I’m back on the Agile Development topic again today, I’m absoutely loving Scrum as an approach but I am finding one problem that I suspect is not peculiar to UNE but is endemic in the higher education and perhaps even the entire public sector.
That problem relates to reactivity or delivery speed in the rest of the organisation. So while we’re all ramped up, focused and sprinting, unfortunately the rest of the organisation is not.
I need to tread carefully here but I do believe that in stark contrast to commercial organisations, universities in particular have a more thoughtful attitude to general operation and particularly to change. Directives are generally rare and the consultative process seems to often result in compromise that supports the status quo rather than slapping it about and moving forward.
However, this is the world in which we live and operate and these are just hurdles that we need to deal with. One way of dealing with this is transparent, up-to-date and accurate communication of progress and importantly, of those hurdles. Previously this is where I would have reached for my Gantt chart and spent an hour a day tweaking things here and there and saving as images to paste into highlight and exception reports which I’d then email around to all and sundry to dutifully ignore. By the way, as an aside, check out the ongoing discussion on Edward Tufte’s website about reporting project progress for big projects, I warn you though it is a long page.
Enter Scrumdesk I could write 5 articles just on this tool alone, it is without doubt the best application I’ve ever used for tracking and communicating development activity and totally appropriate for BI/DW and web development. Incredibly it is also free (for up to 5 users). You’ll need to learn about and practice Scrum to get the most out of it, but as an application it is crammed full of novel and very practical features that I just haven’t ever heard people talk about (like the use of Fibonacci Numbers for estimating), and importantly for this article a fabulous project overview report that is actually a dashboard.
Have a look at it and leave a comment here telling everyone what you think, it has already won a wealth of awards and is nominated for the European Software Conference Epsilon Award next month in Berlin. I think the product is still in its infancy so there are a few amusing translation issues (the team are based in the Solvak Republic) but I just know this is going to make my life reporting progress to executives a whole lot easier and its fun. Sorry Henry Laurence 
