April News
Mukwonago High School graciously hosted our HDI meeting in April, and talked about their IT Academy. It’s truly one of a kind, as they are learning advanced level IT curriculum and partnering with area businesses to provide student internships for real world experiences. The program has gained a lot of traction, with over 70 students signed up next semester.Dave DuVarney, President at Talavant, presented on Business Intelligence, and talked about how his company is moving information forward with Agile/Scrum methodologies, and transforming business intelligence into business dollars.
Some key takeaways include the roles he defined in a Scrum environment:
- Team Lead - Decides which course to take, set the sail for the ship, determines a broad course of action to take
- Scrum Master - Keeps team priorities in line with the team lead
- Analysts - Problem solvers, Critical thinkers, they are feeding materials into the machine and evangelizing the value, and taking that back to the business – they are the ones selling it to the business operations
- Developers - Moving large data from A to B, building reports and Modeling data. They need to aggregate data across systems, set speeds, targets, and modeling.
- Support - Troubleshooting problems when they come up
Other takeaways when implementing Scrum/Agile: Keys are to set the cadence, consistent movement, and get feedback, and don’t forget about the technical debt. If no cadence is set, staff will want more and will become disruptive to the sprint.
