Kaveh Kalantar's Blog

It is an exciting and tiring time at Actum.  We are growing and changing at rapid pace, such a growth brings on new challenges and experiences that none of us, including founders had before. Most of the experiences are new to us all. None of us experience 300% or more growth in couple of months, and this is what is happening to several teams and departments currently. Right people and right attitudes are key factors in our growth and success so far.  In any traditional organisation, growth brings on new hierarchy - more Directors, Team Leads, VPs and etc. However, we decided to go the opposite and reduce hierarchies as we grow. One of the Founders is leading such change initiative. He is brave enough to experiment it and allows the rest of the organisation to shape the idea into a more practical one.  Actum is a project based company, we develop software, consult on digital strategy and customer experience, and we also help clients with processes (Lean, Agile, De...

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) realised the reality of the projects and introduced back phases to Agile community. Whoever works in a project based company, especially a project based company where projects are usually less than one year in length and each are for different clients, understands the reality of Agile in such environment. When you start working on a new project for a new client, it is essential to go through a phase that you get to know each other better, to understand the business purpose of the project, to understand the scope of the project, to know what are the high level architecture and what technologies are going to be used and who is the initial team, and if funding is available and also when things must be delivered and to whom. In answering these questions you may need to meet with different people, run couple of workshops and brainstorming sessions. And this is called Inception Phase. As DAD is more like a goal oriented decision framework and not a presc...

Retrospective is by far the most important ceremony in Scrum or any other agile or Lean process framework. It is the retrospective that creates a continuous improvement momentum, it is because of retrospective that teams can experiment with new proposed changes and evaluate them. Without regular retrospective and self inspection, you can not claim that you are working based on some lean or agile process framework, and you will never have an ongoing improvement process that is driven and supported by all team members and stakeholders. Although regular retrospective is important, but sometimes you also need a retrospective to look back several months (assuming the project is long enough) with all involved parties. Such a retrospective will usually take 1-2 days and the outcome must be measurable improvement proposals that have the most impact to the project performance. Recently, I facilitated one of these retrospectives for one full day at ACTUM . We were around 30 people including ...