AGILE TRAINING ~ CONSULTANCY ~ COACHING

Bit of a techie one this but I thought I'd add it in case somebody found it useful! I've been doing a bit of work with Google Maps and  http://www.openstreetmap.org/  an open data source project which I have a lot of respect for. I won't go into details but I've needed to calculate distances between two points based on there coordinates and some of this has to be done on a database server...... So I've put together this very quick SQL function which returns the distance between two coordinates in God's own measurement, no not cubits, miles! set   ANSI_NULLS   ON set   QUOTED_IDENTIFIER   ON go -- ============================================= -- Author:        <Christian Miles> -- ============================================= ALTER   FUNCTION  [dbo] . [calculateDistanceBetweenCoordinates] (     @lat1   float ,     @lon1   float , ...

How many projects have you worked on where the overall goal seems unclear, vague or just lost in the myths of time and space? Can this happen in agile teams? Well unfortunately the answer is very often yes! In fact teams doing Scrum are perhaps more guilty of this than those using more conventional project management techniques such as Prince 2. Scrum is often misunderstood and poorly implemented and in the race to start developing code and producing deliverable's the overall goal gets missed. However every Scrum project SHOULD have a Product Vision, It's one of the must have artifacts I list in my  The ten must do's of Scrum Who sets the Product Vision? The Product Owner is responsible for the overall success of the project and they should be responsible What makes a good Product Vision? The vision statement should be clear, concise and importantly brief! It's purpose is to align the entire team and stakeholders so that everybody understands the goal -...