Agile Conference NCR

I will be presenting at Agile Conference - NCR. The topic I selected was “Agile Collaboration Schemas”. It would an interesting event. Currently, the presentation is being peer reviewed by Guido and Priyanshu from Xebia.

I will post the abstract submitted for the conference in my next post.

Xebia.com

It is interesting to note that there is a company in North India, that claims to use only Agile Software Development frameworks for its IT Services Outsourcing. The company is www.xebia.com Although there home page does not talk about this, if you go to some inner pages you get mention of terms like Agile Business, Business Value, Scrum Certification Courses can be found. They are also organizing a conference in NCR on Agile.

Managers in Agile

One of the challenge and opportunity that transition to Agile presents for most organizations, is to redefine how we manage things [and we saw in last post - how difficult it can be] and importantly the role of a manager.

Well, below is a general outline of some of the things managers do in their current roles:

• Do code reviews
• Define tasks
• Assign tasks
• Track tasks
• Firefight
• Make MS Project Plan
• Make Excel Reports
• Talk to the customers
• Give feedback to team members
• Recommend appraisal of team members
• Promote team members
• Give presentations
• Train people
• Write case studies
• Write white papers
• Work with other teams
• Provide technical leadership
• Provide process leadership
• Provider marketing leadership
• Do HTML coding or other housekeeping work
• Keep customer happy
• Read about technology and trends
• Make usage projections
• Improve company bottomline
• Recommend engineering practices
• Control attrition
• Interview and hire
• Provide status updates

There can be more depending on which organization do you work with. All that is needed is to come up with all the tasks that you do and cross out ones you should not do in Agile. Assigning and tracking tasks are obvious ones to go. There are many above that can be crossed. After this, investigate if any more things should be added to the mix. Thats it - you have a great new JD for a Manager. CMMi - here we come