Prestige Consulting

To provide the best service possible to our Immigration Clients we have as part of our team of professional advisors Royal Reed, a Lawyer who has over 10 years of experience helping migrants with their visa and residency needs.

As well as consulting to companies specialising in Immigration Work, Royal is also heavily involved in the Asian community, providing her weekly radio program on AM936 (Friday 6-7pm) as a way in which to give back to the community she has helped to grow. http://www.chineselawyers.co.nz/

Royal is also a registered Mediator in which she has experienced many mediation sessions between parties of differing cultural backgrounds. This has given Royal a deeper understanding of the cultural issues and needs of those from differing backgrounds.

Royal is also the chairperson of the New Zealand Taiwan Business Association. As such she is highly involved in community events like the Taiwan Way at the Auckland Food Show in 2009 and fund raising for charities and special groups in need.

To get some real solid advice about your Immigration questions, email us now on info@prestigeconsulting.co.nz or call us on (09) 4756612.

There is a helpful article here that covers the practical use of defining when things are “done” for Software Application projects. The picture paints a thousand words though, so here goes…

Mitch relays that once this definition was completed…

“Our stakeholders were shocked. They remarked that they had never seen such detail and commitment to a quality release before. After seeing the list, the systems engineers were comfortable with the level of work we were doing to address their needs on each story, sprint and release. The security team was equally pleased to see the level of architecture, documentation and threat modeling that the team was doing.

Equally (if not more) satisfied were the sales, marketing, and general management stakeholders.

The list helped all the stakeholders visualize the team’s commitment to do the best possible work to meet the needs of the business and its customers. To the team, the done list was a way of life—not a checklist to follow, but a commitment to excellence.

The list gives us a way to communicate. When everyone can see what it means for this team to be done with its work, the team no longer hears, “Are you done with this or are you done with that?” Instead they are asked, “Is this story complete? Is the iteration complete? Have you released to your environments?” And everyone understands what an affirmative answer really means.”

http://blog.agilebuddy.com/2009/06/scrum-falls-short-in-at-least-one-area-in-my-opinion.html

See this blog item on Scrum and the somewhat emotional response from a few passionate people on Scrum. Tobias’ response was…

Scrum is a simple framework whose clearly established presence will cause organizational dysfunction to rise to the surface.

Scrum doesn’t actually do anything, people do things. Scrum, coupled with common sense can be applied at every level in an organization. To say it doesn’t consider the whole life cycle is simply saying some people don’t know how to use Scrum in a holistic way, and are bound by development practice thinking. Not the same thing at all.

The definition of done has to be taken in context. If you are working on a web application it is common sense to complete work and push it to live servers every sprint. If you are working on embedded software for appliances that only get updated every six or twelve months, along with hardware and other changes, then clearly it is impossible to “release to production” every sprint.

The point of “potentially shippable code” means it can be shipped any time the PO/Customer requests it, without the need for additional testing or bug fixing. It is exactly that: shippable. The phrase is carefully chosen to be context independent.

Most teams that want to add things to Scrum (usually some version of Lean or Kanban) are doing so because they don’t get the simplicity of Scrum, and are failing in one area or another. Rather than adding anything to Scrum we should be looking at what to remove from our processes that doesn’t damage the core Scrum framework. In well-functioning Scrum, less is more.

Many software development organizations are discovering that they must be agile–but they seldom know much about Scrum. Patterns for ‘Big’ Scrum, the latest from ganthead.com Extreme PM department, explains and describes some of the most commonly observed patterns that arise in organizations that implement it. In short…

In short what follows assumes that readers possess a working familiarity with Scrum. That is you know that:

Scrum is for managing small teams and the essence of Scrum is that a product owner leads a small, self-organized team in incremental development;

This incremental development is performed in sprints (iterations of 2 or 4 weeks), driven by a backlog (list of requirements), and produces a demonstrable product that is reviewed at the end of every sprint by the team’s stakeholders;

This review leads to modifications in the team’s development strategy and that the team’s goal is to maximize the value it can deliver to its stakeholders; and

What makes a Scrum team successful is that it focuses brainpower on complex problems and that Scrum is about “a team producing value,” rather than “people doing work.”

Since Scrum is a small-team process, when we say that an organization is doing “big” Scrum we really mean the organization is grouping itself into small teams, which are managed using Scrum

From an article by Mike Griffiths at ganthead.com on August 3 2009

The new PMI Agile Community gets officially launched at the August 2009 Agile Conference in Chicago. To some people this may seem an unlikely alliance, to many it will bring useful connections.

Just as agile zealots like to berate the command-and-control nature of some PMI approaches, old school managers condemn the seemingly unstructured techniques practiced in agile. In reality, projects and organizations are complex and a smart mix of approaches is required to be successful. Really, who does only pure agile and who does only pure waterfall or command-and-control projects, anyway?

Yet as humans we are drawn toward others with similar mindsets, and factions of opposing views can result from collections of perfectly reasonable individuals. The magnetic attraction to like-minded people is a strong force as we reinforce ideas and build our knowledge from each other. Bringing another group together with the first group often results in magnetic polar repulsion: “They’re not like us! Look at the ridiculous practice they follow! We are much better!”

It is easy to retreat to your own group, but some great things have been built by balancing opposing forces (linear propulsion, electric motors, etc.).

In New Zealand we love to watch the All Blacks Rugby team win. And to win the game it usually depends on who wins up front in the forwards and this all happens in the scrum! He who wins at scrum time usually gets the upper hand and wins the game.

So why do I talk about scrums on our website? Simple, there is a project management methodology called scrum in which a project can win up front with a powerful, yet lightweight framework designed for flexibility and adaptation without abandoning security and structure.

Read more about scrum here…

Prestige Consulting is an executive consulting company that provides professional services to all businesses requiring an expert consulting service.

Our consultants provide that quick expert relief you are look for when things are tight and you need a project completed fast and without down time.

Choosing a good consultant can take time, but with proven skills and past experience in similar business environments can provide you the assurance that you are choosing the right one.

At Prestige Consulting we taylor the consultant to the business need and aim to provide the most suitable consultant to the role you require assistance on. Email us to find out what we can do for you.