Saturday, January 28, 2017

Tech Blog Launched!

Here is a new one: I have started a tech blog on GitHub: http://alexandrugris.github.io/ :). I will also keep updating this one, as the two blogs have two very different intents behind.

The management blog (www.alexandrugris.ro) is mostly about interesting insights I have from time to time, mostly on topics like management and leadership. I write when I think I have something (hopefully) original to say or, as it happened before, when I stumble upon an interesting managerial challenge which drives me to analyze the situation deeper, to extract a pattern. If I find my conclusions to be interesting enough and applicable to other situations, I put it online.

The technical blog on the other hand will probably be driven by my own play with various technologies. I start it with the idea of having a log where I jot down the stuff I experiment with. I don't expect it to have a unifying theme although, as it seems right now, it might evolve somehow towards distributed systems, software architecture, coding techniques and parallel computing. But that is just because these topics are on my reading list these days.

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Agile With Structure

Last year I passed the AgilePM certification (DSDM methodology). The main benefit this methodology brings is, I think, rigor and structure to the Agile world. It bridges the world of software development with the world of large enterprises, bringing in an adjustable layer of governance on top of the team-oriented practices Agile is known for (Lean, Kanban, Scrum, XP). DSDM starts from the premise that everything is adjustable, but in order for things to go smoothly a certain level of up-front planning is needed, a certain level of organization, with more traditional roles and responsibilities, is needed in order for various projects within an corporation to become predictable. It paves the way for better Portfolio Management and synchronization at the project level, not only at team level. 

Here are some slides I put together regarding the methodology. Most of the pictures come from the dsdm.org website, the home of the methodology. Links from the slides are put as caption under each slide.

https://www.dsdm.org/resources/dsdm-handbooks/dsdm-atern-handbook-2008



https://labs.spotify.com/2014/03/27/spotify-engineering-culture-part-1/







https://www.dsdm.org/resources/white-papers/the-dsdm-agile-project-framework-for-scrum