Categories
Marketing

How We Charge Our Clients

Senex Rex charges by the day, not the hour. This allows us to focus, to think, to innovate. Tracking time obsessively, as many lawyers and consultants do, turns them into automatons who can follow the rules, color inside the lines, who might take a dysfunctional situation and make it average.

We’re reasonable, of course. If we just do a one-hour call, we don’t charge. Doing the best for our customers sometimes means we work a 14 hour day, and we charge just a day for that.

When we take a client, we seek to make them world class. We address tough problems like agile sustainability. We seek to build our skills into the DNA of our clients, so they don’t need us anymore. And our clients praise us for that.

See James Surowiecki, “The Cult of Overwork,” The New Yorker, January 27, 2014.

Categories
Personal Scrum

Agile Resolutions

January is “New Years Resolution Month” for me. I plan what I’ll improve in the rest of the year and how I’ll do it. Roughly 88% of people who make New Years Resolutions fail [Lehrer 2009]. Twenty years ago, software projects had extremely high failure rates like this. The software industry started adopting “agile” management practices, bringing project failure rates down to less than 50%.

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Categories
Enterprise

Converting from Waterfall to Scrum – The First 30 Days

In a 30-day period, Senex Rex motivated and shepherded a 700-person company, with development teams in 4 countries, to convert from waterfall to Scrum, with two training courses, one in the USA and the other in India. Today Dan Greening watched the CTO answer employee questions perfectly in front of 68 Indian, Ukrainian and British staff members, saying that there were three roles, Scrum Master, Product Owner and Team Member, that the distinction between QA and Dev would be erased, that there would be dedicated Scrum Masters, that bonuses would be tied to team success, not individual contribution, that they will be using Scrum, and there are no alternatives.

This approach will turn this privately held startup company into an unstoppable machine, and likely prepare it for a highly successful IPO.

Senex Rex leaves companies with the skills and training materials to coach and train their own people in Scrum and agile methods. We help companies design career paths and compensation plans to support agile practices and management behavior long-term. We do not use the “army of coaches” model, but rather help shape companies to permanently self-sustain. The clarity in what executives say following our training is dramatically different from what we’ve seen with other approaches.

Categories
Enterprise Scrum

Velocity Variance: Should we seek consistent velocity?

Abstract

Rhythmic experimentation defines Scrum. A good Sprint experiment seeks to improve important metrics, such as increasing velocity or decreasing bug count. Some managers claim consistent velocity is important. Percent velocity deviation, σ(V)/E(V), is a reasonable metric to compare teams’ consistency. However, software companies usually look for innovation and profitability. Staid, old companies recreating boring stuff can get very consistent velocity. When innovating teams are asked for consistent velocity, some may game the metrics by padding, or stop innovating. Therefore, use consistency only as part of a collection of metrics that describe a team’s behavior, but not a target.

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Categories
Uncategorized

Agile Capitalization Video, with Dan Greening and John Rudd

Dan Greening recently got together with John Rudd, Managing Director of SolutionsIQ, to discuss Agile capitalization methods. Visit our Resources page to watch this 15-minute breakdown of Dan’s experience doing Enterprise roll-outs of Agile and in dealing with portfolio management of Agile.

Categories
Enterprise

Five Challenges to Large Organizations that Force Agility

Sometimes, looking at the bigger picture of workflow can highlight traditional bottlenecks. Duplicating code for the sake of expediency is one of the symptoms of eroding agility. Removing interdepartmental barriers will bring greater agility to an organization.

In this first of 5 articles, Dan Greening makes a strong case for doing software modification tasks in a virtual laptop environment and automating regression testing into systems accessible to all departments affected by those changes. Please continue reading at http://agilecanon.wpengine.com/five-challenges-that-force-agility/

Categories
Enterprise

Reducing Release Duration Can Increase Agility – A Case Study

backflip

Shortening the time between releases can have the effect of increasing agility throughout an enterprise. In this article, the author recounts his experience at Citrix Online, and the positive ripple effects Agile techniques brought to the company.

Categories
Enterprise

Why Should Agilists Care About Capitalization?

Agile Cap fig1

In many companies, agile software development is misunderstood and misreported, causing taxation increases, higher volatility in Profit and Loss (P&L) statements and manual tracking of programmer hours. One large company’s confused finance department expenses all agile software development and capitalizes waterfall development; projects in this company that go agile see their headcounts cut by 50%. This discourages projects from going agile.

Scrum’s production experiment framework can align well with the principles of financial reporting. In this article, the author explains the basics of capitalization and expensing, and offers a financial framework for capitalizing agile projects that can be understood by both accountants and agile teams.

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Categories
Enterprise

Q&A: How can I transform my corporation to agile?

Question

Devesh Kumar from Thomson Reuters asks:
I am being asked to setup agile in totality. I know to setup agile development teams. What I don’t know is how to handle Agile budgeting, How to migrate VPs to agile in higher management, what must change in HR to support agile, and what other organizational policies must change. Can you help?

Answer

You raise some complicated issues, and different people will have different experiences that can help. I bet you have been inundated with private emails, offering consulting help. I’ll just spew this stuff publicly.

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Categories
Scrum

Ad Hoc to Agile, Scrum and Scaling

tortoise-hare

A colleague recently asked whether a team he encountered was agile.

  • The team is managed by a smart computer scientist with deep architectural understanding.
  • There are two specialist engineers on the team: one with database knowledge, and the other with Javascript/CSS/HTML.
  • Periodically team meets with the manager and product manager to plan. Together they decide the overall functionality to be delivered by the team, and decide how long they need, typically two to four weeks, which they call “sprints”. They select functionality that they believe they can finish in that time. These are not user stories, but a collection of requirements that seem like they should go together. The work is not directly releasable.
  • Since the manager is smart, the team usually defers to the manager’s architectural approach, which consciously considers team member skills. The team decomposes the requirements into tasks, carefully constructed to reduce the need for member interaction. They try to minimize source code clashes in advance, assigning tasks to people carefully.
  • The team members typically work in isolation. Although they do not have daily stand ups, they are co-located, so they can always ask co-workers for advice and help. Each is responsible for the tasks he or she was assigned.

Some team members want to use Scrum, but the manager has said, “No. Scrum involves too much process, too many meetings, team members will feel micromanaged.”

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