Solvis Consulting, LLC: August 2009

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August 2009

August 29, 2009

New microblog from Jesus Hoyos in English

Jesus Hoyos, our Managing Partner and CRM Guru, has a new microblog in English.

The intent of his new microblog is to write about the CRM industry in general and from time to time about topics from the region. His Spanish blog, www.jesushoyos.com, is dedicated to the CRM industry in Latin America.

Posted at 09:15 PM in Latin America, News, Strategy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Tags: Jesus Hoyos

CRM Certification - 2009 Latin America Tour

Solvis is a hosting sponsor and part of the consortium of companies in Latin America offering a CRM Certification in Spanish. The Certification is on its second year and it is based on Paul Greenberg's book, CRM at the Speed of Light. The dates of the tour are:

Miami - October 5, 6 & 7
Córdoba, Argentina - October 26, 27, 28
México D.F. - November 4, 5, 6

For more information go to the 2009 Latin America Tour site.

Posted at 09:08 PM in Education, Events, Latin America, Strategy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Tags: Paul Greenberg

August 11, 2009

Agile Development; Using the Scrum Framework with CRM SaaS

By Earl LaChance

On Solvis' most recent CRM SaaS implementations, we've been using the Scrum framework to help manage the projects.

Wikipedia Definition of Scrum: "Scrum is an iterative incremental framework for managing complex work (such as new product development) commonly used with agile software development. "

The general idea is to deliver a functional piece of software every sprint (2 - 4 week time frame). Remember, this does not imply "production ready". This is an iterative approach to developing a product toward production-ready status, with a focus on constant improvement.

Our Scrum process flows as follows:

1.User Stories are created, based on requirements. These are created in “ScrumWorks”, a software package that offers a free version (Basic) at http://danube.com/.
2. Tasks are added to each user story and we assign an estimation to the task in hours
3. A point person is assigned to each task
4. User Stories are then placed into "Sprints" which are short development cycles.
5. At the end of each day, the Project Manager or the “Scrum Master” collect these hours and update the task in ScrumWorks.
6. We conduct a daily "Scrum meeting" where we hold a development review: what was completed, what is planned, and roadblocks.

(Graphic from Mountain Goat Software, Inc)

One of the important results of the daily scrum is an understanding of the daily burn-down calculation, which shows us:

a. Total hours for the sprint
b. Total days for the sprint
c. Ideal number of hours to be ‘burned’ daily
d. The number of hours we burned the previous day
e. The delta between how many hours we should have burned to stay on track vs. what we actually burned
f. The number of hours left in the Sprint
g. The number of hours we NEED to burn today in order to stay on-track and to not fall behind.

Using Scrum, we know on a daily basis the following:

1. Who completed which tasks and which tasks are planned
2. How much time a resource spent working on the sprint
3. How the team is tracking toward on-time delivery of the sprint

Although I have personally been an Agile practitioner for some time, I am now very much a Scrum framework advocate! This is the an excellent example of the marriage of a management process to a software package(Scrumworks).

Posted at 03:29 PM in Agile, Implementation, Project Management, Scrum | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Tags: agiledevelopment, CRM SaaS, Project management, Project Manager, Scrum, Scrum and SaaS CRM, Scrumworks

August 03, 2009

2nd Social Media & CRM Seminar

Solvis is pleased to announce our 2nd Social Media and CRM Seminar - August 10, Mexico City. For more information go to our seminar site or see the widget below.