Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

This commentary was initially included in a lengthy book review post about the book “Tale of Two Systems”.  Given I will be referring to these two documents on an ongoing basis, I have shifted the commentary to this separate page.

In the book, the 2nd key document is called the “Statement of Work” (SOW).

This, along with the “Concept Document” are the two key documents referenced in the book.   I agree there should only be two!

According to the book (p8) this “laid out the ‘how’, ‘who’ and ‘when’”.

The author notes that this was developed concurrently with the iterative development of the Concept (i.e. “What and Why) Document.

In my view, it is important that this was a separate document, as these types of details (whilst needed up-front) should not pad out a business case.

As a business owner, what I need is to know that the SOW exists and to have trust in the people who have developed the SOW – I do not necessarily need to read the details.

For our company, moving forward, we’ll place particular emphasis on conversations, and documentation, that answer together the:

HOW, WHO and WHEN

I know that someone recommended I read this one – I apologise for forgetting who it was!  Was it you, Justin?

I read this book as it claimed to answer some questions I had been pondering along the lines of “what’s this AGILE thing all about?” .

Shane’s review helped, but I still had loads more questions – as a result of which we loaded up our Amazon cart with quite a few books on the topic, of which this is the first I have reviewed.

1)  Binary Review

This book is written as a fictional tale of two separate software development projects within the same large company – one using “Lean and Agile” Software Development, and one using a more traditional (e.g. waterfall) approach.

The Book	What we thought
“A Tale of Two Systems”by Michael K Levine	. Useful (and very timely for us)!

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As a novel, this book certainly does NOT qualify as “Un-Put-Down-Able”.

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The time was half past seven in the evening.  It had been dark for an hour outside.  My stomach was empty, but I pressed on.  It was quiet in my study at home, the only activity - my feverish typing away at the keyboard.  I was almost done, joy within sight.

You see I was finishing the design specification for the latest iteration of ez2view.  This version was going to be the most ambitious version of our products yet and, after heavy internal debate, we had finally decided on where the product would go.  I spent the last week researching the technologies that we needed and designing the core structure of how the program would work.

Who am I?  My name is Stephen Hurn and I am the Product Manager of ez2view Australia and its companion product ez2update Australia.  I have been with global-roam since 2006 and have seen the company grow threefold over the last three years.  I will occasionally be pontificating on this blog about my times at global-roam.

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