coclarity

LEAP is a year-long enterprise and management development programme hosted by the Enterprise Acceleration Centre @ Limerick Institute of Technology. We were selected to facilitate a workshop and day of training on project management. Ronan Skehill, one of the LEAP participants, wrote a great summary of the day.

I believe project management is important for any business but crucial for start-ups. In a start-up everyone needs to be a project manager, everyone need to make sure they are pouring effort into things that will matter to the business.

I’m making the slides available here (PDF files)

1. Introduction (6.6MB)
2. Traditional Approaches (2.3MB)
3. Agile & SCRUM (6.1MB)
4. Productivity, GTD and more (1MB)

If you have any questions or suggestions, please fire away in the comments section below.

It was over two weeks ago but I’m just getting to post these slides from a talk I gave in IT@Galway. Things have been crazy busy in the world of coClarity. The talk tied together Patterns, Scrum, eXtreme Programming, GTD and Ferris’ Four-Hour-Workweek.

While agile techniques owe their inspiration to other disciplines, like design-patterns, they have been improved by the software industry. So even if your business has nothing to do with software development or “agile” you can probably apply some of these ideas and practices.

The slides are on slideshare.

About 45 people showed up at the the Cairnes Business School in NUIG. Kieran Conboy of NUIG also talked about the future of agile techniques and how they compare with each other.

I told some stories of first-hand experience applying agile techniques in tiny, medium and massive companies. The stories began at a “fringe” talk at OOPSLA 98 where eXtreme programming was unveiled on green single-sheet handouts, continue to 1999 and applying Scrum before anyone really knew what it was, then on to 2003 where both eXtreme and Scrum were used on the development of drivers/firmware for a very successful processor. The stories culminate in the present day where the techniques are being used to bootstrap a web-application for project coordination (coClarity).

We had a good interactive chat with some excellent questions lobbed in from the audience. I even got to chat with some former colleagues from Tellabs and Digital afterwards. Last week I got to reuse some of the slides in a guest lecture to 3rd year engineers in Limerick Institute of Technology.

Someone from Enterprise Ireland was there and they’re talking about organising a repeat of the talks in Cork and Dublin.