The Journal of Information Technology Management

Cutter IT Journal

REPRINTCutter IT Journal Vol. 21, No. 5

My Avatar Is Agile —Is Yours? Using Scrum toManage Projects in VirtualWorld Developmentby Matthew Ganis and David McNeill

REPRINTCutter IT Journal Vol. 21, No. 5

Project Management 2.0: Using Agile, Enterprise 2.0, and Other Modern Methodsto Manage Today’s Projects

Opening Statementby Rob Thomsett

My PMO’s Midlife Crisisby Bonnie Cooper

What Can We Do About Our Project Managers?by Alistair Cockburn

Project Management 2.0: It Won’t Go Anywhere Without Project Leadership 1.0by Mark E. Mullaly

What Lifecycle? Selecting the Right Model for Your Projectby Johanna Rothman

Beyond Agile Project Management: The Way Forwardby Darren Dalcher

My Avatar Is Agile — Is Yours? Using Scrum to Manage Projects in Virtual World Developmentby Matthew Ganis and David McNeill

Discovering the Benefits of Project Management 2.0by Andrew Filev

Download your complete copy of Project Management 2.0: Using Agile, Enterprise 2.0, and Other ModernMethods to Manage Today’s Projects in PDF format today!

This Cutter IT Journal issue discusses the complex issues surrounding project management in the new global environ-ment. Discover how one IT executive is overcoming her PMO’s “midlife crisis” by shifting its focus from project execu-tion and metrics to portfolio oversight and business relationship management. Learn how your projects can reducetheir “Feature-Time-to-Benefit” through a combination of lean, agile, and Toyota Production System (TPS)-inspired tech-niques. And hear from one author who relates “a typical agile failure story” and argues that we need to go beyondagile project management to ensure that the value project teams deliver represents coherent and complete content.Download your copy now — the project you save may be your own! Visit www.cutter.com/offers/pm2.html.

How do you manage a remote development team thatneeds to deliver functions in a graphically rich environ-ment with a technology that is new, virtual, and evolv-ing? Our answer: go agile!

In this article, we will discuss our use of Scrum in thesupport, development, and deployment of ibm.com’sVirtual Business Center estate in Second Life. We willaddress our use of this method from both a technical(development) and traditional project management per-spective. We will also address Second Life and the chal-lenges that go with running a region. We believe thechallenges and learning curves can be easily overcomethrough the use of agile development methods, due totheir iterative and incremental nature. These methodsnot only work, they can also help you excel at your task.

SECOND LIFE AND VIRTUAL WORLDS

A virtual world is an online environment in which theresidents of the world (represented as avatars) partici-pate online (see Figure 1). Avatars can communicatewith other avatars, explore new locations, create andmove objects, and interact with other objects and avatars— all within this virtual environment. The functioningof a virtual world can mirror that of the real world, orthe virtual world can allow residents to do such thingsas fly, wander around underwater, or teleport them-selves to other locations. Today’s virtual worlds areimmersive, animated 3D environments that operate overthe Internet, granting access to anyone in the world withan Internet connection (and a client application that ren-ders and helps manage the virtual world experience forthe user). Residents of a virtual world have the freedomto do and be nearly anything they want, limited only bythe design of the environment.

Linden Labs, which launched Second Life in 2003, hasreported that as of September 2007, Second Life hostedover 7,000 businesses and boasted a gross domesticproduct (GDP) as high as $600 million. The total resi-dent population is over 12 million,1 and current esti-mates show that by 2010, 20% of global Tier 1 retailers

will have some kind of marketing presence in virtualworlds, with 80% of active Internet users and Fortune500 enterprises having a virtual world presence by2011.2 Most of the content in these worlds is contributedby the residents, making them truly social worlds. Someestimates claim that 99% of the content within suchworlds is user-created.3

A key task domain that must be managed in virtualworlds work is building. “Building” refers both to cre-ating new objects and to enhancing and maintainingexisting objects. Building in Second Life is a very visualactivity. All objects in the world are created with a setof very simple geometric-shaped building blocks, called“prims” (short for “primitives”). These prims can betwisted, stretched, cut, and resized, to name just afew of the transformations and attributes that can beapplied to a prim. When several prims are “linked”together, they form the recognizable objects seen inSecond Life, such as buildings, cars, powerboats, and allof the landscaping — rocks, trees, and flowers. All thetools needed to build in Second Life are easily learnedfunctions of the Second Life client that is used to accessthe virtual world. Once these objects are created, theycan be stored by an avatar (or, more correctly, stored inLinden’s asset manager and associated with a specificavatar) in their personal inventory. Inventories can con-sist of many artifacts from Second Life: prims, objects,notecards, and clothing, just to name a few.

My Avatar Is Agile — Is Yours? Using Scrum to ManageProjects in Virtual World Developmentby Matthew Ganis and David McNeill

3©2008 Cutter Information LLC REPRINT

SEE AND BE SEEN

Figure 1 — A virtual world example.

©2008 Cutter Information LLC4

Building in Second Life requires (at least) three skills:prim manipulation (building), texturing, and scripting.Texturing is simply the process of putting a pictureor pattern on one or more surfaces of a prim, whichcan also have other attributes such as color, tint, andshine. While building can be a very daunting and time-consuming task, once a programmer has a decent graspof the tools, it is simply a matter of applying these tech-niques and creating more complex shapes, in a trueincremental fashion.

THE WEB VS. SECOND LIFE

There are many parallels between the World Wide Weband Second Life. Content on the Web comes in the formof HTML pages, which are two-dimensional entitieswith graphics and rich media content, such as Flash.Second Life consists of three-dimensional objects (forexample, buildings and chairs) that can have a varietyof attributes and behaviors. Some objects can displaystreaming media (audio and visual), while others caninclude scripts, which allow programmatic control ofthe objects.

One of the interesting things about Second Life is thatwhenever you are “in-world,” others can see you andinteract with you. In a sense, on traditional Web pages,you are alone. In contrast, inside a virtual world youcan easily see who is there with you, viewing exactlythe same thing you do. For example, when I read aspecific blog entry on a Web page, I have no idea whoelse may be reading it. In Second Life (or anotherMMORPG4), however, the sense of “presence” allowsme to interact immediately with other Internet userswho may be viewing the exact same content as I. Thisdifference introduces a dimension of real-time social lifeand collaboration to the Internet in a way that, up tonow, traditional Web pages have not.

IBM’S VIRTUAL BUSINESS CENTER

Through the mid-1990s, the geographic branch officewas the primary and ultimate coverage model for all lev-els of business transactions at IBM. Over time, that phys-ical model became unaffordable, and those “real world”business centers began to disappear. The challenge forIBM at the time was to build relationships in a worldwith an increasingly distributed workforce and clientbase. One solution is the IBM Virtual Business Center, avirtual world representation of IBM’s original real-worldbranch offices (albeit in a futuristic form resembling thearchitecture in the cartoon The Jetsons). This “virtualbranch office” also serves as the 3D-interactive entry

point for customers to engage with IBM across all of theother 17-plus IBM “islands” (or “regions,” in Second Lifeparlance).

IBM envisions the Virtual Business Center as a placewhere clients, prospective clients, and others can cometo learn about IBM and its offerings as well as to evalu-ate and get support for various software and hardwareproducts. The benefits we hope to see are an integrationof the 3D virtual world with the Web and with real IBMpeople. The Virtual Business Center is a clear entrypoint for clients to engage with IBM in Second Life.In the building of this Second Life presence, weemployed Scrum to manage the development, design,and deployment of all of the 3D artifacts in our SecondLife regions. The goal was to deliver a working virtualworld experience that incorporates several locations(buildings and structures) that provide a wide variety ofcontent (information) to our visitors. In addition to thebuildings and structures, the required content objectsincluded video players, notecard distributors, staticsigns, teleporters, and many other objects.

PROJECT ISSUES

Our team was highly distributed, with developerslocated in India, Brazil, Canada, and the US. The USteam was itself widely dispersed across various loca-tions, such as Raleigh, North Carolina; WestchesterCounty, New York; and New York City. As a result,we had several issues to deal with; namely:

Developing and maintaining the 3D interactionmodel

Conveying a shared visualization for objects

Overcoming communication difficulties (due to physical and cultural limitations)

Developing a clear plan of attack and schedulingwork tasks for the development team

3D Interaction Model Concerns

The 3D Interaction Model (or simply “interactionmodel”), is the organized collection of “areas,” objects,navigation elements, and other visual cues that definethe basics of the intended immersive 3D experience fora user. Developing the interaction model is a criticalstep for organizing the scope of a 3D development proj-ect and arriving at a team understanding of the comple-tion criteria for the project. Conceptually, the interactionmodel resembles the work products (wireframes anddesign composites) of the information architecture disci-pline in the 2D Web world. The differences between the

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2D world and the 3D world are primarily the consid-erations that are thrust upon and must be taken intoaccount by the project team. These considerationsinclude, but are not limited to:

Line-of-sight and visual perception

Visual interest (and disinterest) of elements in the 3D world

Integration of sound/voice with the visual experience

Inclusion of collaboration influencers and theobjects/elements that are intended to be sharedby multiple users

The most critical difference, and the one that creates themost issues, is that objects’ behaviors can be customizedin the 3D world in myriad ways. The end result of inter-action model development is a written expression of the“what” and a sense of the “how” of the intended 3Dexperience. A good interaction model will describe anexperience that strikes a balance on several fronts:

The experience is attractive and has visual interest,without overwhelming the user’s visual senses.

The experience is interactive and “fun,” withoutoffering the user a bewildering variety of choices asto how to engage the experience.

There is variety in navigational and conveyance choiceswithout creating the complexity of a roadmap or forc-ing a disorienting, confusing experience on the user.

The problem with the interaction model is that it is nec-essarily complex, especially with a 3D developmentproject of any significant scope. Moreover, it tends tobe organized in a hierarchical or network structure. Nomatter how well documented the interaction modelmight be, removing all degrees of uncertainty from it is,in practice, not possible with current tools or currentbest practices. Irrespective of the interaction model’sorganization, however, a Scrum-based approach can beused to reduce the uncertainty in it.

Shared Visualizations for Objects

Second Life creates some practical difficulties for 3Ddevelopment teams due to its lack of any useful importfunction for 3D objects created by “industry standard”3D modeling tools. This situation almost forces all devel-opment in Second Life, commercially a good thing forSecond Life, but not necessarily something that is in adevelopment organization’s best interests. 2D graphicstools can be and are used to give a builder the sense of anobject or set of objects, but the fact that this 2D work iseffectively “throwaway” is obviously less than optimal.

Team Communication

Compounding the basic communication problems ofour highly dispersed development team was the factthat none of the developers was well versed in SecondLife or the creation of 3D artifacts. This wasn’t a largehurdle to overcome, but it was one that we had to dealwith in a business plan that required us to launch ournew business center by a predetermined date.

Managing Work with Scrum

To manage and mitigate for these issues, we chose toemploy Scrum, an agile project management method,for this project. Scrum is an iterative and incrementalprocess for developing products or managing work. Intheory, it allows a team to produce a potentially ship-pable set of functions at the end of each iteration. InScrum, teams will self-organize, based on their strengthsand weaknesses, to perform the work at hand. Everyoneon the team creates the product, contributing whereverhelp is needed. Every day, every person on the team dis-cusses his or her own individual contributions and/orchallenges with the rest of the team. To facilitate this,Scrum instantiates a daily status exchange meetingcalled a “daily scrum.”

Scrum iterations, called “sprints,” are typically 30 daysin length. The goal at the end of each iteration is todeliver a working product. Because there is a workingproduct at the end of each iteration, it is possible torelease smaller changes more frequently, providing func-tionality to the end users sooner. By dividing work up inthis way, a team can deliver value over time, while mak-ing small changes or corrections as they move forward.

ANATOMY OF OUR SPRINTS

Due to our challenges with communication and geo-graphical dispersion, we chose to change the lengthof sprints to two weeks. Since the technology wasso new and the communication gaps so wide, theseshorter iterations allowed us to more closely monitorour team’s work.

Second Life doesn’t have the concept of a code reposi-tory that would allow multiple avatars (or developers)to “share” code. It does, however, permit ownership ofobjects and code. In Linden’s economy, ownership of anobject can occur when one avatar “sells” an object (for$0) to another; when an avatar purchases an object, itbecomes the new owner of that object. We use a singleavatar as the “owner” of our objects and code so we canhave a code archive of all objects created and deployedwithin our regions.

©2008 Cutter Information LLC6

Since Second Life is such a visual environment, we arevery particular about the placement of objects withinthe world, as constrained by the interaction model.These constraints, plus the additional constraintsimposed by our development and object managementpolicies, led us to a unique design for structuring andrunning our iterations.

Because we wanted to keep the development team work-ing on various objects and scripts, we chose to removethe “grunt” work of object inventory and placementfrom the developers. In doing so, we ended up stagger-ing our sprints so that at the end of each iteration, theScrumMaster can collect all of the new artifacts, organizethe inventory, and work with the customer on the visualaspects of object placement in the world. In the case ofsome iterations, where the scope being attempted is alarge-scale experience (such as an entire Second Liferegion), objects are developed and tested but notdeployed until a later iteration (see Figure 2).

By overlapping our sprints, we promote the notion thatdevelopers and graphic artists will keep a steady streamof work always flowing into the team. Deploymenttasks can then occur as new development in the nextsprint (see Figure 3). An alternative approach fordeploying objects is to develop enough inventory ofassociated and related objects (meaning tested objects)that a worthwhile chunk of the information model canbe deployed and then experience-tested. In practice,we have used both of these approaches.

Our development and planning process is typicallybroken down and spread across iterations. We addressissues or updates needed in our region based on ourinteraction model, which defines how avatars shouldinteract in our world and with our objects. The outcomeof the investigation with our model dictates the keyobjects that are needed and the context that they arerequired to operate within. Once the object is createdand validated (tested and approved for function andvisual appearance), it is placed (deployed) in the virtualworld and made available for use.

REPRINT6

Week 1: Preparation

Week 2: DevelopmentDesigning and

scripting… … …

Week 3: Development/

Acceptance… … …

Day 1 Day 2 Day 3 Day 4 Day 5

Prioritizerequirements

Review withcore team; get

and/orrefine sizings

Cross-teamreview

for scope/taskanalysis

Interface withexternal

organizations

Designing andscripting

Acceptance ofcompleted

requirements;communication

of changes;purchase object

Place new/changedobjects (change

managed);update interaction

model

Figure 2 — The anatomy of our iterations.

Iteration 1:

20 Aug – 7 SepScrumMaster

ScrumMaster/Development TeamIteration 2:

4 Sep – 21 Sep

Iteration 3:

17 Sep – 5 Oct

Iteration 4:

1 Oct – 19 Oct

Iteration 5:

15 Oct – 2 Nov

Iteration 6:

29 Oct – 16 Nov

Iteration 7:

12 Nov – 30 Nov

Figure 3 — Our overlapping sprints.

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USING ITERATIVE DEVELOPMENT TO HELP WITH EDUCATION

One of the other challenges we had to contend with, aswe noted above, was a lack of knowledge about usingthis new technology. Creating our objects in an iterativefashion allowed our developers to build their knowl-edge base and experience over time. For example, onerequirement we had was to deploy an object within oursales center that, when touched (the basic interactionwithin Second Life), would deliver a set of inventoryitems to our sales personnel. While this doesn’t seemlike such a daunting task, it could be challenging fora programmer unfamiliar with this new technology;therefore, we needed to “go slow.” This particularrequirement was easily broken down into the followingfive stories, which were delivered over two iterations:

1. Create an object that, when touched, delivers oneobject to an avatar. (The handling of the “touch”event is in a script that is embedded in the object.)

2. Change the object to deliver from the object’scontents a folder of objects.

3. Change the script to deliver the folder only if theavatar is in a specific group.

4. Develop an object to hold the embedded script.

5. Test and deploy the final object.

Rather than overwhelming our novice developers, wetook advantage of increments to not only deliver objectsincrementally, but to also build skills incrementally.

USE OF A SCRUM TO OVERCOME DISTANCE

Cutter Senior Consultant Alistair Cockburn has outlinedvarious methods of communication that developers willuse when working on a software project. Cockburn sug-gests that the most effective mode of communication isperson-to-person, especially when it is enhanced by ashared communication medium such as a whiteboard,flip chart, or index cards.5 As a team moves away fromthe optimal situation, they tend to experience a drop incommunication effectiveness.

Stand-up meetings, which are one of the core practicesin agile software development, facilitate communicationamongst the team members. But how do you performstand-up meetings effectively if the team members aredistributed across several geographies?

One of the nice things about working in a virtual worldis that despite any physical distances, when you arewith other avatars in-world, you’re meeting with themface-to-face (so to speak). By performing the 15-minute

daily Scrum in-world (see Figure 4), and supplementingit with a real-world conference call, we quickly clearedup communication problems owing to cultural differ-ences and helped to build camaraderie between teammembers, just as if we were all physically in the sameroom. We also used a fair number of temporary in-world objects — typically presentation boards withdesign elements and behavioral specifications depictedon them. With these, the team had ready-to-hand refer-ences, in situ in the virtual places we were using forbuilding. These objects were, in effect, the virtual worldanalogs for more traditional real-world developmentartifacts like whiteboards, flip charts, and so on.

Some teams have had trouble effectively producing aproduct without any face time between team members.6

When our team members work together, they are in thesame room or location with each other in the guise oftheir avatars. Thus, we have experienced minimal issuesdue to the lack of physical proximity between the mem-bers of our team.

PLANNING, NOW AND IN THE FUTURE

At present, all of our stories (or backlog items) are keptin an online tool called XPlanner.7 While this systemworks quite well for organizing our stories and trackingteam progress at the task level, it lacks the ability toprovide a detailed description of our objects and theirvarious characteristics. We are currently instituting link-ages to a wiki within XPlanner to better highlight someof the details that are required for such a visually chal-lenging environment (see Figure 5).

SCRUM AND SECOND LIFE: A MATCH MADE IN VIRTUAL HEAVEN

We have found that Scrum is very well suited for ourwork in Second Life. The incremental nature of themethod allows inexperienced developers to take theirtime and build their confidence levels, and this practice

Figure 4 — Our daily scrums take place in-world.

©2006 Cutter Information LLCREPRINT8

was critical for our newly forming team. We also foundthat we could exploit the iterative approach at themacro and micro work management levels, developingand iteratively refining both the intended experience (asrepresented in the interaction model) and its constituentobjects in an organized manner.

When working in a distributed environment, manywould-be agile teams report problems with some ofthe agile practices, such as the daily stand-up meeting.Because virtual worlds tend to be very social, we foundthat these problems were greatly minimized in theSecond Life environment as compared with a typicaldistributed team. Leveraging the virtual world environ-ment as much as we could, we used several meansto mitigate communication difficulties and culturaldifferences, thus making for an effective project team.

ENDNOTES1“Second Life: Economic Statistics.” Linden Lab, 15 March 2008(http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php).

2“Business Communicators of Second Life,” 8 December 2007(http://freshtakes.typepad.com/sl_communicators/2007/12/gartner-sees-vi.html).

3Wagner, Mitch. “Building in Second Life, With Links to Web Info.” InformationWeek blog, 24 April 2007 (www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/04/building_in_sec.html).

4A MMORPG is a “massively multiplayer online role-playinggame.”

5Cockburn, Alistair. Agile Software Development. Addison-WesleyProfessional, 2001.

6Frye, Colleen. “Making Agile Software Development Work forDistributed Teams.” SearchSoftwareQuality.com, 18 October2007 (http://searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid92_gci1277064,00.html).

7XPlanner (http://xplanner.org).

Matthew Ganis is a Senior Technical Staff Member in the ibm.comSite Architecture group at IBM in Hawthorne, New York, and a mem-ber of ibm.com’s Virtual Business Center team in Second Life. He has20-plus years of experience in various positions within the IT indus-try, ranging from new product development to management to soft-ware and networking architectures. Dr. Ganis holds a BS in computerscience, an MBA in information systems, an MSc in astronomy, anda PhD in computer science. He has authored or coauthored over 40papers across all of his fields of interest, including programming techniques/system administration, networking, agile software develop-ment processes, and even stellar evolution and radio astronomy. Hecan be reached as Astro Sabre in Second Life or at ganis@us.ibm.com.

David McNeill is a Certified Executive Program Manager in theibm.com User Engineering group at IBM. With 25-plus years ofexperience with IBM and having served in several IBM divisions invarious technical and management roles, Mr. McNeill is currentlythe executive program manager responsible for ibm.com’s VirtualBusiness Center in Second Life. His career experiences include keyroles in: developing and marketing IBM’s first-to-market object-oriented visual construction application development products;marketing, sales, and delivery of very large services contracts; estab-lishing IBM’s application management services initiatives; and pro-gram managing initiatives associated with ibm.com’s strategies tomake itself into a world-class Web-based route to market. Mr. McNeillis certified as a Project Management Professional and in IBM’sProject Management profession program, and he holds BS and MSdegrees in computer science from North Carolina State University.He can be reached as DBMc Smalls in Second Life or at dbmc@us.ibm.com.

ibm.com

SalesReception

BriefingCenter

InnovationCenter

Story x

Story y

XPlanner

Wiki

Virtual w

orld mapped

onto wiki pages

Additional visuals andinformation for the stories that relate to specific locations within the estate

Region

Figure 5 — Our evolving planning practices.

Cutter IT Journal

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The Cutter BusinessTechnology CouncilThe Cutter Business Technology Councilwas established by Cutter Consortium tohelp spot emerging trends in IT, digitaltechnology, and the marketplace. Itsmembers are IT specialists whose ideashave become important building blocks oftoday’s wide-band, digitally connected,global economy. This brain trust includes:

• Rob Austin• Tom DeMarco• Christine Davis• Lynne Ellyn• Jim Highsmith• Tim Lister• Lou Mazzucchelli• Ken Orr• Mark Seiden• Ed Yourdon