I wish there was a book entitled "How to Write Your First Letter as an Editor", unfortunately there is none that I am aware of, so please bear with me. As the new Editor-in-Chief of the Agile Journal, I would like to introduce myself and tell you a little about where we will be going with the Agile Journal over the next few months.

We created this set of questions to help corporate managers select Agile-experienced consultants and candidate employees for project work. Assembling a team of qualified Agile people is one thing, but the fact that some Agile practices and principles mean different things to different people makes it even harder to succeed in staffing your initiatives.

With so many corporate developers and IT teams beating a path to Scrum adoption there seems to be a lot of ScrumMaster training (both certified and otherwise) as well as coaching going on these days. Putting aside any worries about people receiving just enough training to be dangerous (e.g. 2-3 day ScrumMaster training is available from many sources) for moment, most of us think this trend towards Scrum and Agile Development is a very positive one indeed. That said, what concerns me the most is what I perceive to be an oversight of the need for product owner selection, investment and support.

With today's economic pressures coupled with a highly competitive business environment, management is aggressively pursuing ways to increase effectiveness and efficiencies at the same time as they strive to improve customer services. For these reasons many organizations are trying to integrate offshore development into the Agile projects. Offshore development has seen tremendous growth in recent years. The efficiencies gained by combining these two methods could be significant, but there are some pot-holes on the road to success.