Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
June 10, 2026 | Live Webinar
Lessons from the Yurt Part 2 - Interview with Kathy Compton
|
Part 2 of my interview with Kathy Compton from Panda Transport
|
Posted on: February 15, 2011 10:12 AM
| Permalink |
Comments (0)
Lessons From The Yurt - An Interview with Kathy Compton from Panda Transport
 This is one of my all time favorite interviews!
Last fall I had the great fortune to meet Kathy Compton and Theirry Holoweck from Panda Transport at the Øredev 2010 conference. One of the really unique things about Panda Transport is that this two person band exists 1/2 in the US and 1/2 in France. In talking to them I realized that those of us who struggle with offshore have a lot to learn from the music world. Kathy has focuses in using vocal techniques and body language as ways of making herself a more effective performer - to me, this ties directly back to a PMs ability to utilize body language, emotional intelligence, etc. to be more effective in our jobs. This part one of the interview. Part 2 will be posted in a week or so.
|
Posted on: February 08, 2011 11:49 AM
| Permalink |
Comments (2)
Why You Suck at Offshoring, Even With Agile (Recap and Retrospective)
Categories:
Thushara,
Wijewardena,
Offshore,
project planning,
video conferencing,
Agile 2010,
off shore,
Agile
Categories: Thushara, Wijewardena, Offshore, project planning, video conferencing, Agile 2010, off shore, Agile
| Thushara Wijewardena and I have had a great response to our Agile 2010 presentation, "Why You Suck at Offshoring, Even with Agile". In an effort to respond to some of the requests we have received, we put together a video recap of our presentation along with a retrospective. The video is broken up into two segments because of the size. Please let us know what you think.
Part 1
Part 2
|
Posted on: September 27, 2010 12:37 AM
| Permalink |
Comments (2)
Project Potion 17 - Death of the Phone Call
Categories:
Merlin,
projectshrink,
Bas De Baar,
Project Potion,
Thushara,
Wijewardena,
Offshore,
ProjectWizards,
Agile 2010,
off shore,
Agile
Categories: Merlin, projectshrink, Bas De Baar, Project Potion, Thushara, Wijewardena, Offshore, ProjectWizards, Agile 2010, off shore, Agile
Posted on: August 10, 2010 01:57 AM
| Permalink |
Comments (0)
OFFSHORING AND THE TECHNOLOGY GAP
|
The most interesting interview I had was with a gentleman I know who comes from India and has been in the U.S. since the 70's. He has years of experience in testing out different ways to make offshore successful. Some of the lessons he has learned seemed to be directly counter to my assertion for the talk, but he had some very solid explanations of how and why he came to those conclusions. One of the things he said is that there are certain job functions that an onshore team should probably never send offshore. Architect and BA were among these roles. By way of explanation, he offered a story... The company he ran had been contracted to develop a POS system for use in retail stores in the U.S. He had one of his top leads head over to India to spend time with the team they had formed. The requirements had been fully defined, all the developers were trained and things seemed ready to go. During the discussion of the requirements, the lead asked the team how many of them had ever worked on a POS system before. None of them had. The second question was how many of them had ever seen a POS system before. Only one team member indicated that he had and when he was asked to describe it, he described the back of a cash register. So, while the team was comprised of experienced developers, and they had a full set of requirements, none of them had ever had experience with anything like what they were being asked to develop. Now, while this would not prevent them from actually executing the requirements, without some level of familiarity with what it would be like to interact with such a system, or what the job function of someone who had to use it was like, how likely is it that they'd be successful in their implementation? In this case, they were fortunate that their lead, although born in India, had spend several years in the U.S., knew the client, how they worked, etc. Without his knowledge of how this POS system needed to be used, the team would have been lost no matter how good they were. What I found most interesting about this was that while I had been focusing on the idea of culture as being a significant stumbling block for onshore teams who are unable or unwilling to adjust how they work to adapt to the offshore teams, I had not considered how the implementation of technology in the day-to-day life of people in one country or another could have such a significant impact on the work. It wasn’t just a matter of the onshore and offshore teams respecting one another, or making sure they all knew how to develop in the same programming language, or that they had well defined requirements. In this case, the fact that none of the team members had ever run across a system of this kind presented a huge challenge and no amount of cultural sensitivity, or training was going to cover the gap created by the varying levels of technology implementation on a day-to-day level. If you are planning on attending the Agile 2010 Conference in Orlando and would like to hear more of what Thushara and I have learned during our research for the presentation, please join us on Thursday, August 12 at 11 AM in room A-4. And if you have any feedback on the above, I'd love to hear it. |
Posted on: August 05, 2010 03:43 PM
| Permalink |
Comments (2)