• Murach's JavaScript and jQuery book review

    Posted 6/18/2013 by The Spitfire Group on behalf of Tim Lennek
    Book review of Murach's JavaScript and jQuery by Tim Lennek     "JavaScript and jQuery are two broad topics and I wondered how the authors were going to approach these topics. The book started slow, describing in detail how web servers interact with Application Servers and client browsers. Once you get past this, they get into the subject matter in more depth.      They come up with an introductory application and show how to approach it, with JavaScript and ...

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  • Consulting and Scrum: Keeping a new team honest

    Posted 5/3/2012 by Andi Blackwell
    As we all know, Scrum teams work best when they are co-located and within koosh-ball-tossing range, not when they are working at disparate sites. We also know that teams who have not worked together before can come up against challenges with communication, unmet expectations, productivity and quality, among others. Both of these conditions can significantly increase risk on a project. Throw them into a consulting environment on a fixed-bid project and the problems can increase dramatically. To ...

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  • Lean Portfolio Management

    Posted 4/10/2012 by Wade Scherer
    Lean Portfolio Management has become a recent fascination of mine. Mainly because it has helped me to see how much more effective projects I was involved in could have been in the past. We are all aware of the value of Agile at implementation, and how that can contribute to a product being much more to the liking of the users. But, if you step back 100 yards, what do we see? And what did we see 10 years ago? 10 years ago we saw projects defined and budgeted up front, and followed through to t...

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  • The end of email. Can it also mean the beginning of accountability?

    Posted 2/24/2012 by Lisa Helme
    Some companies have noticed it for years, some more recently - internal email communication can often be inefficient, consuming valuable time and resources. Numerous people have discussed these inefficiencies in blogs and news articles - obviously I am not alone in finding recent reports about companies such as Atos and CapGemini ending the use of email for internal communications intriguing. Email has allowed people to easily pass the buck and lighten their own load with the simple press of a b...

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  • The Business Effect of Process

    Posted 1/16/2012 by Mark Richtermeyer
    One of the most interesting aspects of my position as a consultant is the visibility into so many companies' inner workings. By the time they are seriously talking to Spitfire about needing consulting, they are usually a long way down a troubled path. When the business has already begun to fire people because the critical technologies that keep the business running are not working right, its a pretty good sign that things have been wrong for a long time. Sometimes we witness architecture messes ...

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  • Thoughts on starting a new project with kanban

    Posted 1/16/2012 by Andi Blackwell
    We just started a new project for a valued client and based on the nature of the team and the company culture, we've decided to use kanban to manage the development process. This client has an internal team of very competent folks, but because they were small, they didn't really use a defined development process and standards. The joint project we are working with them on is a large one, with a much larger team and many moving parts and realistic but aggressive timelines. We believe that using k...

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