experience. Highly recommended!
The event is free and open for anyone interested.
It has been a while since I posted here for the last time so I’m catching up with a bit delay.
During the April 2013 gathering of Scrum Bulgaria group – Stavros Stavru presented report of a survey about the “State of Agile Software Development in Bulgaria”.
While such kind of surveys have their limitations – it still provides quite interesting findings. It’s actually the first survey about Agile of this kind in Bulgaria (and not only in Bulgaria).
More information and the report itself can be reached from following references:
Recently I came across following issue. In an electronic (or physical) Kanban board it’s possible to assign a given work item to specific person. Many work/task tracking tools support that (and it’s not specific for Kanban only).
What I wonder about is the possibility to have multiple people working on same item at the same time. In some cases – the work item can be decomposed into several smaller sub-items. I’m not talking about these. What I have in mind is work on which multiple people work together at same time to produce a single output (e.g. pair programming; or doing some discovery/analysis on one and the same topic – and different people contribute with their findings).
I want to focus on an environment which should stimulates self organization and pull style of work. So the purpose is not to punish/prize the responsible person if he doesn’t meet or exceeds some expectations. (I also consider the team could be non-collocated – so the electronic board is something they rely on for coordinating their work).
So here are some options:
Since some tools don’t support assigning multiple people per work item. So in case we want 1.A or 3 – a possibility is to create artificial sub-tasks per collaborator. (I would say – that’s a bit weird decomposition of work and is likely to lead to confusion).
And if we want to follow 2 – then if tools allows work assignment, this may lead to confusion.
Presently we’re working like describe din 1.B and the collaboration on single work item is just not tracked in the electronic tool.
I’m still not sure what would be the best way to handle such scenarios. Any comments and suggestions are welcome.
Recently I attended a nice webinar entitled “Essential Agile Business Analysis” organized by IIBA with speakers Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman. During the webinar there was a twitter contest which I had the luck to win 
The prize was the new book authored by Mary and Ellen: “Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning & Analysis” (which promises to provide essential practices for rapid discovery of product needs).
Less than a week after that my prize arrived in good quality (unbelievably quick delivery from USA to Europe/Sofia). The book is about 250 pages, really high-quality paper, very well structured. (Details about the contents can be found on book’s site).
So, today I’m starting to read this book. I’ll come back later to share what I’ve learnt from the book.
Recent monthly gathering of Scrum Bulgaria group took place in the evening of 16 January 2013 at Telerik Academy.
January 16 (Wednesday), 2013 at 18:30 Bulgarian time
Telerik Academy Light Room: Sofia 33 Alexander Malinov Blvd, Wedding Mall, 2nd Floor
The presentation was very interesting. We had an overview of what national culture is and some cultural statistical indexes (Тhe Impact of National Culture.pdf). Then the Agile values and principles have been related to some of these cultural dimensions. And conclusions/suggestions have been made about Bulgarian culture and Agile (Bulgarian Culture.ppt). There were discussions about what can be done in order to adapt Agile to our local culture, how to work with people of other nations, and other stuff.
There is a quiz at the end of the second presentation which we did. Interestingly, the quiz results even for our small group of event attendees were very close to the nation-wide ones.
Per-country statistics of several cultural dimensions for almost all countries can be found at: http://geert-hofstede.com/countries.html
Two interesting blog posts of our presented related to the topic:
The official announcement of the event can be found at scrumbulgaria.org site (in Bulgarian)
A winter day in Vitosha Mountain
Next gathering of Scrum Bulgaria group will take place in the evening of 17 December 2012 at Telerik Academy.
December 17 (Monday), 2012 at 18:30 Bulgarian time
Telerik Academy Light Room: Sofia 33 Alexander Malinov Blvd, Wedding Mall, 2nd Floor
Yordan Dimitrov & colleagues will present how they’re using Customer Advocacy Group & Customer Driven Development at Telerik.
More details about the event can be found at scrumbulgaria.org site (in Bulgarian)
The event is free and open for anyone interested!
