This time, we applied new model of Agilia recurrent meetings, which should be held on premises of company using agile in real work. First host company was ČSOB and their experiences were really interesting.
Event started with introduction from Michal Vallo, who described what Agilia is, what is purpose of our community and he had a short talk abut this new model I mentioned above.
The second speaker was Jiří Vybíral from ČSOB internal programming division.
They are group of .net developers responsible for internal and external applications. They are practicing applied scrum they got as methodology from their Belgian mother company KBC Group. There were very positive moments I recall from presentation.
One of them is involvement of internal customer, which seems to be working for them and helping to deliver more valuable product in the end. They are of course implementing small pieces of work in iterations, what I consider mandatory for anything what can be tagged with agile mark. They are applying fixed budget model with emphasis on detailed estimation of workforce requirement. Changes are normally applied to product backlog, but development stops when resources are burned. Whole feeling I got from it is that there is scrum applied on systematic level, as a project tool. There is a field of improvement IMHO and some more holistic approach will help here (like later mentioned LEAN).
This presentation raised a big discussion about practical experiences and software deployment mechanisms.
Third on stage was Michal Vallo again, with presentation of LEAN and seven wastes. I liked this presentation, as all I know about LEAN is almost from Wikipedia. Roots of methodology and history was explained and there was a lot of ah ha moments for me in these seven wastes presented. I found there is some link to critical path used in waterfall methodologies and LEAN seems to be a good candidate for generally usable corporate methodology. Shame is that we were limited by time and practical examples were cut.
Hope you all will come next time and we will find another interesting company for our next meeting. You can fing more photos from event here.
About author: Adam Sobotka is a member of Agilia team and Project Manager at Globus.