Scrum

Ken Schwaber co-developed the Agile process talks Scrum to some Google engineers. Ken is a good speaker and the talk is pretty interesting and worth giving an hour of your time to. I'm a big fan of these online training videos. It would be very hard to see a speaker of Ken's calibre where I'm based.

For those who don't know scrum, it is project management technique focussed on short iterations cycles and real deliverables and good team communication. Some of the ideas are not new. Anyone who has done project management will know that you need milestones in order to measure progress and that a milestone of the type “deliver working project in 2 years” is pretty useless (yes but we've all worked on those big projects, typified by Brooks in the MMM, where at the end of the massive 2 year cycle nothing working actually gets delivered. Scrum is very useful for managing “internet time” type projects where traditional techniques can prove too rigid. It gives a high visibility of progess and impediments to delivery to both team players (pigs) and stakeholders (chickens) while minimizing the time spent in meetings. Scrum is a good compliment to eXtreme programming.

Here is a rapid introduction to Scrum: http://www.softhouse.se/Uploades/Scrum_eng_webb.pdf.