Our customer is looking for a true Scrum Master. This is a full time consultant position with Navstar, Inc. You will fall under my division of Enterprise 2.0. If you would like to apply, please send your resume to abaker@navstar-inc.com.

Duties: Provides a total systems perspective including a technical understanding of relationships, dependencies and requirements of hardware and software components for a project. Must be knowledgeable in computer systems and gathering/identifying requirements. Must be knowledgeable in life-cycle support, including maintenance, administration, and management. Creates, drafts and/or reviews program documentation, generates formal review documentation, and participates in system and program reviews. Reviews program plans, identifies inconsistencies. Coordinates, supports and participates in program meetings and reviews.

Assists in the evaluation of software and associated documentation. Participates in formal and informal reviews to determine quality. Must be able to track project studies, plans, actions items, take minutes, etc. Provides frequent contact with customers, trace ability within program documents, and the overall computing environment and architecture. Manages/updates the master schedule. Ensures coordination and information flow occur between all programs and organizational managers.

Description of On-site duties: Passionate SI/Scrum Master/Development Manager needed to serve as Scrum Master to provide collaboration, facilitation, and leadership skills supporting the development of innovative software application. Individual will be responsible for enforcing the rules of Scrum, removing impediments from their team while promoting self-management and constantly improving standards of work. Must be “self-motivated” and capable of managing multiple priorities and tasks as delegated. Serve as liaison between technical and non-technical departments. Communicate with other management, developers, product managers and technical support specialists on product issues.

Must be a “team-player” with the ability to work within a collaborative environments. Support the product development process. Organize and facilitate project planning, daily stand-up meetings, reviews, retrospectives, sprint and release planning, demos and other Scrum-related meetings. Track and communicate team velocity and sprint/release progress. Maintain process documentation. Ensure the development teams are practicing the core agile principles of collaboration, prioritization, team accountability, and visibility. Support the Product Owner. Assist as needed with backlog maintenance. Assist with internal and external communication, improving transparency, and radiating information. Assist with prioritization and resolution of defects/bugs. Support the Product Team. Assist team with making appropriate commitments through story selection, task definition. Participate proactively in developing and maintaining team standards, tools, and best practices. Identify and remove impediments, prevents distractions. Facilitate discussion and conflict resolution. Empower the team to self-organize.

Pager Duty = NO!

Weekend or Shift work = Possible.

Strong project management background, interpersonal skills, communications skills, and experience with full system development life-cycle. Familiarity with Agile methodologies, particularly Scrum. Demonstrated ability to provide innovative ideas and solutions to project management and team building in order to get the job done. Must have a positive and proactive attitude with demonstrated initiative.

Location: Reston, VA with travel to Mclean, VA

Navstar is an Equal Opportunity Employer. Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, citizenship, disability, age, military or veteran status, and other characteristics protected under federal, state and local law.

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Technology marches forward and the paradigm changes. The latest new paradigm – Cloud Computing! Cloud Computing is going to completely change the way we design our computing infrastructures, again.

Cloud Computing is the concept of using Internet services to support users. In general the term is applied more toward business users, but I would say that we all use Internet (or cloud) based services. One of the best and most successful cloud computing services is web-based email or webmail. Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail are all examples of webmail services – and these services are examples of Cloud Computing.

There are also some specific types of cloud computing models.  These are basic subsets of cloud services and are different in the sense that they are usually purchased and have SLA (Service Level Agreements) associated with them.  The models are Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), and Platforms as a Service (PaaS).

Why do it in the Cloud?

In general cloud based services are more robust than similar in-house solutions. Yes, cloud services fail, but probably less often than similar services a business could deploy. Gmail for example has very high availability numbers. In fact, Gmail claims 99.9% availability, which is about an hour of down time per year,  less than 5 minutes a month.

Cloud computing is also less expensive.  Using cloud based services can save a lot of money in terms of capital investments and labor. Consider the costs of running an internal email server – hardware, software, system administration, networking, spam management, and so on. The costs of cloud based solution, the cost of the service and maybe a system administrator to help the users.

Why not to do it in the Cloud…

There are some very serious risks associated with Cloud usage. First and foremost is security. Cloud computing require you to rely on the cloud provider to address security.  Add to this the fact that the service is Internet accessible and security becomes a challenge. Recently Twitter felt the effects of failed security in its usage of cloud service. Without the benefits of hiding behind a firewall, cloud based services are more susceptible to hacking simply due to accessibility. It is critical to educate your users of these new challenges.

Another potential issue is data portability. Can you get your data out of the cloud? Unluckily, the answer is usually no. The ability to extract your data for archiving or backups is an important consideration when deciding whether or not to use cloud services and when selecting a provider. A recent move by Google to address data portability is a move in the right direction and will hopefully encourage others to follow suit. But the standard answer for most cloud computing solutions is “all your data are belong to us.”

Welcome to the Future…

And Cloud Computing is there. The use of cloud computing is almost completely ubiquitous. Most Internet user take advantage of cloud services daily.  In fact, I suspect that most web usage is primarily focused on the use of cloud service; email, work-related activities, blogs, etc. The Cloud is the Internet and Cloud Computing is its new purpose.

What is next? More Cloud Computing power! Google Chrome OS? Maybe…

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This may seem trivial, but company names and product names will start to get more serious and traditional as the more staid elements of the economy (government, financial sector, etc) look for social media partners/providers. Also, hopefully the term “social media” and its variants will go away.

2. Austerity measures.
Tight budgets will drive the adoption of low-cost Web 2.0 and cloud solutions. This has already started, but will the trickle will become not a flood, but simply the new world order in 2010. Even the slow-to-adapt government and conglomerate organizations will move this way. 2010 will be the year of small contracts, as all size organizations have a lot to do and not enough full-time employees to do it. Small and very agile expert teams will rapidly deploy to complete a project, then move on to another one. This will boost the smaller Enterprise Web 2.0 players as companies look to get away from the big-ticket, enterprise-class offerings from major vendors like Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and others. Google may be a winner here, as once enterprises make the decision to move to platforms for wikis, enterprise mashups, cloud services, etc., they will still want one-stop shop of pre-integrated solutions from entrenched software providers (see Reputation Economy).

3. Data processing centers:
Data analytics is becoming an increasingly important part of Web businesses, and all manner of organizations are adopting tools to take the unstructured information in blogs and wikis and mine it. Tagging, aggregation, and analysis software are going to be the big stories in 2010, and possibly the big revenue earners (after shopping and vices). The services that can combine data analytics and crowdsourcing will be the big game-changers, as they will tie everyone into the datastream.

4. Mainframe computing.
OK, it’s called cloud computing now, but it’s still basically dumb-ish terminals hanging off a data repository somewhere. Only now that repository’s far away, and probably owned by someone else. The cloud computing story, as compelling as it is today for many situations, will only get larger in 2010. While the risks become more apparent, the cloud computing industry as a whole will grow as organizations seek to cut costs, manage growth/shrinkage, and shorten time to market.

5. Mobile platforms and devices.
The spread of Android beyond phones to computing appliances, major advances in the iPhone platform, the iPhone app store, the prevalence of the Blackberry and its new open application strategy, the constant data stream of Twitter, and the growth of the netbook will drive business applications that continue to untether the workforce, enable virtual organization while connecting workers together using new collaboration and communication technologies, many of which will be using 2.0 approaches. If the desktop didn’t completely die in 2009, it will become almost completely outmoded in 2010 as the average “smart phone” becomes capable of helping users with a larger percentage of their daily computing and communication tasks. The biggest holdup will not be technology, it will be in the ability of organizations to adopt mobile technologies and understand how to leverage them in their business.

6. “2.0” is de facto.
All things 2.0 are mainstream. People will have Facebook and Twitter as their homepage, and have them on all day. The internet will be synonymous with social media. It may even become part of government. The world of individuals will be so steeped in social media that it will become most people’s understanding of the internet – if you aren’t on Twitter / Facebook / YouTube, you aren’t on the Internet. People will assume and expect Google and Wikipedia at their disposal at all times. Organizations that avoid 2.0, either internally or externally, will be committing institutional suicide. Meanwhile, most big corporations still won’t figure out the best way to use 2.0 (because it doesn’t favor big corporations).

Internal use of 2.0 will continue growth in large enterprises while the struggle continues with market-facing 2.0 products. We saw widespread internal penetration of social networking and Enterprise 2.0 in organizations globally in 2008, but the weak story continues to be the successful creation of online 2.0 products for the broader marketplace. Virtually all of the major online success stories have come from Internet startups; very few if any traditional organizations have been able to create fast growth, widely used Web 2.0 products like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc. That’s not to say that there aren’t many compelling attempts, but none of them have reached the same engagement level with the marketplace. This will almost certainly continue in 2009 as organizations continue to find ways to grapple with the best methods for leveraging the world’s largest single marketplace in their businesses. (ZDNet, predictions for 2009)

7. Economics 2.0.
The massive changes in the business landscape create new 2.0 business opportunities. While the financial sector has been hit hard, many aspects of it were already online, if in a very 1.0 way. Trading applications were certainly one of the first major online success stories and so were online mortgage applications. Real estate, however, never had a large presence online for a number of reasons related to control of the industry by brokers and other organizations. It is likely that these industries and others will finally be put online in a fully 2.0 fashion by a new generation of players. These companies that will use the latest new technologies and business models to move into the massive gaps left over by the implosion of the finance and mortgage industries. What could this actually mean? It likely means things like user-generated mutual funds, online investment vehicles with 100% transparency, as well as real estate markets going fully online with self-service listings. The end of a business cycle such as we’ve seen leaves the landscape open for innovative new players with good ideas that otherwise wouldn’t have a runway to succeed. I believe we can expect a number of them online in 2010 since the Web remains the quickest and easiest way to create and grow a new business.

8. Reputation Management, Social Capital, and Identity.
“Many a man’s character would not know his reputation if they met on the street” – Goethe

Search Engine Reputation Management tactics are often employed by companies and increasingly by individuals who seek to proactively shield their brands or reputations from damaging content brought to light through search engine queries. Some use these same tactics re-actively, in attempts to minimize damage inflicted by inflammatory (or “flame”) websites (and weblogs) launched by consumers and, as some believe, competitors. Given the increasing popularity and development of search engines, these tactics have become more important than ever. Consumer generated media (like blogs) has amplified the public’s voice, making points of view – good or bad – easily expressed. Search Engine Reputation Management strategies include Search engine optimization (SEO) and Online Content Management. Because search engines are dynamic and in constant states of change and revision, it is essential that results are constantly monitored.

Social media will continue to strengthen “bridging” social capital, connecting communities that wouldn’t otherwise be connected and enhancing both. A service like Angieslist may appear for individuals and online communities, but in 2010 I expect mostly consolidation of individual and corporate online identities and increasing awareness of the critical importance of reputation in the 2.0 world.

The post 8 Social Media Predictions for 2010 appeared first on Navstar Inc..

Now, having more time to think about predictions in Social Media and Web 2.0 I have a few additional ideas on what the future might bring in the next year. I also asked some of our Navstar employees to give me their predictions, in which they will be posting throughout the remaining weeks left in this year. I have expanded on a few ideas myself to get things started.

Web 2.0

• Google Social Search will be used to make more informed decision. Feels like this is another shot back in the war between the search engines in the previous strike by Microsoft’s Bing.
  

Social Media

• Twitter will still be a strong contender, with the launch of twitter lists recently, users are now able to organize their followers by ideas, location, and other niche groups. This conversation will lead rise to organizations having conversations in public with each other for more transparency.
• Google Wave will continue to be in beta as it has yet to define itself or be completely understood by those who are currently waving. It may take years to fully develop Wave to its potential. If Google Wave had been our original email solution offered by Google years ago, we could be using it in place of many other email forms, including Outlook.

Enterprise 2.0

• I believe 2010 will have great strides for the Enterprise 2.0 revolution in organizations. This revolution will mean more grassroots movements by employees to adopt methodologies to collaborate across the dispersed workforce.
• Sharepoint will have some big contenders in 2010 with Jive’s Clearspace and Social Text as cheaper options with more flexibility. Small businesses will take advantage of the “free” versions of Enterprise 2.0 tools, but only if they allow a Community Manager for the Intranet to be a full time position to foster the growth.
  

Government 2.0

• The Federal CIO and CTO will start leading more with actual Federal policies in place that encourage data sharing, collaboration between agencies, and greener IT.
• Washington will continue to embrace new ideas from Silicon Valley, but the DC Metro area will be thriving with innovation that will be showcased in the Spring Government 2.0 expo. This boom will continue to fuel the change for an open and transparent Government.

Mobile

• With the Android platform making huge strides in the final quarter of 2009, the cell phone gift this season will be either the Droid from Verizon or the Motorola Cliq with Motoblur for T-Mobile.

What are some of your predictions for 2010?

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