Agile Project Management and a SIEBEL PM Job

A rather thought provoking article I came across on Agile Project Management.

Agile teams: Focus on the people rather than the process

Rick Freedman believes the agile PM’s most important roles are to create a collaborative environment that enables teams to achieve creative results and to encourage contributors to focus on group goals and agendas rather than the individual.

The NBA Finals are over, and LA Lakers coach Phil Jackson has broken the record of the legendary Red Auerbach by leading his team to the NBA championship for the 10^th time. Jackson’s ability to coach superstar players Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, and to get superstar results from role players Lamar Odom and Derek Fisher, illustrates that leadership matters, and that a group of skilled, confident, and occasionally arrogant individuals can be guided to success and can coalesce as a team.

While other coaches struggle with players who are more interested in individual statistics and personal highlight reels than in getting team results, Jackson has been able to channel the ambitions and skills of his players, both in Chicago and Los Angeles, towards team achievement. Shaquille O’Neal and Scottie Pippen make winning championships a bit easier, but, despite all the outstanding players in the NBA, no other coach demonstrates Jackson’s ability to inspire teams to great outcomes.

What does the NBA have to do with agile PM?

Like Jackson, agile project managers often have teams composed of supremely skilled and confident contributors. Like Jackson, many agile project managers often struggle to get arrogant or immature team members to subsume their personal ambitions and instead focus on team results. And, like Jackson, agile project managers must develop a leadership style that inspires and enables team members to achieve.

The coaching metaphor is, in my view, an appropriate analogy to illustrate the type of project leadership that agile methods require. Great agile project managers are coaches, with the critical understanding that, whether it’s shooting hoops or developing software, only the player can make the right decision under the pressure of the moment. Creating the environment that enables the experts to do what they do and setting the strategy while allowing the players to create are attributes of a winning coach and an agile project leader.

SIEBEL CRM Senior Project Manager.

Our global multinational client in the french speaking part of Switzerland is now looking for a Senior Siebel Project Manager/Program Manager to join the project on a long term basis here in the French speaking part of Switzerland.

THE ROLE:
Senior PM for Siebel implementation with role evolving to Program Manager (multiple projects/more countries) as Siebel initiative is planned across next 3 years. You will be in charge of the overall Siebel global implementation.

YOU NEED:
At least 8 years CRM projects, Siebel experience (SFA/BI/Call Centre), global/large scale projects(multi-country deployment), strong project management skills (end-to-end project life cycle, good command of all project areas; technical, process, change, etc), process manufacturing experience, strong communications skills, experience of vendor management.

• University degree or equivalent. Good education is mandatory.
• Fluency in English (written and spoken)
• At least 10 years large complex international experience in delivery of IT/consulting services in the area of CRM with in-depth expertise in implementing CRM software such as Oracle CRM/Siebel
• Experience on business process re-engineering;
• Experience in international working environments; Experience of off-shore delivery model
• Management of project teams
• Advanced business consulting competencies

Nice to have:

• Deep understanding of leading and emerging IT solutions; experience of Siebel on-demand will be appreciated
• Selling skills on high added value services
• Good business acumen for marketing and sales in specific industry/process manufacturing/pharmaceutical/chemical are an advantage

Startup Teams with HP on Cloud-Based Testing

I received my latest copy of InformationWeek recently and found this article interesting – especially since all discussions these days seem to center on either Cloud Computing or Agile Development.

Skytap is a startup that tabs themselves as the leading provider of cloud-based virtual labs that deliver 100% self-service provisioning of complex IT environments without any architectural changes. Cloud computing is poised to become the defining technology of the 21^st century and Skytap’s goal is to make serving up virtual machines over the internet as ubiquitous as delivering html to a browser. They are working to maximize efficiencies, minimize costs, eliminate unnecessary hardware, outsourcing, eco-efficient computing, and doing more with less.

I’ve worked many very large-scale government contracts where testing was a massive onsite effort involving additional hardware, software, and bodies in a compressed and stressful timeframe. Cloud-based testing would have made those experiences much more sane. And it was solely my responsibility at the time to make those tests happen and help ensure their success.

Likewise, my time in the gaming industry involved load testing for slot data management software. It’s necessary to test slot machines against large loads of usage – the last thing a very large casino gaming entity wants to happen is for their slot system to crash on a Saturday night due to heavy customer usage!

Without further ado, here is the article written by Charles Babcock for InformationWeek…

“Startup Skytap has cut a couple of powerful alliances for it’s cloud computing services, most recently joining forces with Hewlett-Packard to make it easier for companies to stress-test software against thousands of simulated end users without taxing their won data centers.

Skytap – named one of the InformationWeek Startup 50 in April, shortly after getting $7 million in venture funding – offers a Virtual Lab where developers try out applications by building test environments from its library of operating systems, databases, and middleware. Skytap already partners with Microsoft to enable Visual Studio Team System testing.

Skytap is providing HP’s LoadRunner testing tool to build test scenarios that push an application’s limits. The tests can be set up, managed, and torn down through HP’s Quality Center, which uses Skytap’s cloud computing resources to execute the actual test. The tests run as virtual workloads under VMware’s ESX Server.

Cloud computing is seen as a lower-cost way to offload workload spikes from the data center, and testing and quality assurance are likely prospects. Other cloud computing services such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud also can be used for testing. Companies pay Skytap from $1,000 to $10,000 a month for cloud-based testing.”