Agile Life

I was stuck up in DC this weekend and was working a bit on Saturday when I decided to take a break and watch a movie. I started down what is a slippery slope for me by watching Taking Chance, a movie about an Marine Officer who volunteers to take a young Marine’s body back to his family. It has been a few years since I have looked at the faces of the fallen so after the movie I decided to look at all of the Marines killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan (see what I mean by “slippery slope”?).  I have a process I follow where, over a period of several hours,  I look at every picture. Of course it took me longer this time than a few years ago because many more have been killed in action.  After that I had what I describe as an overwhelming sense of sadness at the loss of my brothers that I know comes from Semper Fi being part of my soul.  If you are a Marine, you know what I mean.  Also, I’m not sure when it happens, but you hit an age where young people just look, well, young.  Many of our dead heroes were born after I was already out of high school.

Being a person of action and already slipping down the slope, an idea occurred to me.  Gunnery Sergeant Terry Ball and I served as Lance Corporals and Corporals together back in the early 1990’s.  Gunny Ball is on the list. He died from wounds received in action in Iraq.  He was an amazing Marine who became even more amazing, I found out later, as his career developed. He was a Drill Instructor and Senior Drill Instructor at Paris Island!  I really admired him when we served together and his death was a huge loss to the US Marine Corps and our nation. I decided that I would visit his grave.

I got up early this (Sunday) morning and took the metro from Vienna to Brookland/Catholic University.  I attended Mass at the Basilica and prayed for Gunny Ball and his family (he left behind a wife and three children). Then I went to the gift shop and bought two identical coins with a cross inscribed on one side and a prayer on the other. I took the metro to Arlington National Cemetery, where Gunny Ball is buried. I located his grave, placed one coin on top of his stone, and kept one as a reminder to me of the ultimate sacrifice he made.

From the Galluscio family to the family of  Gunnery Sergeant Terry Ball and all of our fallen heroes, “Please know that we are grateful for your sacrifice.”

Semper Fi, Gunny. Godspeed.

I graduated from Clemson University in 1995 with an MS in Computer Science. After working for a short time as a software engineer writing spacecraft command and control applications in C on Unix, I hit my stride as a software development manager and I successfully managed software teams of varying size across a variety of programs. The programs I ran were successful, but not without heroic effort on the part of the teams I led.  In 2006 I took a short break to run engineering for a start-up company where I acted as the product owner for a product being built by a team in India at Aspire. This talented team was talking about Scrum, and my response was, “I don’t care what process you use as long as my product gets built to specifications on time.”  Basically, over time my Aspire team taught me to work as an agile product owner. I managed the backlog and watched the product develop quickly in short iterations of potentially shippable product. Wow, I was amazed watching the product develop with no “big bang”, very little heroic effort, and very little stress. The product was built and brought to market on schedule.

I left my start-up in December of 2007 and went back to work on a proposal in the healthcare domain for a project of national importance. The focus of this project is to build a federally-funded open source implementation of the Nationwide Health Information Network specifications. We won the program and I was selected to lead it. We have since made six successive on time deliveries and supported multiple federal agencies going into limited production all using an agile project management methodology called Scrum, as required by our customer.

In December of 2007, before working on the proposal, I went to a training class to become a Certified Scrum Master. I had sort of an epiphany at this class. I realized what my Aspire team had been doing to so successfully build my product. I also realized that Agile in general, and Scrum in particular, fully embraced everything that I knew intuitively as a technical manager about what it takes to make a project successful. In particular, transparency is the key to customer intimacy, you have to “aim small to miss small”, and you have to keep “good enough” on the “tip of the spear.”  Transparency, tight spirals, and constant focus on priority breeds trust. Trust is the foundation of success.

That is how I became an Agile Project Manager. I’ll never go back!

I think an appropriate way to start off is to introduce myself.  My name is Tony Galluscio.  I’m from Indialantic, Florida. I’m married and have four children ages nine to fifteen.  I commute to DC where I work for Harris Corporation as a technical manager with a focus on Agile projects.  For more information you can see my bio at http://www.scrumalliance.org/profiles/23148-tony-galluscio.

My work interests involve open source software, healthcare interoperability, network communications and protocols, artificial intelligence, and Agile project management methodologies.

My personal interests include family, faith, fishing, 4×4 trucks, and reading. I am an avid reader. In fact, I was an early adopter of the Kindle 1 and just today I purchased a 2 gig SD card ($12, can you believe it?) because I filled up my kindle with books. Right now I’m reading a couple of different books including Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and The Hidden Pattern, A Patternist Philosophy of the Mind by Ben Goertzel.   I’m reading The Hidden Pattern in preparation for attending the Artificial General Intelligence conference in Switzerland in March.

Among the excellent advice I have received from Danese Cooper, the Open Source Diva (http://danesecooper.blogs.com/) ,  was a suggestion that I start a blog.  My intent here is to blog about subjects that have meaning to me. I’ll try to keep it short and stay on topic.   The opinions and musings in this blog are mine and mine alone. I don’t speak here for anyone but me.

I’m hoping this will be an excellent adventure. Let the blogging begin!