Get them on the list and they will sort themselves

When it isn't clear what people should be working on, start by making lists of what they are working on.

I don't remember if it was Beetle Bailey or Yossarian (Catch-220 who worked out that if you carried a clipboard and a pencil, people assumed you were doing something and left you alone to do whatever you wanted, or nothing at all.  Today's equivalent would be striding the halls peering at a smartphone and barking  into it from time to time. We're all so busy that it seems to be an imposition to stop anybody long enough to ask them what it is exactly that they are so busy doing.

And, just as importantly, what they are not doing that they should be doing.

Frequent complaints include:

• We're so busy doing operations, we don't have time to work on projects
• I'm allocated to so many projects I can't get any work done on any of them
• We don't have enough people to do everything
• Everything is priority one - until another number one comes along, and then both of them are priority one

Maybe these claims are even true.  Before PPFM has had the chance to become effective, people have difficulty expressing why they are so busy, or what it is that they are so busy on.

Don't fall into the trap of defining a multitude of tasks that go into supporting operational needs.  As lists, they can go on forever. While any of the events on them may be the focus for a day or two, but the reality is that most of the events do not occur at all, or occupy a small part of the overall time available.  Only the overall manager of the actual operational tasks we are discussing should have any interest in this.  For everyone else, there's a level of effort.  We don't know what the specific tasks will be in any given time period, but we do know that pretty consistently xx percent of my workforce is involved with keeping alive whatever functions it is that the group manages.  Treat that as ONE activity, and decide how much effort is going into it on a percentage basis.

Now get these folks to list out for you every non-operations "project' they are involved with.  It may be surprising how long that list can be.  Or it may be really short, or at least it may be missing all of the priorities you thought you assigned..  Either way, most of the time it turns out to be a very revealing exercise.

Without your having to issue any instructions at all, self-corrections will begin.  Transparency is a beautiful thing. For most people.  Of course, some people will resent having their little shell game exposed.  Be prepared for that.

Shameless plug: you can read more about how this works in Let It Simmer:
https://www.amazon.com/Let-Simmer-Portfolio-Management-Organization-ebook/dp/B017JY36SC

Go back to the blog main page

Audio publishing tools: circles within circles

If you think writing a book is hard, wait until you decide to make an audio-book out of it.  Now I understand why it costs $30-60 to buy the audio version of a $15 book.

If you've been wondering where the blog posts have been lately, or why it's taken so long between the publication of my Kindle book and the release of the print version.  Well, along the way I discovered that the best way to catch little niggling edits was to read the pages aloud - and it occurred to me that if I was going to do that anyway, why not create an audio version of the book at the same time?

Because it is not as easy as you might think..

Start with the assumption that you want your book to conform to Amazon's standards - can you afford to do otherwise? (I'm going to refer to the platform as ACX, Audiobook Creation Exchange, that's how you get your book on Amazon)

• The upside is that ACX has extremely precise specification for what you have to do to make your book acceptable to them.  It has nothing to do with content.  It addresses the file length, the maximum volume, the average volume, and the audio quality (no background hiss or extraneous noises). 
• The downside is that those tolerances aren't easily achieved.  You could pay someone to narrate your book for you (prices tend to run around $200-$400 per final narrated hour, or basically per 30-40 pages; for my current book (Let It Simmer: Making Project, Portfolio and Program Management Stick in a Skeptical Organization) which runs almost 300 pages, that would be $1200-$2500.
• The odds are that investment would take years to break even.  So you could do it yourself, taking it on faith that the audience will forgive your rasp, your heavy accent, or whatever because they are thrilled to be hearing these words from the author in person (actually, yes, there is a pretty high tolerance for that). If that's your option, this post is for you.

Your biggest hassles are not equipment and software.  They will be your HV/AC unit, and your spouse, kids and pets thundering around the house.  It's amazing how loud sounds are that you've never heard before: your dainty spouse's footfalls sound like a herd of heffalumps and your HV/AC unit sounds like a jet engine revving up.  Since you probably can't or don't want to set up a sound-proofed studio in your house, you're just going to have to manage those problems.

But, following the advice of aforesaid mentors, who include Alun Hill (@AlunHill), Mark Timberlake (@Mark1Timberlake) and KC Carlson (www.video4results.com), I did make some minor investments in decent equipment, and it really is minor.  You need a directional mike for your video camera and you need a USB directional mike and pop screen for your PC / home studio. That's it.  Total hardware investment about $100, certainly under $150 even without going to eBay or waiting for sales (let's save the specifics of the equipment for another post).

And then ...

The software.  You can get free software from various places.  You've got to be a bit of an audio nut to appreciate most of it.   I had to use Camtasia (or something similar) anyway for related work that uses video, or to integrate slides with audio recording.  It's also quite complex but since it handles everything I needed, what the heck.  I decided to do as much as I could with what I had to use anyway.  It's not free: list is $299, but you can usually find coupons for half-off or $100 off.  You won't be sorry; it's a beautiful tool and pretty easy to use. But for audio purposes, it's just the foundation.

I'm not an audio freak.  I couldn't care less about woofers and tweeters and I really don't have much interest in a big console with all those knob things. I mean, how hard can it be to narrate a book in a reasonable tone of voice, maybe clean up some verbal miscues and package the files up for production?  It's not music or anything.

And in fact, that's the problem. You don't always know whether the music is right or not.  With human speech, you can pick up a lot of things in a tenth of a second, and a distortion or interfering noise even that short is perfectly audible and registers.  "Attention interrupt" is the whole principle behind internet and TV marketing -- it works because it is annoying.  People don't wnt that in their books.  So ACX has pretty clear specs for an audiobook.  So here's what you have to do.

Record your text.

That should be the easy part (we'll talk about tools in a minute).  The first thing you'll find out is that the text has a lot of errors your brain sort of skipped over during the editing process; when you read aloud, they all come out.  You'll end up fixing the text as you go, and starting that segment over again.

Fix errors via cut-and-splice.

This is pretty powerful; it's amazing once you get into the swing of it how you can start rambling on, or have a coughing fit, and you just have to remove those minutes of tape. (OK, it's not really tape). Most of the tools I looked into at first, including Audacity which is almost universally recommended, looked way too complicated and audio-geeky.  So I started using Camtasia to record and edit. One thing it does have is a very cool filter for background noise which makes things a lot easier later. That worked pretty well as an editing tool.

Setting the correct bitrate

For broad audience compatibility, ACX insists on MP3 files at a 192KB rate. That's not one of the Camtasia settings for MP3 exports.  So you have to use a little app (also from Tech Smith) called fre:ac.  It's free and very easy to use. Tech Smith's forum also provides instructions on how to install it.

Meeting the decibel thresholds.

Once you get your file at the right processing speed, via fre-ac, its not over by a long shot.  NOw you need a tool that Camrasia doesn't have.  Camtasia users have long been asking for a volume meter with actual decibel values on it, not just a red-yellow-green needle. You can increase the total volume from a nominal 100% to some other percent -- but where do you adjust it to in order to be ACX-compliant?  Actually, you need a lot more than just the meter: you need some analytic tools.  There was no way in Camtasia to even know whether you are in the range Amazon requires, as "green" simply isn't fine-grained enough for that.  In any case, I had all green recordings but I wasn't about to take some 100 hours to record maybe 10 hours of book (accounting for the learning curve, once you get the hang of it, it's probably a 4:1 ratio) only to be rejected by ACX and have to do it over.  (And once I had a tool to look at my files, they were all well outside the ACX thresholds even though they sounded just fine).

So, time to take another look at Audacity, which has much better instrumentation.  This highly-capable tool is open-source (i.e. free).  Once you've gotten it here, surely that's all that's required? Well, no.  It's designed to work in detail with WAV output and there are limits to the MP3 output it can produce. One of those limits is that it can't generate the 192 kb rate you need.

So now you've been forced to use Audacity for at least part of the effort, it would be possible (and is quite easy) to just start by recording in Audacity instead of Camtasia.  But when you're done recording you'll certainly have to edit, just as above, and since you'll have to pass through Camtasia to convert the MP3 file bit rate anyway ... is your head hurting yet?  So it's up to you. For editing, I found Camtasia a lot easier to work with; but it could just be that I started there.  There is a great deal more help on line from the vendor and others.  Audacity's forum etc is not as rich and a lot of the documentation has that open-source look and feel which is aimed a bit more at the geek community. But you need that techno-info from Audacity forum because it has the tools you need next.

Either way, you'll end up loading two more plug-ins to the standard Audacity set-up: "ACX Check" and RMS Normalize (different from the Normalize that is already on board). THe Audactity forum is pretty good about telling you how to do this.  Load in your MP3 file and run your ACX plug-in (under the Analyze menu) to see how the clip compares to ACX requirements.

Now the following sentence is pretty short but the doing of it is tedious.  You'll have to iterate between the on-board Normalize, setting the peak dB level to a recommended level of -3.3 level to provide a little cushion for the ACX maximum of -3.0, and the RMS Normalize and Compressor plug-ins (located under the Effects menu) which attemt to module the overall sound levels so that the whole clip nets out within ACX's very narrow range of -18 to -23 dB.  It usually took me 3 or 4 tries to find a combination that works.

The last check is for background noise, which must be held under -60dB.  I found that with the Camtasia filters applied, this wasn't a problem, but if you have to then Audacity has another plug-in (Noise Level) to further squelch that (as well as a setting in the Compressor plug-in).  Audacity's forum also notes that this plug-in starts to create the kind of signal that triggers ACX to consider that the file contains too much post-processing to be reliable.

Once you get it all sorted out, Audacity will let you create an MP3 which you can then include with the rest of the files you need to upload your entire opus to ACX as an audio book.

So there it is, more than you ever wanted to know about conditioning a simple audio file sufficiently to enable it to become an audio book. However, as several of the names I noted above mentioned, the video component of our brains is used to filling in parts it doesn't truly see.  The audio part is what causes bad reviews, even of a video.

Next time you're thinking how expensive an audio book is  .. try making one out of just a simple white paper you've written.  All of a sudden $35 seems cheap.  Although I still borrow most of mine from the library ...

Containers - Back to the Future of Software Development Yet Again

A new concept of "containers" promises to make software applications free-standing entities, essentially infrastructure-independent.



H/T to Federal Computing Weekly (FCW) for a good overview post on this concept and some thoughts on the challenges with implementing it.

This concept makes sense.  But we've heard this song before:

• Object-oriented programming was supposed to shred everything down to micro-applications that could just be recombined to make full-sized applications
• Services-Oriented Architecture (SOA) was supposed to shred everything down to micro-services that could just be recombined under a thin execution logic layer to make full-sized applications
• Virtualization was supposed to separate systems into n-tier architectures so that the applications could be treated as black boxes and shifted from one infrastructure to another.

Issued raised in the article include:

• Container realization software is still new and changing rapidly.  That poses all sorts of complications if the goal is stability, and might cause rework of the applications to stay compatible with their own platforms.
•  Once it goes into production, many applications depend on it (or at least that is the idea).  How do you make sure nobody fixes it, or amends it to suit a new applications, without validating the impacts on all the application?

This is not the first time we've heard those concerns raised, either, so maybe we have a better idea today on how to solve them.

So what is different about the new containers?
Your observations are very welcome!

While you're here: I's super-pumped for the pending release (October) of:
Let It Simmer: Making Project, Portfolio and Program Management Practices Stick in a Skeptical Organization.  Take a peek!


Photo credit: "Mülltrennung" by Peng 6 July 2005 16:28 (UTC) - --Peng 6 July 2005 16:28 (UTC). Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:M%C3%BClltrennung.jpg#/media/File:M%C3%BClltrennung.jpg

Can a Charter Drive Project and Program Success?

Every methodology tells you to start by securing executive support, as demonstrated by getting a signed charter.

That's a good idea, although not because anybody is actually going to pay attention to the charter document itself.  Most likely the only time it will be used as a reference is when stakeholders cheerfully point out that whatever you are trying to accomplish is not specifically included in the charter and most regretfully they don't have the resources at this time.  

It takes time and effort to get a charter signed out.

It is also true that a number of successful projects did not actually have signed charters.  So why bother?

Successful initiatives without formal charters achieve their success because they have active, observable leadership support.  Leaders are constantly inquiring after its health and come down like a ton of bricks if resources are not available as and when needed.   When that's happening, the document is of little need.  At the project manager level, the sure knowledge that if the obstacle is not cleared away then Mr. Big will apply his own unique problem-solving techniques is by itself a sufficient motivator that problems get resolved.

You cannot play that card too often, and you cannot pull it on every initiative, or you are back to the chaos of not having any priorities at all.

The point is not really to get the charter signed.  The point is that if you can't seem to get to closure to get the charter signed, then your initiative obviously doesn't enjoy a great deal of status with the intended sponsors.   If they won't do something as simple as signing the charter, do you really think they will go to war with the other senior players when they renege on their resource commitments? 

In Japan, executives may even sign it upside down to indicate that they don't really support it but they won't oppose it either.  Sometimes it would be helpful to have it right out on the table like that!

Having a charter does not prove that you have support.

Being unable to get a charter means that you certainly do not have support.

So by all means get a charter.  It won't prove that they really care, and it does not mean that you will actually get all the support that is promised.  At least it shows that they don't really hate the idea.

Learn more about charters in "Let It Simmer: Making Project, Portfolio and Program Management Practices Stick in a Skeptical Organization" will be out at the start of October.  Check it out at www.simmer-system.com and get in position for a pre-order at the lowest possible price!

Hidden Features of Windows 10 Install That You Should Worry About and Fix

There is a new "feature" in Windows 10 that you'll want to know abut (and fix) on Day One.  That's on top of the little security challenge noted in the previous post which notes a key action you will need to take before the roll-out happens.  If you haven't done it yet, please do so immediately.

A separate post addresses the actual roll-out experience, but the summary is: pretty painless.

What I want to let you know about today is a whole new security wrinkle you need to consider: the Windows 10 defaults.

Yup, that's a vulture sitting there, looking over your shoulder.


(Image: Audubon)

Let me say first, and not for the first time, that I am a Microsoftie at heart. And I trust the NSA with my information a heck of a lot more than I would trust the Washington Post (in case you are reading this, hi guys!)

Still, you can't help but be surprised by the default settings.  They go a long way to explain Rand Paul's apparent paranoia.  If someone really is watching your every move, are you really paranoid?

So, when the actual install cycles end and the system asks whether you want to customize: YES, you do!

Read the settings carefully. Your choices may be a bit more aggressive or cautious than mine for various reasons.

Here are the ones that jumped out at me:

In the basic Customization table, the key settings are almost the reverse of what I wanted.  I disabled:

• Content and calculation details: no, Microsoft does not need to know that
• Typing data: ditto
• Advertiser information: no, thanks.  I get enough of that already.
• Location (since this computer doesn't travel much and when it does I use the phone for "near me" sorts of things). Google seems to know the answer anyway; that's probably a whole other topic!
• Page prediction. This one is not so much a security and privacy issue as it does cut down the background processing.  Yes, it probably would speed up the actual transition from on page to another but Verizon's FIOS service and (let's admit it)Windows 10 are pretty fast for most purposes.
• Suggested hot-spots: more ads
• Auto-connect to content-suggested networks: Really?  "Yes" by default?

That is 8 out of 10 that I chose to reverse.  What is left?

• Smart scanning: protects against known or likely threats while in Windows browser: seems like a good idea, although I will likely not be using Windows Edge until all the sites that don't support Internet Explorer reverse themselves.
• Send errors and diagnostics to Microsoft: sure, let them identify and fix problems. Of couse, I have no idea how much data gets sucked out of the machine when i doe that, and it may well undo all of the concerns noted above.  Oh, well.

After the customization appears, you will get an opportunity to go through the "Getting Started" page. At first I thought it did not work, but it came to life eventually.  Then I thought that the audio drivers has been killed, as the getting started videos were playing but without sound.  That too was restored after a bit.  I suspect that the system was busy finishing up some other tasks in background.

The system now advises that it includes several new applications:

• Photos (the old Microsoft Office Photo Manager turned into a tile; actually this happened in Windows 8)
• Music (I can't help you much here as I don't have much to do with music)
• Microsoft Edge (new new name for the browser), and
• Movies and TV (Windows Media Manager turned into a tablet app)

Since they are tablet-style applications, if you haven't had this pleasure before you'll have to get used to dragging them down and off the screen when you are done with them.  Yecch.  And it makes it quite hard to multitask with them, i.e to have them and another applications on the screen at the same time. There's probably a way to do that but frankly nothing about tile-world is intuitive to me and for the most part it disgusts me so much that I just don't use the apps.  There's a reason why I have a PC as well as a phone, which is specifically that I want to to be able to use information from more than one program at a time.  I assume that was also the reason hardly anybody liked Windows 8 either.

Once you've registered changes to your defaults and taken about 10 minutes to go through the Get Started set of tutorials (they are pretty lean, and more motivational than instructional, so it does not take long), you get a restart.

Up comes a nice new screen and to my surprise the system displays some customer screen-savers you may have saved earlier rather than the standard Windows displays.  Thus far, AVG Tune-up has not complained of the dag on system resources that those screen-savers cause.  When it does, Windows has some defaults available.

Also, fortunately, the Microsoft ID (the outlook.com address you were forced to create is you bought a computer with Windows 8 on it) and the PIN you had to set up for Windows 8 still work.

Then the system will take another recycle for applications setup; this one is only about 5 minutes.

Once it has finished with that, you get the opportunity to do more customization and again you may want to do just that.

The next area with some security implications is the Notifications.

• Tips about Windows: You may want to shift this to "on" for a while until you get the feel of your new toy.  You can get back to the notifications dialogue from the Start menu [did I tell you that as back?  Thank goodness it is.  Although you may want to consider re-installing your own, as the Windows 10 version still does not show Recent History].
• Application notification: Of course yes. You should decide on this at the application level.
• Notifications on the lock screen: The point of the lock is that you are away from the computer. Why show your notifications to anyone else?
• Alarms, reminders and incoming VIP call while locked: same reasoning
• Hide notifications while presenting: yes, that would be a good idea. You cannot rely on this, however, as I assume it only works if you have a projector plugged in, or perhaps if you are using PowerPoint.  So if you are doing a webinar-type event through a web service, it may or may not pick up on that. If you're going to share your desktop, you should assume that people will see what you have on your desktop.

There are other settings but they are pretty much the usual choices, with one exception: under Multi-tasking, there are "Virtual desktop" options for showing desktops other than yours.  Whether you want to do that or not depends on your situation, of course, but there is no provision for declining to show your desktop to anyone else.  Until I learn more about how this works (as usual, there is zero documentation for the system), I am going to assume that anyone in your connected work-group can see your desktop.  And of course the people in Redmond, if you did not turn off the customizations noted above!  And the NSA.  And the Chinese.  Well, heck, you might as well not worry about it.  Just stay off the porn sites.

That's about it from a security perspective - as far as I know!

Microsoft seems to have a bit better information as there has been a patch install daily so far. Presumably they are fixing holes.

Oh, yes: one more thing.  When all this is done, if you have not done so already, check the "hidden icons" tray.  It's in the status bar at the bottom-right of the screen.   If your antivirus of choice is not up and running, then you'll need to decide whether to adopt Windows Defender or go back and re-install your preferred flavor. Which is where the "key step" from before the install comes in.

As always, comments are welcome.

How to Survive the Transition to Windows 10 - Fact versus Fiction

Well, the great day has finally arrived.  Or maybe not.
All of us will have the opportunity to see one of the most amazing projects of our time as it unfolds.
Microsoft is going to replace the operating system on hundreds of millions of computers with basically no user involvement needed.  Hopefully.

Naturally they have a story as to how this will work: here's a link to their FAQ page.  It's pretty detailed and informative.  Still it is what architects cal this the "rosy path" - everything goes as planned.
I never did get the Apple craze, I guess I'm just a Microsoft sort of person.  So I hope it does go well.  This post will be the first of several that comment on what really happens.

Everybody will be working through this at a different pace.
If you have any insights to share, please do comment and it will become part of the thread.
If you have a lot of knowledge to share, let's talk offline about a guest post or a webinar.

The announcement

Some months back, Microsoft advised me that I would be getting Windows 10.  I needed to sign up for the deferred program or else it might just appear right now.  Well, duh.  Of course I am going to wait until I learn more about this beast. It was hard enough trying to get past Windows 8 and keep using Windows 7.

I still haven't learned how to use Windows 8, nor have I figured out why anybody would want to.  The whole point of Windows computers is to do useful things on them , which usually requires more than one window being open, and that is something you cannot in Tile-world.  Apparently nobody else figured it out either, hence the arrival of Windows 10, with, we are assured, much more customer validation and totally complete testing. Hopefully I learn to love it.

The deferral process required a small download to my system.  Did I trust that?  Since they built about 4 GB of code that already sits on my machine now, and I get who knows how many updates a week in the background, of course yes.  If they were going to attack my system, it would have been done long ago. The little app sat quietly in some corner waiting for its master to awaken it, with no apparent impact on the system at all.

The Prelaunch

This week I received a popup notification that the window for Windows 10 downloads is now open.  There is a phased roll-out.  It does not say which phase I am in.  I hope I am last.

Even the deferred program has a deferral option.  I can even choose not to get it, and stay on Windows 7. If I get it and do not like it, I can roll back to Windows 7.  However, if I do that, I'm on my own, and I will have to pay market price for Windows 10 once I realize what a terrible mistake I made.  But I could go ahead and do it (or, really, not do it).

As it happened I went by a Microsoft store where I met a very knowledgeable representative.  He says they have really tested it a lot. There have been very few complaints about apps not working, although it is true that for some that come in OS-specific versions, it may be necessary to get the Windows 10 drivers, plugins or whatever from the application vendor.

One of the features of Windows 10 that he showed me is that tile-world does not occupy the entire screen, so you can get at the rest of the screen without having to shut down your current app.  So you can in fact work with two applications open at once, even in Tile mode.  That is great because .some of the Windows tile-based apps are really pretty nice but until now I have never used them because of the one-app-at-a-time approach.  Now maybe I can use them.

What Do I Do Right Now?

Go through your Control Panel and work out what applications you have installed.  I have at least four that I don't remember what the heck they were and had to go to the internet to find out.  If you don't need them any more, get rid of them altogether. If you do need them, write down your license keys, user ID and password for each app that you use, and keep it somewhere other than your computer - just in case.

Updated: after the install did upload itself, most of the major applications seemed to be in order. There are some that Windows removed altogether, which revealed themselves fairly quickly in normal operations because they were mostly freeware that supplements the Windows capability (or, perhaps, turns it back to the way Windows 2000 did it - old fuddy-duddy!)  Examples include Classic Shell (the Start button tool) and 7-zip (zip compression utility that didn't collapse the way the Windows 7/8 versions did).

The most serious problem was the disappearance of AVG (various security packages). Microsoft understandably inserts Windows Defender as a default to make sure that the user has some security present, but did you really have blow the other package away without a trace?

Since I use the paid version rather than the free version, it was a good thing I had the e-mails with the key codes. I do note, though, that if you have forgotten to record your keys, AVG will send them to the e-mail address from which you purchased the licenses in the first lace.  And if you have any of your AVG keys then you can access your AVG account and get the rest of them.

In a separate post I will go over some of the installation quirks.  There are not that many, but what you find may surprise you.

I have no doubt whatever that many people are more knowledgeable than me on this topic.  Please leave comments!!

LeSS SAFe is more - events coming up right now

Another installment looking at different ways to adapt Agile to enterprise scale.  Inflating it, as it were ...





Photo credit: Gerald Pereira and License

• First, some comments on LeSS given that you have the opportunity to go see for yourself (if you can afford it).
• Then opportunities to learn about SAFe.

What is with these mixed-case acronyms?  I guess there are some people pedantic enough to complain that you cannot use a capital E in SAFE because the words has a lower-case "e".  It would be if we YELLED IT LOUD ENOUGH :-)
Worrying about that sort of thing is very un-Agile.

LeSS Materials and events

H/T to Brian Sjoberg at Excella Consulting (a company that has impressed me over the past 2 years), although in this case Brian is representing the DC Scrum Users Group (DCSUG)for this heads-up.  If you have interest in Agile I can thoroughly recommend DSUG's meetups.

• A course on Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS)in the DC area from August 10-12 (registration page)
• LeSS SAFe Comparison by Gosei
• Blog post comparing Waterfall, SCRUM, SAFe and LeSS here.

LeSS Seems to be Just Less

As noted in an earlier post, I have not quite got the drift of LeSS.

The folks who are leading proponents of it in the US describe the integrative processes as "whatever the self-defining teams define it to be".  One could make a case that a pyramiding schema of scrum-of-scrums and product owners would be able to establish integration in terms of cross-component integration.   I don't see that as alleviating the organization's concerns over scalability and security.

I do note that in the most recent framework picture (at the LeSS link above), architecture and security now have a specific place.

A Turn for SAFe

H/T here to Net Objectives for the following information:

• Conference: Agile2015, in Washington DC - next week (August 3-7).  $2400.

• Net Objectives' 3rd Day of SAFe: Elaborating SAFe  (you have to give up your e-mail address but it gets you access to tones of material).

• SAFe in an Hour. A quick introduction to SAFe.

• Driving from Business Value in SAFe. Introducing minimum business increments and why they improve SAFe's portfolio management.

• Rapid Implementation of SAFe. Rapid is the new method we'll be discussing in the open space.  This was a pre-look at it. 

• Introducing Leanban. A first look at our new team-level Agile process that is more than an integration of Scrum and Kanban. [This link here is further updated since the presentation date].

• Using SAFe in Small & Mid-Scale Organizations. SAFe is intended for development groups of more than 50 people.  This webinar presents methods of coordinating multiple teams which total fewer than the 50 required for SAFe.