Bob Smith

Senior Director, Data Strategy @sagegroupplc |
Views my own unless I RT yours

[Bob Smith @insightbob]

https://t.co/Hp3Dsc8PzS

[Bob Smith @insightbob]

https://t.co/ulobI7Bfgy

[Bob Smith @insightbob]

Can't help but agree, especially for business intelligence and analytics teams. #Kanban ftw

[Santiago @svpino]

Scrum is a cancer.

I've been writing software for 25 years, and nothing renders a software team useless like Scrum does.

Some anecdotes:

1. They tried to convince me that Poker is a planning tool, not a game.

2. If you want to be more efficient, you must add process, not remove it. They had us attending the "ceremonies," a fancy name for a buttload of meetings: stand-ups, groomings, planning, retrospectives, and Scrum of Scrums. We spent more time talking than doing.

3. We prohibited laptops in meetings. We had to stand. We passed a ball around to keep everyone paying attention.

4. We spent more time estimating story points than writing software. Story points measure complexity, not time, but we had to decide how many story points fit in a sprint.

5. I had to use t-shirt sizes to estimate software.

6. We measured how much it cost to deliver one story point and then wrote contracts where clients paid for a package of "500 story points."

7. Management lost it when they found that 500 story points in one project weren't the same as 500 story points on another project. We had many meetings to fix this.

8. Imagine having a manager, a scrum master, a product owner, and a tech lead. You had to answer to all of them and none simultaneously.

9. We paid people who told us whether we were "burning down points" fast enough. Weren't story points about complexity instead of time? Never mind.

I believe in Agile, but this ain't agile.

We brought professional Scrum trainers. We paid people from our team to get certified. We tried Scrum this way and that other way. We spent years doing it.

The result was always the same: It didn't work.

Scrum is a cancer that will eat your development team. Scrum is not for developers; it's another tool for managers to feel they are in control.

But the best about Scrum are those who look you in the eye and tell you: "If it doesn't work for you, you are doing it wrong. Scrum is anything that works for your team."

Sure it is.

[Seth Godin @ThisIsSethsBlog]

Feature creep https://t.co/dv46gRw2Og

[Paul Lewis @paullewismoney]

Holiday Inn hacked and database deleted - its password was apparently Qwerty1234 - by couple in Vietnam 'for fun' after a ransomware attempt failed https://t.co/rztOwibA5x

[Bob Smith @insightbob]

Sage are giving away MORE tickets to The Hundred competition! Head over to their page (@sageuk) to find out how you can win your way in! 🏏 #SageTheHundred https://t.co/pF5KoHe29v

[Bob Smith @insightbob]

How Marketing Ops Can Prepare for 2022 https://t.co/lUElPIq9Sj

[Bob Smith @insightbob]

Closing the Gap Between Digital Marketing Spending and Performance https://t.co/dfEyHNorEg

[Bob Smith @insightbob]

How to Take Your Ecommerce Marketing Strategy to the Next Level https://t.co/NDe4gbiebh

[Bob Smith @insightbob]

The Next Great Digital Advantage https://t.co/dAd92vY7oF

[Bob Smith @insightbob]

Head over to @sageuk to find out how you can win your way into @TheHundred competition! 🏏 #SageTheHundred https://t.co/SrtdzcVMMc

[Bob Smith @insightbob]

Well well well @Zuora @SnowflakeDB this looks too good to be true!

https://t.co/cOZYXsiD0b

[Simon Kuestenmacher @simongerman600]

What a chart! This chart visualizes the frequency of compound insults (e.g. poophead, scumwad) in Reddit comments in the shape of a prefix and suffix matrix. This is super helpful in creating new swearwords too. Perfect for the social media age. Source: https://t.co/ghKHfGBtWP

[Trung Phan @TrungTPhan]

In 2013, Dell Inc was a struggling PC and hardware firm. CEO Michael Dell took it private in a $25B buyout and turned it into an IT infrastructure + cloud giant (re-listing as Dell Technologies in 2018)

The $4B that Dell put up in the deal is now worth $40B.

Here's the story🧵

[Bob Smith @insightbob]

Outstanding #Dataviz

[Colin Angus @VictimOfMaths]

I've always liked this way of visualising 3-way election results, and wow, the Conservative->Lib Dem swing in yesterday's North Shropshire by-election was *huge*.

A constituency that's only been getting more blue since 1997 suddenly went very yellow.

[Bob Smith @insightbob]

Are you a biz owner or budding entrepreneur, fed up of the same old business stories? Sage's Sound Advice podcast is for you! With episodes full of brilliant business insight from a range of fantastic guests. Take a listen here. #SoundAdvicePodcast https://t.co/rubgFXrHEm

[Picard Tips @PicardTips]

Picard management tip: Experiment.

[Sage UK @sageuk]

Fed up of Xero? Find out why over 3 million global businesses with half of the UK’s accountants and bookkeepers choose Sage!

👉 https://t.co/Djmu3UVRrD

[Steve Hare @SteveHare]

Thank you to all colleagues who tuned into our global 40th birthday celebration at our fantastic Global HQ in Newcastle. #LifeAtSage

[Bob Smith @insightbob]

@arranangus And this game was mega

[Bob Smith @insightbob]

@arranangus The mouse had three buttons