Up at 5AM: The 5AM Solutions Blog

The key to agility is constant improvement. To have improvement there are two requirements: a desire for change, and an action taken to make that change. This makes a clean delineation into how the retrospective should be divided; look at the past and then look into the future. In the development process a team either adjusts and improves, or continues to see the same problems and limitations. 

Sometimes the "wisdom of the crowd" is what you need to solve a really hard problem on a budget. With cutbacks coming left and right in our recessionary world right now, science needs a little help from its friends - lots and lots of friends.

President Obama proclaimed this week (September 11 – 17, 2011) as Health Information Technology Week. The focus of the week is to educate people – physicians, policy-makers, researchers, and the healthcare community – about the value of health IT. The president encourages us to "learn more about the benefits of Health IT by visiting HealthIT.gov, take action to increase adoption and meaningful use of Health IT, and utilize the information Health IT provides to improve the quality, safety, and cost effectiveness of health care in the United States.” 

On August 24, 2011, the National Children’s Study (NCS) program office at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) held a special Research Day conference that was open to the public. As the study is very clearly linked to my occupational field in Health IT, I decided to attend to learn more about the NCS and why it is so important to the health and well-being of our future generations.

At 5AM, we use Scrum to manage our work. Scrum keeps the team highly committed and productive by making the best use of what we know now to guide the team toward developing solutions that will provide value today. It's great. What Scrum doesn’t do so well is deal with the “big picture” - At least, that’s how I felt when I first started using it.