Hello Everyone:
Did someone call off the recesion? Before I left for holidays I was running
flat out and already my calendar is looking scary! I will probably regret my
joke about the recession later but it is busy, so busy that I will not be
able to make the call tomorrow. That said, here are a few points that I want
to make for EPF outreach.
1) I am completing some new course offerings, portions of which I will
donate to EPF. I'm running about 2 months behind on this right now.
2) One of my SD West proposals was accepted in the dreaded 1:00pm to 3:30pm
Friday slot. This is my "Agile Business Analyst" talk which describes how to
effectively incorporate a BA into an Agile Process. I use EPF as the example
process. This is one of the presentations I will be donating to EPF. I have
a couple of others including my "Agile Grows UP" talk.
I still believe for this to take off we need (listed in a priority order):
1) Steve to get off his butt and start participating again
.its been so
long since I've actively participated that I have forgotten how to access
the buglist and CVS
sigh
2) an EPF user oriented website (not an EPF developer oriented one).
This website shall have:
a. EPF articles, whitepapers, how to guides, tutorials, etc - ideally
we could create an example project (maybe not the "recycling machine" and
use it consistently through all training material)
b. presentation material that trainers/consultants can re-use or
incorporate into their training material
3) Social Networking - nothing happens anymore without blogging,
twittering, or vblogging.
4) Book(s) - I've said this over and over again, while there may be
volumes in the e-world, credibility only comes with dead trees. I have
created huge volumes of material, with my new courses and others, but now I
have to really winnow this down into a book with a useful and catchy story
line. A few of us have agreed to collaborate on writing a book. Maybe we
should take a page from the agile manifesto and meet a ski resort, and
brainstorm some outlines. Whistler is of course good, but so is Big White
(smaller than Whistler, but much better snow and cheaper). We could bring
our families along, rent a big condo, ski durin the day, then starting in
the later afternoon (our apre's ski ) start brainstorming some outlines.
5) Certification - while I personally pooh pooh a lot of
certification process, I believe they do give some credibilty to a process
and there is some assurance that a person may know what they are talking
about. The only argument I see for us is whether we test knowledge. We could
take the scrum approach and if you warm a seat for two days you are a
certifiied scrum master. At least with this designation you have some
assurance that a person may have heard the words "backlog", sprint, and
product owner. Also I must admit shamelessly, that certification is a great
way of earning income, look at the demand and prices for Certified Scrum
Trainers. I think we should follow the Scrum model where we will have a
cadre of certified EPF instructors who create their own teaching material
(using the EPF core training material) to create their own courses. I was
thinking we could have three certifications:
§ EPF Master (EM) - someone who is familiar with the content and intention
behind EPF and can use EPF to inform the design of a process in their
organization
§ EPF Process Master (EPM)- an EM who can use the composer effectively
§ EPF Trainer (EPT) - us and whoever we believe is competent enough to
teach this stuff.
I know we have been talking about the website for months now. What appears
to be blocking it beyond all of us having busy lives is simply where is it
going to live and who is going to look after it. I'm prepared to pay for
hosting the site but I am not even a good web master let alone a web
designer. So we need someone who can at least initially design the site and
set up some kind of useful content management system.
For EPF certification, what courses or training programs should we have ( or
will have?) In other words, what courses should make up a certiication
cirriculum? I know I can offer courses and seminars like "Agile Grows UP",
"The Agile Business Analyst", and the "Agile Architect" . I know the "Agile"
adjective is tiresome.
Ok now here is my first cut at a vision statement:
The problem of knowing how to design an appropriate process for a software
project is resulting in sub-optimal performance of software teams. Process
frameworks like RUP offer excellent solutions, but their "tailoring down"
approach to software process design is confusing for most of those involved
in software process design. Agile processes have offered good solutions for
small teams and have the ability to scale to larger teams, but there is
little guidance on how to scale leading to significant inconsistencies in
the results. We believe EPF offers an excellent solution to this problem,
but unless there is a supporting community, no one will adopt it.
A successful solution will popularize EPF in the software development,
project managememt and product management communities. A successful solution
will make the adoption of EPF a straight forward and reasonably risk free
solution. A successful solution will facilitate the growth of a large
supporting community for EPF and encourage numerous independent and large
consulting organizations to push EPF in their practice.
Feature Description
I haven't worked things out fully yet, but here are a few tentative use
cases
§ Share Training Material - a contributor shares training material (e.g.
PPT slides) which others can use to build their own EPF training material.
§ Contribute Method - contributor can upload a plugin or a complete method
built using EPF to share (or sell?)
§ Contribute article/resource - a contributor contributes a
§ Connect with colleagues - a epf user can connect using social networking
facilities with other EPF users
§ Blather away - an epf user can blog, twitter and even flame about EPF
§ Search for training provider - an EPF user can find a
§ Register EPF training provider
Ok that is long enough, for now, I really need to start refining this a lot
more. Hopefully catch you all next week.
best regards,
Steve
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