John Hill functions as an Agile Program Manager, ScrumMaster, and Scrum Trainer for the Aerospace and Defense division of JDA Software Group, Inc., headquartered in Calabasas, California where he works with JDA's "Contract Manufacturing" suite of products (http://www.jda.com/solutions/contract-overview.html).   John is also now Program Manager for Boeing's Integrated Defense Systems (IDS) division's funded off-shore development initiative.  http://www.boeing.com/ids/  John is thus quite familiar with the challenges associated with offshore Scrum.  John is now additionally using Scrum to port his divisions products from the HP PA-RISC platform to the HP Integrity (i.e., Itanium) platform (http://h20341.www2.hp.com/integrity/cache/332341-0-0-0-121.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN).

Recent Articles by John

Empowering Teams: The ScrumMaster's Role 11 Jun 07
For Scrum to work, teams must be truly empowered. Unfortunately, far too many teams are operating at much less than capacity and are failing. Find out how to cure a team that is suffering from a power shortage.
Shake It Up! Moving Beyond Plain Vanilla Scrum 29 Jan 07
Maybe Baskin Robbins had it right. Just as one flavor of ice cream doesn’t suit every buyer, vanilla Scrum may not be the best recipe for every organization. Find out how combining tasks and blending roles can result in a more evolved, cross-functional team.
It's All in the Delivery 12 Jun 06
How Scrum Avoids Problems with Traditional "Earned Value" and "Schedule Performance Index" Calculations

Recent Comments by John

On Empowering Teams: The ScrumMaster's Role
Hi Mike: Thanks for the great feedback on my article. I would, however, like to clarify one point. Although I do strongly agree with you that the ScrumMaster should keep the team working on the stories selected for the sprint backlog. When it...
On Empowering Teams: The ScrumMaster's Role
Hi Aldo: You are absolutely correct in that teams with less exposure to Scrum (or "Agile" environments generally) will struggle until they really understand the dynamics of Scrum. Thanks for adding this point that I should have made in the ...
On Empowering Teams: The ScrumMaster's Role
Adam: I haven't been on the SA website for a while and just now saw your question about planning imprecise backlogs for three teams, etc. I would strongly recommend that the Product Owner(s) engage in "Release Planning" prior to you doing any "S...
On It's All in the Delivery
Trevor: Since I wrote this article, several individuals at SolutionsIQ (esp. Tamara Sulaiman, PMP) have written a GREAT paper on using "Agile EVM" presented at Agile 2006 (link to this article is below): http://www.solutionsiq.com/agile_inde...