This blog is somewhat of a response to a comment on my JIT posting.

I really like The Goal and think the Theory of Constraints (TOC) is brilliant.   I believe it can be applied to software development in two ways.  One is very valuable and the other must be dealt with with great care.  First, the one to be careful.

 read more »

 Scrum and Management: Planning and Focusing

Over the last several years, teams of developers have been trying Agile and getting success at their level. Now, management is getting engaged, both to figure out how to do this across divisions and the enterprise, as well as how to do a better job in less-than-simple situations that most enterprises face.

There have been notable examples where things did not go as well as expected when teams face complexity, where the fit is not exactly good, where maybe the initial approach taken was just too simplistic. It is management's job to help teams look at ways to improve.

This is why at conferences, we are encountering more and more mid-level managers. And they are asking very different sorts of questions than technical, development teams ask. This is stimulating and exciting. Clearly, Agile is beginning to enter the mainstream as a better way to manage software product development.

In this podcast, we will touch on two topics Alan that are concerns for management: Release Planning and Focus.  read more »

Michael Kennedy is a leading expert on Lean and Product Development. He is the author of Product Development for the Lean Enterprise: Why Toyota's System Is Four Times More Productive and How You Can Implement It, a book you definitely want on your bookshelf if you are interested in Lean Product Development.

 read more »

Enterprise Agility

Often, organizations invite us in to help them think about how to bring Agile into their development practices. The initial focus is often at the local team level. Our experience is that this is not the best place to start. Instead, we prefer to look for pain points that the organization is feeling in their development work, and we talk with local teams to get indicators of these points.

• What is stopping you from delivering the value to customers that you feel you should?
• What opportunities do you see and what waste is there?

We can predict some of the answers depending on whether it is an IT organization or a product organization. IT organizations tend to have people working on more than one project at a time whereas in product organizations, people usually focus on one project. This means that IT organizations often have less connection to the business and have more contention for resources. These are all opportunities for improvement that may or may not involve changes at the local team level.

Enterprise Agility, Systems Thinking

“Enterprise Agility” focuses on helping the overall development organization be more able to respond to the needs of the business. It starts by looking at what needs to be done and then on how to do it. Probably, this will involve Agile at the local team level, but that might not be the best place to start.  read more »

I am reading Creating A Lean Culture: Tools To Sustain Lean Conversions by David Mann. Fantastic book. Here is a quote that has helped me quite a bit already:

Annual reports proudly refer to company culture as an invaluable
asset, and so on.

Should a company target its culture in its efforts to transform its
production process and all the positions - high and low - associated
with it? It is tempting to answer: Yes! But, that would be a mistake.
 read more »

Alan Shalloway has started a regular series of webinars on Lean and Agile topics. The recordings of these webinars are available to registered users of the www.netobjectives.com website in the Resources Page for 30-days and to students and customers after that.

Here are some webinar recordings on these topics:

 read more »

What do I mean by a silver person? Well, that's the Scrum Alliance version of a silver bullet.

Net Objectives is one of the biggest Scrum training providers in the world. We have one trainer who estimates he's trained 350 people at one company in Scrum over the last couple of years. None of this training is ScrumMaster Certification training, however. Why? Because why would a company need 350 ScrumMasters? They need 350 Scrum team members. Doing CSM training for all of them is comparable to sending all team members to PM training. Kind of like a football team. Do you send everyone to a school to teach everyone how to coach? Or do you send them to a school where they all learn how to play football? Tobias Mayer, a former CST, writes about this in his blog entry as well "The Problem With CSM Courses".

 read more »

Know Thy Audience - Part 2

Happy Cinco de Mayo 2007!

I will be doing a couple of shows with Alan Chedalawada, the Chief Operating Officer and manager of the coaching practice at Net Objectives. He is a gifted coach who connects with senior management as good as anyone I have seen. He knows how to get things moving.  read more »

Net Objectives is a partner of VersionOne and we use their product internally. In the past I have personally recommended VersionOne as a tool provider without hesitation. In my opinion, and in the opinion of our company as a whole, VersionOne was the best agile management tool available.

Now that we have that out of the way, let me say that VersionOne just upped the ante in the tool space with their new Taskboard view.  read more »

I just completed our first public offering of our Agile Estimation and Analysis for Developers and Product Champions and had some interesting insights. As in all of our lean-agile courses, I talk about the structure within which the teams work. This is very often as important as the way the teams work. For example, most companies (especially IT ones) have people working on too many projects at once. This causes thrashing to occur at both the individual level.

If we can improve the blend/number of projects being worked on we can markedly improve the performance of the team.

 read more »