Agile – the BUZZ word

A word that I hear every day at office………..'AGILE'. I never knew what it's all about till I get to review projects, which practice this methodology. Knowing the concept is quite easy but practicing and monitoring is the challenge.

Depicted below is a burn down chart that I came across, which was very impressive. So just thought of sharing what I understood while reviewing a project today.

One of the challenges that we face is monitoring agile process, where most of us think, analysis should be based on numbers. But in agile, the burn down chart, where it shows the remaining hours of work is a good indicator to analyze projects.

As an example if we are reviewing the burn down chart of a four week sprint (is a set period of time during which specific work has to be completed and made ready for review), as shown in the image, The green line which shows the burn down, should touch the redline at the end of the sprint.

Both the burn down chart and the guideline being able to meet at the end of the sprint means, that the sprint backlog items (deliverables of the given sprint) had been delivered on scheduled time frame.

The yellow line, which is the estimation accuracy, shows the changes in scope. So according to the scope change the burn down will also change. This is not the only reason for the burn down to have a high deviation. It could also be due to team members not updating the remaining time.

And the interesting indicator is the required daily burn down rate, which is shown in orange. This shows the number of hours needs to be completed by the team per day to bring the burn down to zero by the end of the sprint. This is a very good indicator to see whether we could deliver the items for the sprint at the end of it.

Having these types of indicators would help to analyze the project in a different perspective, than what we used to do earlier. So we need to adapt to the new trend to keep us moving.

So the important thing that we should understand is that process is an element that keeps evolving. That is why most of the quality management systems focus on continuous improvement. Continuous improvement does not mean having a standard and making changes to it, but to re-establish new processes that are needed for the business.

Quality as a Differentiator

Well, all these time I was thinking that quality could be considered as a differentiating factor. But after attending yesterday's session at the QUALITY SUMMIT organized by SLASSCOM, I understood that quality is one of the critical factors that help in differentiation, but it is not the only factor that could be called a differentiator.

The summit was indeed a very good starting point for us Sri Lankan quality practitioners to start thinking on different aspects of quality. It had some very good ingredients which brought in wide variety of experiences.

The emphasis on 'NO MODEL IS PERFECT' by one of the guest speakers is what impressed me a lot. Very often we get to come across different models which we think is going to help us. But, unless we try to alter it or use it in the way that it could bring us BUSINESS VALUE and CUSTOMER DELIGHT, the adoptions would become a disaster.

From yesterday's summit I learned two important things:

1. No Model is Perfect
   
2. Quality is not the ONLY differentiator, but a critical element in differentiating.
   

And l should appreciate the organizers for putting up such an event in Sri Lanka. It was a very good start. Hope it would continue every year. Also, with the little bit of experience that I have gained in the industry, I would suggest that SLASSCOM could call for case studies and papers and then choose the best for the presentations. So that the best of the best will be presented and the speakers would put more effort on their presentations.

ISMS Awareness

Today we had an awareness session in the company regarding the new ISMS initiative. I managed to get a cartoon clip which depicts security breaches that normally happens. The main idea was to get the interest of people at different levels, including trainees. And to make everyone understand that ISMS is not something that we should be scared of.

Trying out blogging through MS Office

I have never tried to blog through MS Office blog post feature, so thought of trying it out. It's just a curiosity to know how it works. J