Living agility is to start fast

Mountain view Kaunertal Gletscher

It is one of the primary agile principles to get new features, functionalities or even a new website as fast as possible to the customer. With our new website we like to follow this principle and start even without having a lot of primary content available. So let’s look a bit in the past and the future to see what can happen here.

What have I done last?

The focus of Think Network changed a lot in the past two years. From being a long term and heavy contributor to open source projects such as Joomla and JoomFish we moved back to our roots of management consulting and agile methodologies. Introducing agile methods to the deployment and operations team within the Vodafone Group was the first step. This challenge was really exciting and in the end the first part of a longer journey.

The second element was my position as head of product within the RTL company wer-kennt-wen.de. The company develops and hosts the second largest social network in Germany and it is actually the only really competitor to Facebook – even so the comparison to Facebook is quite interesting. What is special about wet-kennt-wen – it focus on a social group that is quite unique and requires special features. In this respect we introduced quite German structures such as a link to your favorite association such as your soccer club. Most successful was the personal „like“ to Santa Clause. Yes, Santa is registered and you can „like“ him! Within less than 4 weeks more than 100.000 people liked this fellow and we had a lot of fun with a unique christmas game.

What I’m doing now?

Since December 2011 I’m working for Holiday Check AG as a corporate agile coach – supporting all product development teams and being the team lead of all project managers and Scrum masters. Being back to the agile methodologies started a process of re-focusing. Today I’m sure that the open source engagement will continue. It will not be the first priority anymore but I’m sure that I’ll have some more time to develop cool code soon. Even so I’m learning that PHP has absolutely its limits atm. On the other side agile thoughts, topics and visions became much more important to me. This is why I restructure the old Think Network site to create a place to simply write down these thoughts.

Some might ask why I use a different tool to do so? This is as I like to learn new things. It is easy to use the old stuff used a long time ago. And yes Joomla has developed a lot within the past year. However it is still the same kind of CMS and so far I’ve never used something different on my own sites as a productive tool. This is about to change – even so other things might not change a lot.

What can you expect next?

I’ll try to blog a lot about my current topics such as agile methods, project management, open source ideas and much more. It will become quite important to give room to new ideas and therefore I’m not promising something specific yet. Let’s see – and tell me what you need. With this I can focus on the customer needs rather than my assumption of your needs.