Experiences in Managing Software Development Through Kanban & Trello

Introduction

On my last project, I managed a team developing an application to manage hospitality locations. Given our requirements were constantly in flux, the contracts were on a short cycle, and the team was generally new to enterprise software development, I chose a Kanban style approach to managing and delivering it. I wanted to share with you the rationale, methodology, challenges, and the surprising change to my role while on the project.
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Kanban Paper Airplane Factory

I went to the local Capital Kanban meetup yesterday evening. It was a bunch of Project Managers discussing Kanban and waste in IT. Seemed completely out of my comfort zone and a way to meet new people in tech here in town so I attended. It turned out to be really cool and way more interesting than my expectations were. I wanted to mention some of those here, specifically some of the IT wastes that were mentioned I see all the time, the insights I got from the paper airplane factory game, and some after meeting talk that changed my perspective on what I perceive as problems in our industry with good software east of California (hah, trick question, there IS no good software done east of California…).

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Consulting Chronicles #5: Getting In, and Out, of the Industry

Today, I’ll talk about how to get into consulting, what the skills and expectations are, and what can cause you to get out.

What is Consulting?

Consulting in the Flash/Flex world usually consists of 3 tasks that may be related:

  1. Offer your architecture expertise.
  2. Offer your code mechanic expertise.
  3. Augment an existing team.

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