New Scrum Adventures

For the past eight years I have worked at my local hospital. I have really enjoyed this position and it gave me great stability. I worked at the hospital from June 2001 to May 2010. I worked mostly in Radiology and during that time our projects were very long, following Waterfall, and consisted mostly of customizing out of the box software packages, such as replacing the Hospital Information System, the Patient Access System, the Radiology Information System, the automated dictation system, the Nighthawk Group system twice, the Picture Achieve Communication System and finally going totally filmless with Computed Radiology. While I learned a great deal over the past eight years, it is time for a new adventure. A large corporate company is impressed with my skills and my recent MBA that I received in May of 2009. And I am chomping at the bit to put my MBA to good use.

Today was my first day at extremely large medical software development and device company. I was hired as a Software Developer/Content Analyst. I arrived at 8:32, late already! The daily “Stand Up” had already begun. The Dev Team has 15 minute meetings where we stand up. I found that they were using a methodology under Agile that is considered a framework called Scrum. I have made a note to read up on Scrum and Agile. The meetings are at exactly 8:30 AM every, single day. I have to leave the house earlier and I have to be prepared with what I worked on yesterday, what I will work on today, and any obstacles in my way. The Dev Teams takes bi weekly turns placing the info into JIRA. JIRA was being projected onto the wall, and as the group went around the room it was my turn and I was introduced to the group as being a new employee. I knew that tomorrow I would not be able to get off the hook so easily. When the meeting was over my supervisor showed me my new cube, bye-bye office, and gave me three large manuals to read. He said he would check on my progress by the end of the day. Help!