Scrum in A Dispersed Environment

How To Manage The Development Game With Players Around The World

The experts say that Scrum as a process works best when the development team is in the same place, so that communications between team members is not only constant, but consistently understood. But what if teams are dispersed? Is it impossible to apply Scrum practices across multiple geographies?

Tele Atlas CTO Bruce Radloff doesn’t think so. His development groups are focused on delivering continuously updated digital maps, and they do so despite being scattered across four United States, two Central European locations and an increasing number of locations in Asia Pacific. The teams have worked through their cultural and geographic differences and successfully applied Scrum techniques to create and regularly update the leading map database for personal and in car navigation, Internet, and mobile devices and applications.

In this keynote session, Mr. Radloff described the challenges and secrets to success in using Scrum across a growing, global organization. His experience continuously updating a database that incorporates 51 terabytes of data will give attendees the best perspectives in how to apply Scrum techniques in one of the more dispersed and challenging of environments.

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About Bruce Radloff

Bruce Radloff is Chief Technology Officer at Tele Atlas, a leading global provider of digital maps and dynamic content for navigation and location-based solutions. As CTO, Mr. Radloff is responsible for driving overall corporate-level product and service architectures and for setting technical strategies on a global basis.

Before joining Tele Atlas in 2005, Mr. Radloff was Vice President, Chief Information Officer (CIO) and CTO at the OnStar division of General Motors Corporation. At OnStar, Mr. Radloff was responsible for the creation of a robust service delivery capability, encompassing the in-vehicle hardware, the wireless network, and the service delivery infrastructure, including the development and operation of three 24x7 driver call centers in the U.S. and Canada. Over his seven + years tenure at the company, Mr. Radloff was instrumental in building the OnStar subscriber base to three million across more than 50 General Motors and other manufacturers' automobile models. Prior to OnStar, Mr. Radloff held various positions of increasing responsibility at Bell Atlantic (now part of Verizon) and at IBM. He started his career as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Air Force.

Mr. Radloff holds an M.S. in Technology Management from the University of Maryland and a B.A. from Ohio State University. Back to Top

About Tele Atlas

Tele Atlas delivers the digital maps and dynamic content that power some of the world’s most essential navigation and location-based services (LBS). The information is the foundation for a wide range of personal and in-car navigation systems and mobile and Internet map applications that help users find the people, places, products, and services they need, wherever they are. The company also works with business partners who trust its digital map data to deliver critical applications for emergency, business, fleet, and infrastructure services. Through a combination of its own products and partnerships, Tele Atlas offers digital map coverage of more than 200 countries and territories worldwide. The company was founded in 1984 and today has approximately 2,400 full-time staff (170 of whom are engineers) and contract cartographers at offices in 24 countries and uses a sophisticated network of professional drivers, mobile mapping vans, and more than 50,000 data resources to deliver highly accurate and up-to-date digital maps. Back to Top