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Our Communications Manager, Tammy recorded this video at the launch of the first ethanol-powered bus in South Africa on the 12 October, which will reduce carbon emissions. MiX Telematics and Scania tested the exhaust fumes on a white handkerchief in the video below.
What are you doing to reduce your carbon footprint?
This originally appeared on Sam’s blog, Inevitable
We are embarking on a journey… as with most journeys there is excitement, nervousness and a pinch of fear We are going to use Kanban for our support process. I’m going to blog about the journey – each leg promises to be exciting and full of lessons
“To get through the hardest journey we need take only one step at a time, but we must keep on stepping” – Chinese Proverb
The current suppport process is not working and we need something else. Kanban was explained briefly and those present are willing to give it a go. This is were I join the journey. I have been tasked with getting the process started – explaining kanban and assisting the support team to get going.
(I have previously blogged about Kanban and I have created a presentation explaining the basics. I also use Kanban for my personal items.)
First things first – we sat together and brain stormed over a whiteboard. “We” included me, the Customer Support Manager and the Senior Test Engineer. We had a basic understanding of the Kanban proposal, and an idea of the first “board”.
We then came up with any problem, issue, thought that we could think of and placed them on the white board. Some of these were easy to explain or deal with – so we chatted about them and moved them off the board.
We then moved onto the proposed board – looked at the limits, and looked at a definition of done for each column. Whilst doing this a bunch of new issue stickies were created – and went into the parking lot.
Each of us had some work to do and we decided to start the process in 4 days time. The developers will rotate through the support team, there will be 3 developers allocated at a time, for around 15 days (their sprint duration).
Day 1 – I created the board and had a meeting with all involved to explain what we are doing and how it will work. Our board is based on the kick-start example from Henrik Kniberg.
I gave a brief introduction on Kanban to the support team. We then played the Name Game to illustrate how limiting work in process works. No-one was opposed to the new process, but rather there were concerns about how it would affect individuals.
e.g: The 3 developers on the support team have no knowledge of Product X. Some valid points were raised:
We need to try the process and see what other concerns creep out. As with any process, frequent inspection and adaption will need to happen for this to be successful.
The Customer Support Manager will add stickies for his top 10 bugs. The Senior Test Engineer will document and train the necessary people in what needs to be done to meet the “Definition of Done” criteria. And in 3 days time we will have our first stand-up…
Sam wrote this on her blog, Inevitable
I’ll be the first to admit, up to mid last week, prior to the SA Scrum Gathering on the 2nd of September; Scrum was making no sense to me. Up to then, practicing Scrum was really frustrating. I’m not saying it is going to be smooth sailing from here on forward; I am sure we will still have several obstacles to overcome.
Different skill sets, legacy systems, inter-team dependencies, getting our heads around team self-management and how all of this should fit into the bigger picture of the company. And lastly, the big question, how to keep delivering value to business amidst all of this.
The single biggest revelation I had at the Scrum Gathering, was the following: Scrum is not efficient (at least not where we are at currently), however Scrum is effective.
So what does it mean? Well, our team has most definitely dropped the amount of tangible output we delivered in our 1st sprint compared to pre scrum days. By tangible output I mean “stuff” that we can show, i.e. “click-button-show-page-capture-data” “stuff”. This really got me down, where is the business value we are supposed to be delivering was the question I had more often than not driving home and some days, driving to work?
We have now established efficiency has dropped, what has happened to our time, what are we doing to be able to justify our pay check at the end of the month? We have become more effective in terms of what we knew all along we should have been delivering on previous development iterations. Unfortunately, this is the point where this post becomes fluffy, as we now are dealing with mostly intangible output.
We now have, for each piece of work, the following documentation:
Ok, so not a lot of it, but we have been able to create unit tests in our database code with proper sample data, and not just AAAAA and BBBB for data fields, but proper test data to satisfy our above scenarios, which in our environment is rather challenging.
A lot of effort wet into this, 1 because we are new to it, 2 because to test some stuff turns out to be pretty hard. This is to the nature of the environment and the project. We have however learned more of each of these aspects. Did I mention we are a brand spanking new team with sparse domain knowledge?
Not in the sense that we shared a keyboard or mouse or even half a screen or desk, however we did sit together to figure out the problem and create a solution everyone in the team is able support should it be required for each piece of work we committed to.
What makes the other guy tick, what she/he is good at, what does he/she sucks at and in which areas would she/he like to gain more knowledge? Help me help you so that we can be the best team we can be.
So let us look at the value proposition again. Yes, we are not currently delivering the same amount of tangibles, but we are forming a team with the common goal of delivering value to business. We are sharing our knowledge, improving our skills and putting down a knowledge base of all work we are doing. Therfore enabling people joining and/or taking over form us, making life easier for them.
So am I converted to scrum? Time will tell. The honest truth is I can see value, but I can also see this is going to be hard. We are definitely finding ourselves about to progress through the typical stages of Tuckman’s stages of group development – Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing (Adjourning and Transforming).
We will have to take it sprint by sprint.
Chris originally posted “Getting comfortable with SCRUM” on webEffects
Tomi Ahonen wrote an article on his blog in January 2007; “Putting 2.7 billion in context: Mobile phone users”. If you like statistics and history – it is a must read! In the article he pointed out that the even though the car is a 100 year old invention, there is only 800 million registered automobiles in the world, but in 2007 there were 2.7 Billion mobile phones in active use, a subscription for 40% of the planet’s population.
Although the Smartphone (a mobile phone with computing power and an operating system) is still a relatively new player in this market place, market penetration is steadily growing at an average of about 12% per quarter. This means that in a few years time every single person on the planet will have more processing power in his pocket, than the Apollo 11 that took Neil Armstrong to the moon.
Figure 1: Worldwide Smartphone Sales to end users in Q309 (Thousands of Units). Source: Gartner
Refer to Figure 1 for worldwide Smartphone sales to end-users in Q3 2009. From this figure it can be seen that 41 million Smartphones were shipped with Nokia having 39% of market share, RIM 20% and Apple 17% as the three biggest players.
The answer is pretty simple…it is a bus that we simply cannot miss. The same way that mobile phones has invaded the space of Personal Navigation Devices (e.g. Garmin), Cameras and Music Players (e.g. IPod), it will eventually invade the space of dedicated OBC devices like the FM3316 and the Mix1000.
The invasion of the smartphone is however is not doom and gloom for the telematics market. There will always be a market for dedicated and professional Fleet Management Systems; it only means that the consumer telematics market will grow exponentially. The availability of mobile phone applications will educate the consumer market about the possibilities and functionality usually only found in the telematics space. So we can see it as free marketing. Smartphones are the vehicle that will carry the telematics marketing message to the corners of the world.
What is the incentive today to buy a dedicated Personal Navigation Device (e.g.Garmin) if you can get the same functionality for free with your next mobile phone upgrade?
What is the incentive today to buy a dedicated music player (e.g. iPod) if you can get a “Comes with Music” phone? It has enough memory, free music and you can navigate, make calls and take videos and pictures!
Most of the manufacturers and operating systems like RIM (Blackberry), Google (Android), Apple (IPhone) and Nokia (Symbian) already have personal tracking applications. Nokia Sports Tracker won the Best Mobile Internet Service award in GSMA Global Mobile Awards 2009. With the Nokia Sports Tracker application you can track your workouts live on the web via your Smartphone.
To any FM-Web and XDrive users this must look eerily familiar – the only difference is that the unit is a person on a bicycle and not a vehicle on the highway!
Vodacom has a “Look4Me” service where you can track your family and phones for security. It has the ability to send panic signals via SMS and you can also define dangerous or no-go zones based on location.
Imagine an application that can monitor you blood pressure/ heart rate and count your steps and then automatically update your Discovery Vitality points. It is a lot more accurate and easier to perform a Body-IQ test in a Gym.
I imagine it won’t be long before we also have Smartphone applications that can interact with the CAN bus or your car via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi to show diagnostics or to record trip details.
And the best of it all is that when you get out of your vehicle, you can use the same device to SMS, Skype, Twitter, Facebook, email, browse the web, take pictures, find the nearest pub or make a business call.
MiX Telematics were one of the first players in the world to respond to the threads and opportunities offered by Smartphones by releasing Mix Mobile. MiX Telematics are on top of their game and they know how to swim in shark infested soup – so watch out! The game has just begun…
Ok. So now im a certified Product Owner.
The course was interesting and it’s always good to hear about other people’s pain adopting scrum and where possible giving concrete help.
It was awesome to spend the two days with people from MiX and watch them growing into their new position.
MiX Telematics attended the Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) training course at the BMW Pavilion in Cape Town led by Peter Hundermark from Scrum Sense.
It was an engaging two days with MiX being represented by Francois de Wet, Zoe Zenkins, Evangelos Gikas, Charles Tasker, Catherine Lewis, Tony Franco, and Izak Nel. During the course attendees became familiar with the role of a Product Owner and the best practises within Scrum.
Here is the second of our new adverts airing on South African television.
If only they fitted MiX Fleet Management Systems…
One of our new adverts currently airing on television in South Africa.
If only they fitted a Matrix Recovery System…
This post was originally published by Marc on Marc Forrest’s blog
Earlier today I wrote about the News24 iPad app being the first iPad app in South Africa, until I was alerted earlier today to the fact that it indeed wasn’t the first. The free MiX Mobile for iPad app (iTunes Link) from the guys and girls at MiX Telematics, was actually the first SA iPad app, which was published on the 30th June.
You may recall a couple of months ago, I received a X-Drive unit from the chaps at MiX. The X-Drive unit is a device you install in your car, which then allows you to track it on the either the website, an iPhone app, and now, and iPad app. The app is very cool, and is perfect for the iPad. The large screen now lets you get a much “wider” view of what is happening with your vehicle. You can view movement history of the car, which will show you stats such as distance traveled, top speed and time etc.
I have had my X-Drive unit for almost 8 months now, and the credits I got from the team when they sent it to me, are STILL available (413 left). Granted, I don’t do thousands of KM a week, but it sure has lasted long. What I do like is the ability to pull reports from the website, and I really hope to be able to see this type of functionality in both the iPad & iPhone app. It would also be great if one could see your balance & purchase more credits directly through the app.
The one thing thing I have to commend the guys (well actually mostly girls that I follow on Twitter) is the superb support & passion for their products. I had an issue a while back, and mailed @Cath_Lewis, who responded almost immediately and sorted my issue out. Even the CEO of the company is on Twitter and interacts with their users. Another #brandplus to them 
As my time draws to a close with the X-Drive, I am most definitely going to be topping up the credit, now that the iPad version is out. I am looking forward to using it more and more in the coming .
The use of MiX Telematics Fleet Manager solution to promote safe and fuel-efficient driving while enhancing the company’s environmental performance has helped secure the Eco-Fleet of the Year award for Loughborough-based ETS Distribution Limited at the 2010 Brake Fleet Safety Awards.
