Category Archives: Personal

In my last post, I hinted at another blog entry for this month… And here it is… This week is my last week working at IBM… Starting on June 21st, I will be at TD Insurance in Montreal. The last few weeks have been a wild ride for me and if you want to see my thoughts on all this, well… Then you know the drill, I won’t say anything out here on the main page… You need to click to read on… 🙂

In early December, we got a nice pre-Christmas surprise in the form of the feedback they received on the first draft of the book that we sent them back in October. We anxiously sifted through all the feedback forms and the chapters that some had returned with comments and overall, people were pretty positive about our work which was very encouraging for us. Some of their comments allowed us to see places where we needed to clarify what we were saying and others allowed us to see where we glossed over content that they considered very important. It’s one heck of a process writing a book, you cannot please everyone and it all depends on the point of view of the reader and where they are in their knowledge.

As I talked about briefly in my last blog entry, I’m currently working on a book with the IBM QSE Scrum Community and two colleagues at IBM. After many months of… negotiations… begging… collaboration… oh god, I’m at a loss for words to describe what we’ve been through to be able to get this available to people. One day, I should blog about this. But finally, today… July 23rd 2009… The day is finally here when we can publish our chapters online and make them available for external feedback.

As some of you may have noticed, I don’t have a chance to update the site often. That’s because earlier this year, I joined a group of people that are writing a book on how to use Scrum in a distributed environment. This has been a great experience for me up to now. In this blog entry, I’ll share some of the joys and pain I’ve had since I joined this group of people.

I’ve been rather neglectful of the site in the last month or so. I’ve been doing a lot of writing at work and it’s been consuming a lot of my time. I felt like doing a bit of a silly blog entry tonight. I was talking with a colleague this afternoon, let’s call her Anne, who asked me to write up a paragraph or two on how I got started writing. Of course, I could not just leave it at that, would have been too easy… So for your reading pleasure, here’s a mock interview I wrote tonight that she can use as input.

I decided to write about one of my core values in business tonight. I’ve lead different teams in the course of my career and I try to live off the following motto: “People on the team need to be doing the right things for the right reasons?”. I’ve explained this principle a few times to different people over the years and it’s always a challenge for me to explain it clearly.