Agile Life

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!