All posts by Chris Sims

Scrum@Scale: An Overview of the Framework These days, most people know and understand Scrum as a framework that helps people, teams, and organizations generate increasing value over time by creating an environment that allows them to work on the right thing in the right away. At the individual team level, Scrum has demonstrated time and time again that it can help produce twice the work in half the time. While

“I think there’s going to be companies that shut down because of coronavirus and don’t open back up,” he said. “There’s going to be companies that make it to the end. Then there’s going to be companies that figure out how to expand and grow and are not looking at just surviving, but how can we come out ahead. Scrum training that we do prepares companies for that. So we

To our team members, including those of color. To our customers and clients, and to a community that is hurting, scared, and looking for a path forward: I want to be unequivocal. Sigao, its founders, and I, as CEO, stand in solidarity and fully support the movement for Black lives. Systems that marginalize human beings that are in the minority are against our core values, the core values of Scrum,

Welcome to AgileKit – an interconnected framework of Agile tools designed by agile coaches, scrum masters, and product owners to support Agile teams in product planning and construction. AgileKit is an internal project we’ve been developing over the past 2 months. While developing core concepts for the applications as a whole, we started to notice the same ideas pop up: Simple Easy Functional When it came time to Brand, we

This past weekend was a great reminder for me about why the Birmingham business community is so special. Kurt Cherry, an 18-year-old from Charlotte, North Carolina, may have been the biggest Alabama football fan who had never attended a game at Bryant-Denny Stadium. That all changed on homecoming weekend when UA partnered with Dream On 3 to give Kurt the trip of a lifetime. Kurt’s energy and enthusiasm are infectious,

Understanding your customers’ needs is critical for success, but getting there can be complex and time consuming. We’ve gotten to know McLeod Software, one of the largest software development companies in Birmingham, AL, as a coaching client. McLeod is a leading creator of transportation and trucking management software for carriers, brokers, 3PL providers, and shippers. Much of McLeod’s success comes from listening to their customers and providing software solutions for their problems.

I’m excited to share that a project we worked on, the TexasYouth2Adult Transition Tool, with BridgingApps is nearing launch. Texas Youth2Adult is a resource for young adults with special health care needs (and their families) as they transition from youth to adulthood. This is an important program that will help a number of families in Texas, and BridgingApps hopes it will eventually expand to other states. If you’re interested (or

Let’s start at the beginning: Why are we here?   We founded Sigao Studios in hopes of creating something bigger, and now that we’re growing rapidly (we’ve tripled in staff size just this year!), it’s more important than ever for us to remember the basics and think back to our purpose. Simply put, that purpose is “to create an environment that fosters relationships that allow people to grow and feel

I’m excited to announce that we have an amazing new Dynamics 365 client. We were contacted this last week from a representative of none other than Santa Claus himself. It seems that Old Saint Nick is a bit of a tech nerd and has really wanted to streamline his mail room floor operations. Recently Santa and Mrs. Claus came across WordPress and thought it would be a great platform for them to use to build a letter writing system to help more children to easily send letters to Santa. 

I’m excited to have the opportunity to speak at SQLSaturday #652 in Atlanta, GA on July 15, 2017. SQLSaturday #652 will be my fourth SQLSaturday to speak at, and I’m loving getting engaged with the SQL community through SQLSaturday and PASS (a not-for-profit organization that supports data professionals who use the Microsoft Data Platform).  SQLSaturday Atlanta is a large event with over 60 sessions and a host of wonderful speakers from all over. Topics will range from the administration and maintenance of SQL server to indexing and advanced T-SQL all the way to topics like mine, CosmosDB and NoSQL databases.

I’m excited to announce that I will be speaking in an upcoming webinar hosted by APN Consulting entitled “Build a Better Developer Team by Increasing Employee Engagement.” This employee engagement webinar is on July 7 at 1PM EDT and you can register by going to APN Consulting’s website. Registration is free and open to anyone interested in learning how to skyrocket your team’s performance.

In this post, I highlight the first Sigao Studios Academy video, a new YouTube offering from Sigao Studios. In this video, I summarize CosmosDB’s Graph API. CosmosDB uses Apache’s TinkerPop and its Gremlin language to add graph database functionality to its massively scalable data as a service offering. TinkerPop can be found in a host of other graph systems including Blazegraph, ChronoGraph, Hadoop Giraph and others. Its powerful graph traversal language, Gremlin, allows you to quickly traverse a database and derive information from the underlying data.