Kaveh Kalantar's Blog

 To collocate or not to collocate? Most companies that are new to agile have been "consulted" by a "Scrum" Agile Coach, who suggested that they must break their organisation and have cross-functional teams to sit together in one location. Is that the recipe for success?.. Is it really? Even though collocation has its benefits, it is not the necessary condition for a successful delivery team. Collocation as a dogmatic view may hurt you more than you think, and will not necessarily help you to deliver more successful products. I am neither for nor against collocation, but I have experienced and worked with both approaches. And each sometimes worked very well and sometimes failed. All the variations of teams geolocation (collocated, fully-dispersed, partially-dispersed, or distributed) can work. It all depends on how the collaboration model is setup, what is the context and conditions, and how much the team and organisation are aware of each other, and are aligned....

Burn out is theoretical, psychological, a fuzzy thing. Burn out is standing at a lathe for 10 hours doing the same thing. (In) an exciting job, you are turned on every minute and wanting more and more and more.... Jack Welch Jack Welch has never been one to pussyfoot around when it comes to discussions of leadership, and he doesn’t break from form during a lively give-and-take with MIT Sloan Dean David Schmittlein and an audience of Sloan students. Schmittlein starts with a series of questions involving the reasons why some top corporations lose their market leadership positions. “Complacency and arrogance,” Welch believes, clearly lie behind these drops in stature -- believing you “know it all” when in fact you always have to “know somebody’s doing it better than you.” Managers and their staff must understand “somebody’s always shooting at you,” and “you have to always find a better way of doing it.”