In Store Mobile Apps, the Next Big Opportunity for Shopper Marketing

In 2006, I was involved in my first mobile marketing effort that tried to provide in-store offers to shoppers as a loyalty program. It was very difficult to get the technology in place and the biggest obstacle was acceptance of mobile as a loyalty platform by retailers.

Advertise your product in YouTube and be like the Big Boys

The Hot wheel cars were moving fast on the Thunder Speedway, the blue GT Racer is zipping ahead of the other two cars and taking on a curve, the checkered flag is in sight and looks like it is going to be a win,  but not so fast, like a black mamba chasing its prey the Black Baja truck is chasing the GT-Racer along the curves of the speedway, inching closer and closer, crushing the tiny car to the side rails, suddenly out comes from the GT Racer’s rear,

Five Easy Ways to move from Waterfall to Agile

So you are in Waterfall and drenched and shivering… and you want to move to the Zen garden of Agile Nirvana, fear not, I the agile Zen master will show you the path to that bliss…

Agile Mapping for PMBOK Knowledge Areas

In my previous blog post I wrote about the probable mapping between PMBOK Process Groups to Agile processes. PMBOK organizes the five project management process groups and the project management processes to nine project management knowledge areas. The project management institutes recommends that project managers have a good understanding of these knowledge area to deliver outstanding service to their customers.




PMBOK Knowledge Areas:

At the outset the PMBOK knowledge areas look more in tune with the water fall development. But true agile practitioners will see a a lot of overlap in the knowledge that they need to successfully manage a agile/scrum delivery in the PMBOK process. For example the PMBOK Integration Management  can be directly mapped in agile to
1. Release Planning
2. Backlog Grooming
3. Reviews and Retrospectives
4. Burndown Visibility
This kind of mapping I found becomes necessary when talking about agile development with Project Managers and Business Analysts who have been trained in the traditional methodologies. I have tried to create a mapping table between the PMBOK knowledge areas and agile for reference to agile practitioners to use in conversations with PMO folks.

You can see from the table that it misses the following PMBOK knowledge areas in the agile mapping

1. Procurement Managemet
2. Project Cost Management

These two are basically in my view enterprise level tasks and best left to the PMO. We can also give a fair amount of control over the Time Management to PMO for making the agile projects enterprise grade.

By showing the PMO and Business analyst that agile is not a renegade process and explining that agile artifacts and ceremonies are indeed easily mappable to PMBOK process groups and knowledge areas we can elevate agile acceptance in the enterprise.

The Mac Bliss

Last mothers day my kids suggested that we buy a new laptop for my wife as her old Dell notebook could not support an upgrade to the new Win 7.

Initially my idea was to buy a net-book, but decided against it as she does research work and create presentations in the PC. I had some initial requirements based on my wife's feedback on her PC usage.

Things I was looking for were,



1. Light Weight
2. Good Styling
3. Less Noise
4. Good Screen resolution and at the same time smaller screen size, not more than fifteen inches.
5. Easy to use
6. Built-in Bluetooth
7. Integrated Webcam
8. Stop bugging with update messages and performance degradation due to constant background virus and spy-ware updates.
9. Stop updating and rebooting on your own.
10. Good Document processor and Presentation Software for research presentations.
10. Faster browsing experience
11. Release me from the in-house free customer support guy (this requirement was mine).

Also she insisted on seeing the laptop before buying and this ruled out online purchase.

I first started looking around for a windows based laptop as both of us have been using windows for a long time. I recently upgraded my Tablet PC OS from Vista to Win 7 and liked its responsiveness. My initial thought was a new windows laptop running win 7 should be fine.

As we went around shopping for a PC laptop, we found every PC laptop we saw had some features missing from our list. After couple of attempts at various local stores and failing to decide on any of the windows laptops we finally decided to visit the local Apple store even though I knew we would be spending a little more money on the purchase.

In the store we had a live demo with a macbook pro. My wife liked the styling and design of the macbook pro with its aluminum uni-body construction.

I started ticking of my requirements with the macbook pro features and found it had all the features in my list of requirements until item #7. I was not sure about #8 onwards as I had no prior experience with Mac.

We decided to take the plunge and walked away with the macbook pro. As the in house customer support guy on technology it came upon me to setup the macbook. I have not used Mac OS before and I was preparing myself for a long round of installation nightmare. It was to my utter disbelief I got the macbook up and running with all the updates in just under 30 minutes. It was a pleasant surprise. This installation included installing printer, blue tooth mouse, blue-tooth headset and iWorks. I have done countless OS installs Windows, Win 95, Win 98, Windows 2000, XP, XP Embedded, Vista, Win 7, Debian, Ubuntu and I should say this was the fastest install I have ever done.

First and foremost I was not tortured with endless updates on updates on updates, second I was not asked to download x Framework, Y framework, XY framework version nnnnnn etc, etc., third I was not forced to wait on each and every device installation as if I am replacing the complete OS. Finally I was spared of nervous moments of anticipating a crash on every driver install. Overall it was the most painless new PC installation I have ever done apart from Ubuntu in desktop.

The very first thing I noticed when I started the macbook was the time it took to boot the OS. Win 7 has done a good job on this , but still I felt the macbook pro was quicker.

Next was the fonts, there is something different about the fonts in the macbook, they were crisp and clear much better than the clear-type fonts in WIn 7 and was pleasant to the eyes. The same observation was echoed by my wife too.

Now came the trickiest part, teaching my wife the new OS, which at this point was basically teaching her the following

1. Start the PC
2. Shutdown
3. iMail
4. Safari
5. Keynote 09
6. Pages 09
10. Dock Station
11. Finder

I was preparing myself for a long drawn out exercise on teaching a new user interface as I also lack experience in the Mac OS. To both of our surprise we could setup and learn all the interfaces, Applications and how they work in an hour and already my wife could import her ppt slides from her Dell laptop to Keynote 09 and start building a new presentation.

The only problem we had was getting used to the command key instead of Windows Ctrl key and finding how to do a real delete operation instead of the backspace as the mac delete key does.

With its multi-touch pad, clear screen, back-lit keyboard, seamless device integration, noise less operation, easy interface and out of the box applications macbook pro came out a clear winner and for once I got the House Seal of Approval on a purchase I made.

Now I have to get back to my loyal workhorse, my beloved Gateway Tablet running Windoze 7 and type this blog. hmmm....

Looking at my wife working on her new macbook pro, I can see MacBliss, hmm... I am getting MacEnvy.

Agile Mapping for PMBOK Process Groups

Most of the organizations that develop software products employ standard project management practices and expect their employees to follow those process in their daily work at the organizations. In many of the prodcut development efforts that I worked I have had a Project Manager trained in PMBOK practices help manage the project at the enterprise level.
When teams switch to Agile/SCRUM Product development there is a change in how things are done and many times it appears as if there is a conflict between the PMBOK practices and Agile methodology.




In reality this need not be the case, agile practices can easily fit into PMBOK constructs and help develop products in a faster,leaner way. Similarly PMBOK prctices which looks like they are more suited for Waterfall development can be adapted to Agile methodology easily if we undersatnd the mapping between the two. The mapping of PMBOK and Agile methodology can help getting Agile accepted by the enterprise without much difficulty.
PMBOK guide says Projects are accompolished through process and espouses major processes that needs to applied in every project some form of the other to successfully complete the project. These processes are aggregated into five groups defined as the Project Management Process Groups:

• Initating Process Group
• Planning Process Group
• Executing Process Group
• Monitoring and Controlling Process Group
• Closing Process Group.

An undelying concept of the interaction between the process groups is the Plan - Do - Check - Act cyle from the TQM pronciples by Deming which the Agile Practioners are familiar with.

With this concept behind the PMBOK Process groups it becomes very easy to map the Agile Process Flow to the PMBOK process group flow. Let us see how this plays out.

The PMBOK process groups are not alien to the Agile/Scrum process flow. This kind of mapping can be used as a starting point of the conversation between the Scrum product owner and Project Manager to identify how the Agile mode of working can co exist with the enterprise level PMBOK processes in the organization.