The Business Agility Blog

Dear sprintr users,

It’s been only six weeks since we launched sprintr into private beta and we are absolutely overwhelmed with the amount of positive feedback thus far. We appreciate all of your thoughts tremendously and this is why I am writing you today.

We decided to launch sprintr as early as possible, hoping to quickly start collecting valuable feedback and collaborating with YOU, our users, to determine our priorities for future sprints and releases.

We have received over a thousand feedback-tickets, ranging from small bugs to very cool, innovative ideas for improving and extending sprintr. To make sure we tend to the most desired requests first, I am excited to announce that we will release an update that allows the whole user community to up/down-vote ideas and feature-requests. And of course, you’ll be able to use this feature in your own projects as well.

Also, while sprintr is in beta, we are setting up a small focus group for users who would like to share feedback in a more personal and structured fashion. We want to meet your team (onsite or online) and learn first-hand from your experiences using sprintr.

If you are interested in joining this group, please send me a note at info@sprintr.com.

Hope to meet up soon!

Derek
CEO Mendix

After the last Champions League there is no doubt anymore: Lionel Messi is the best soccer player in the world, perhaps even of all time. His demonstration of excellence in football is unparalleled. One of the cornerstones of his greatness is his recognition that the whole club of Barcelona is invaluable for his individual stardom: He knows it’s the organization that enables him to shine. Think about it, he was not (yet) able to make Argentina world champion. A team, which exists of individual stars. It’s not the number of stars that make the superstar excel. It is the strength of the club.

There is no team in the world that even comes close to Barcelona where collaboration is concerned. One of the reasons why: Because style, experience and skills have been embedded in the organization. With that the organization automates all basic skills to be in control of a soccer match: the ability to act as a group, control the pace, easily change the plan during the game, and learn as a group before, during and after the match. The parallel with software development is striking. The best developer in the world is unable to make the best software in the world if the software organization does not provide an environment that allows focusing on improvement, rewards collaboration and stimulates learning. So, like Messi is unable to show his brilliance when the other players don’t know how to support him, the best developers will not co-create a winning product if basic skills have not been automated.

And that is where platforms help. That is what Mendix contributes to software creation. Like years of training and playing together provided the Barcelona team the required structure and stability, The Mendix platform automates all the things you don’t want to be thinking of when you are developing. The things that always need to happen, that you just want to work. Like Barcelona reacts instantaneously to absorb individual errors in no time, Mendix automatically solves errors in your app or makes them extremely easy to solve. Like a new player is easily fit into Barcelona because the team provides the structure a new player needs, Mendix makes it easy to involve new business engineers and integrate new and improved components. And lastly, like the entire Barcelona organization has been able to gradually improve and make success repetitive, Mendix succeeds in improving its platform and steadily abstracts more and more complexity under the hood. Therewith continuously accelerating control and pace of the game (faster platform evolution), increasing quality of the play (the actual apps) and making customers shout for more (the business). Therewith allowing agility.

Mendix partner FraternIT leverages Mendix to deliver the same platform approach. The FraternIT Project Framework (FPF) supports project savvy organizations. How: by stabilizing the organizational common-denominator under projects. By automating integration between the project front-end and the ERP, HR backend. By making direct application of lessons learned possible. FPF provides insight into the project portfolio, allows project knowledge to spread, decreases dependency on individuals and increases reliability towards customers. Leveraging Mendix, FPF allows for fully tailored implementation within weeks and continuous evolution with your evolving business needs.

Now if only Lionel started using FPF to manage Argentina’s next mission, we bet they’ll win the next World Cup.

Bjorn de Visser (Mendix)
Frans Verschoor (FraternIT)

Last week I attended a seminar given by scrum inventor Jeff Sutherland at the Dialogues House in Amsterdam. It was mainly about why large organizations need an agile approach in order to complete complex projects and to stay competitive; he even stated, “Companies not using scrum will go down, you simply cannot keep up with your competition.” After his seminar the audience had the opportunity to ask  Dr. Sutherland questions. The day after the seminar I stumbled upon this tweet that actually raised the some of the questions the audience had during Dr. Sutherland’s seminar. Let’s break down a few common misconceptions raised via this tweet and the seminar (see image below from tweet)

Twitpic: Why Agile is less effective than waterfall? It’s not according to mr. Sutherland!

• Q: “Agile has more talking and Meetings”
• A  Jeff Sutherland: “Ban meetings, the scrum-master’s job is to protect the programmers against meetings, the only meeting relevant is the stand up meeting”.

• Q: Agile is less efficient when having to transfer project knowledge.
• A Jeff Sutherland: “That’s the things with a good team, there shouldn’t be one guy who has all the knowledge about one topic. I would fire the guy who has all the knowledge on a specific domain, you just cant have single points of failures.”

• Q: “In Agile we do not do what we know best”
• A Jeff Sutherland: “Exactly, because you are in a team, you should have sense of what the others are doing, are capable of, and build trust and insight, this will grow the effectiveness of your team, people are more in touch about what the other one is doing.”

• Q: “More involvement of biz people’s time”
• A Jeff Sutherland: “More involvement yes, but it will save time because the business will get back a product that is satisfying faster, the chance to have to start over after a comprehensive period of designing is reduced a lot.”

• Q: “In waterfall you take time to design, more time”
• A Jeff Sutherland: “…but there is less time to test, you only know if your design was right after you have tested. More testing results in more accurate products.”

• Q: “Resources Scheduling is less predictable”
• A Jeff Sutherland: “Never have the illusion you can accurately tell how much time to spend on something. You know why? Ever filled out a time sheet? I see all these guys in teams on Friday afternoon, scratching their heads how much time they’ve spent on certain tasks and then guessing how much they have put in. It’s inaccurate. So it’s not less predicable, in fact once you have got a good team using Scrum you can measure how many story points a team can process over a period of time, very accurately.”

My two cents: All of these questions are signs of not fully understanding Agility, a lack of Agile experience, or a bad implementation of scrum. Mr. Sutherland boldly states: “Bad scrumming is still more effective than waterfall”.

As Oracle plans to sunset development of its Designer product, Transfer Solutions will use Mendix as a possible alternative to fill in the gap left behind.

BOSTON & ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS – June 15, 2011 – Mendix, the leading business application platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider, today announced that Transfer Solutions, a Netherlands-based, information and communication technology (ICT) service provider, specializing in Oracle and Java technologies, will utilize the Mendix Agile Business Platform^TM, as a possible alternative to provide a highly productive application development environment for its Oracle-user clients.

With Oracle’s announcement to stop  development of their Designer Suite, Transfer Solutions’ software developers were challenged with having to build upon a discontinued platform. In order to continue to provide a highly productive development environment to its customers and developers, Transfer Solutions will use the Mendix Agile Business Platform to facilitate project completion, without losing speed, and flexibility and protecting client investments in the Oracle infrastructure and database.

“Mendix provides us with the capabilities to supply our customers and employees with the best user-experience possible,” said Albert Leenders, technical director for Transfer Solutions. “With Mendix’s platform, we will be able to safeguard, and even expand on our and our customers Oracle technology infrastructure, find a follow up for Oracle’s 4 GL and create valuable options for our customers.”

The Mendix Agile Business Platform guarantees that Transfer Solutions’ clients will be able to extend their legacy Oracle systems, now and well into the future. Additionally, the Mendix Platform offers well-controlled maintenance for designers, developers and administrators – two factors that lead to its selection.

“Transfer Solutions has an established name and outstanding reputation within the Oracle market,” said Björn de Visser, alliance leader for Mendix. “With Mendix, Transfer Solutions will be able to create unique value propositions by leveraging existing Oracle application landscapes for their clients, while enhancing agility and usability.” “I’m very excited to welcome Transfer Solutions as a partner and can’t wait to jointly help customers release new business value in current Oracle application landscapes.”

About Transfer Solutions

Transfer Solutions is an ICT service provider with a strong specialization in Oracle and Java technology. Transfer Solutions operates with three Business Units: Consulting, Managed Services and Education. Consulting delivers ICT projects and consultancy. Managed services manages software applications and infrastructures (databases, application servers, OS), also on 24/7 basis. Education delivers training in the application of ICT technology.

Principals choose Transfer Solutions for the quality of expertise, flexibility and involvement. With 150 employees Transfer Solutions is capable of delivering high value, complete and solid services for principals within both government and private enterprises. Transfer Solutions is an Oracle Gold partner and for the past two years was ranked high in the Computable Top 100 most powerful ICT companies. For more information please visit: www.transfer-solutions.com

Mendix launched sprintr™ into private beta last week. We’ve been using it for a while now, and I’ve noticed some interesting advantages. I won’t dive into all the features here but, more importantly I’d like to discuss what social collaboration will do for your project-team, your department and your company.

1: Breaking down traditional organizational boundaries

Taken from this press release about sprintr™. It’s true, barriers are broken now that we use sprintr™: No more waiting for people to respond to your email – even the ones with overloaded in-boxes, and no more disconnect between distributed teams and departments.

Three departments divided by a huge pond collaborating seamlessly (from Management Board to Marketing Departments): The Netherlands (Rolf Mulder), U.S. (Eric Peters) and CEO Derek Roos who is around the globe constantly. Saves a lot of emailing and messaging back and forth, which brings us to the next main advantage of Social Collaboration…

2: Keep your inbox clean

Check the user story “streamline trial process”, 21 comments! That could have been 21 emails back and forth, with people CC’d in. We all know that every morning our inbox is swamped with dozens of emails CC’d to you, most of them not even relevant.

3: Manage your project information stream effectively: Conversation and files archived properly

Being involved in project means information management, and before social collaboration there was hardly any good way of integrating conversation and file sharing (wire frames, flowcharts etc.) all in the same place. Especially for those who [still] work in waterfall methods, will be bombarded with documents: requirements, flowcharts, designs, wire frames, requests for changes etc. This new way of communicating enhances conversation, but also makes it possible to have the right information at hand at the right time.

4: Capturing the eureka moment

When we leave our offices, cubicles (are they still around?) or workplaces, our minds are still working on some brilliant ideas. It is often the case that the best ideas occur outside the office. Sprintr™ connects you to your work when you want to be. Think: Real-time collaboration.

5: Best idea over loudest voice

The introverted guy next to you might have better ideas than the guy on your other side who always gets his point across, even when he’s wrong. By adding simple polls and voting capabilities to an online collaboration space, you democratize information and keep noise levels low.

Our own social collaboration space: sprintr™ is currently in private beta, if you want to start to benefit from social collaboration yourself please sign up for an invitation:

Rapidly growing agile platform provider adds seasoned software veteran to executive team

BOSTON & ROTTERDAM, NL, June 6, 2011 – Mendix, the leading application platform-as-a-service provider, announced today the addition of Arno Rood, as country manager of the Benelux region.

Rood will continue the expansion of Mendix BV, solidifying its current market position as a market leader.  Prior to joining Mendix, he held several management roles at Xebia, Getronics, MicroStrategy and Oracle.

“In order to maintain our growth, Mendix is constantly looking for the best people in the market, said Derek Roos, CEO of Mendix.” “Arno has significant experience in successfully developing software organizations. In addition, we share the same vision about the importance of agile development and how Business and IT must collaborate effectively.”

Mendix is the developer of the Mendix Agile Business Platform™, a complete solution for agile application lifecycle management in the cloud. The Mendix platform rapidly develops, deploys and manages applications that smoothly integrate with existing systems.

“Mendix is a real success story… the company saw that most IT projects exceed their budget and timeline, and developed a solution to address this problem,” said Rood. “I look forward to working with our large community of partners and users to help organizations simplify collaboration. I’m also excited to join such an entrepreneurial team.”

Alliance to offer custom developed applications with new “A3” program, powered by the Mendix Platform

BOSTON – June 1, 2011 – Mendix, the leading application platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider, today announced Alliance Global Services, a Pennsylvania-based software development firm, will utilize the Mendix Agile Business Platform™ to power its new Agile Application Acceleration Services™ (A3) service.

A3 is Alliance’s approach to accelerate application development processes and improve collaboration with business stakeholders. The offering is aimed at helping organizations develop new functionality quickly and cost-effectively, to combat common development issues, such as time-critical business initiatives, rapidly evolving business needs and legacy system integration.

“Alliance Global Services will combine valuable industry and application development process expertise with the Mendix Platform,” said Derek Roos, CEO of Mendix.  “Alliance will be enabled to define, design and build a wide variety of mission-critical applications and in turn, extend their clients’ existing systems.”

“After a thorough evaluation process, Mendix emerged as the optimal solution to meet the needs of our clients,” said David Rader, CTO of Alliance Global Services. “The Mendix Agile Business Platform enables us to deliver more functionality for our clients, shorten development cycles and increase collaboration between business and IT.”

Alliance Global Services will offer a five-day, on-site proof-of-concept for clients interested in the program. Alliance will offer this on a “Guaranteed Success” basis, illustrating the speed and flexibility of the Mendix Agile Business Platform in parallel with Alliance’s expertise.

About Alliance Global Services

Alliance Global Services is a software development firm that partners with software, technology and information-intensive businesses on their mission critical work. Alliance architects and builds software applications, platforms and products that become primary drivers of innovation and revenue growth for its clients and their businesses. Alliance is recognized for driving quality and speed-to-market when business success depends on the software inside. For more information, please visit www.allianceglobalservices.com.