msc-cse

After 18 months of waiting January 2009 finally arrived. Along with all the added personal mission statements, training ambitions and what not, this is also the month where the article written by Lars Matthiassen and me is getting published.

We got published in the International Journal of Business Information Systems with the article ‘Agility in a small firm: A sense-and-respond analysis‘. I’ll post the approved proposal when I dig it out of my mail box.

My employing firm have several branches throughout the world, our office is situated in Odense and the company headquarters are located on Iceland. And increasing number of projects are dependent on geographically distribruted teams.

The largest risk related to the retrospective was the geographical distribution of the participants. We had team members in Iceland and in Denmark in a rough 60/40 spread. To overcome this obstacle we needed tools in two dimensions;

• Copresense; to provide a better feeling of sharing the same meeting space despite the large distance between us.
• Collaboration; to enable us to jointly participate in the retrospective and not let one of the parties is subject to a passive participation.

Prior to this moment we have typically just used voice services for our project meetings, but to get a better sense of copresence we tried connecting the meeting rooms with web cameras through Skype. This worked fairly well, there were stream drops from time to time, but on an overall basis the experience was positive. Here on the Odense side we could optimize the placement of web cam and screens to give a sense of immersion.

To enable participation of team members in both locations, we used parallel tangible tools such as pens and paper, but also IT network tools. Prior to the retrospective various collaboration tools were evaluated. Initially Cardmeeting was the prime candidate for evaluating brainstorming results, but due to is lack of zoom/font capabilities we ended up using a shared whiteboard provided by dabbleboard.com. This tool worked well in displaying the many brainstorming items, and provided color coding support. Unfortunately it showed serious problems with multiple user interaction. So for future retrospectives we should seek out another tool that supports this.

Firstly…I’m always a bit taken by how quickly time flies by. Its been roughly 9 months since my last post which puts my ‘become-famous-blogger’ plan in a somewhat ill perspective.

So before I hopefully pick up a faster pace (…) and start writing ’serious’ posts, I’d better quickly recap my life from the time of my last post uptil now:

• Still got my wonderful wife, and my son is growing up and becoming increasingly lovable.
• Got a job-title change from ‘Pure Code Monkey’ to ‘Online Community Organizer’, which basically means that I’m responsible for my firms online community @ http://www.certusgames.com (well…it also includes some support responsibility…so it’s not extremely fancy fancy)
• We bought a house…and are enjoying this new status and all the worries that follow in the wake.
• I’ve started working with Betware’s platform which also makes me a web developer (Struts, J5EE and whatnot)…I suppose.

I’m still buying books by the truckload…so in some distant future I’m going to become an expert on the Lego Mindstorms NXT platform, a network security mastermind, Struts Wiz and Agile guru.