Trust And The Business Value Of Scrum

by Frank Dorst on October 7, 2009 · 0 comments

Trust

This weekend my colleague Martin van Borselaer wrote a blog post “Where Scrum Sucks” in which he argued that Scrum lacks the Business side of project control. Martin has successfully used a combination of Scrum and PRINCE2 to solve this problem in various projects.

I believe Martin is right that for some projects more control from a business perspective is needed. However, I don’t think that adding more layers of control is helping us in making better software. It widens the gap between the business and the production team and it takes another chunk out of the project budget. That’s not business value, working solutions are!

If all this project control is not helping to create better solutions, what does it give us but a formal process for dispute? An escalation path?

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How Rate Transparency And Smart Contracts Will Improve The Contractor Market

by Frank Dorst on October 2, 2009 · 0 comments

Chaining of contracts

In a previous post, I argued that the current practice of hiring external IT professionals is increasing rates for contractors with scarce skills.

Stacking of contracts is a very common practice that results in higher end rates and lower income for professionals and small specialist companies. This makes it harder to make a perfect match because (pre) selection is only done through resume filtering. Additionally it results in less control for the parties involved, as it’s almost impossible to synchronize all these contracts.

So how do we fix this? Can we?

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The Analogy Between A North Pole Expedition And IT Projects

September 28, 2009
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At the Oracle Business Club meeting I mentioned in , Marc Cornelissen was invited for a presentation. I was there for networking, so I was a little skeptical at first. That changed, because his presentation was very good and full of links to our business.

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Why Staffing Of IT Specialists Is Too Expensive

September 25, 2009
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At a meeting of the Dutch Oracle Business Club, I got talking with some other executives of consulting firms. One of the things we can all complain about is the strong decline in rates for our top professionals. A great topic for complaining discussion with some food and a drink or two. Working in IT [...]

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Opinions on Oracle, Java and the business of IT

September 24, 2009
Gentlemen, start your engines

I’ve been toying with the idea to start a blog for a long time. I want to share my views on and enthusiasm for IT and its impact on business and daily life. Information technology is changing faster and faster and it’s transformed the way we (could) do business tremendously as it has already transformed [...]

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