Monday, September 17, 2007

One Year Anniversary

Today was my one year anniversary in my new job as Senior Director running software engineering at Corbis. It’s been an interesting year. While we put out 34 releases of new software across a range of our IT systems and external facing systems like corbis.com with barely a handful of defects, the really interesting part of the job has been watching the cultural change and the growing maturity of whole IT organization. It’s amazing how a values driven organization can mature towards a self-governing culture enabled by transparency and high levels of trust and the results are greater productivity and exceptional quality.

After a year, I’m having more fun than ever. It’s fascinating working with a team as we gradually change from a traditional waterfall approach to IT projects and introduce a more collaborative form of working. There is a lot more work to be done and I’m looking forward to another year pushing the boundaries with enterprise agile and lean methods. Meanwhile, our kanban ideas are really catching on with over 130 members in the Yahoo! group and close to 300 messages already this month. We’re seeing some bigger companies like Yahoo! looking in to it and sharing their progress with other group members. It’s so energizing to see our ideas catching on both across our own company and externally. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Andeerson, Lean

Cutter IT Journal: Stop Negotiating, Start Collaborating

I have a new article published this month. Feels like my first heavyweight article for at least 18 months. It feels good to be back in the saddle writing again. Thanks to my friend Pollyanna Pixton of the APLN for the gentle nudge. I’m really pleased with how this article turned out. It was originally titled “Stop Negotiating and Get Naked!” but I backed off that risque title - having previously lived in the mid-West I’ve come to realize that culture varies a lot and it is easy to offend.

The article is a natural extension to my blog post inciting folks to Stop Estimating and is based on my more recent experience with kanban systems and implementing my Recipe For Success: focus on quality, reduce work-in-progress, balance demand against throughput, and prioritize. This new Cutter IT Journal article, Stop Negotiating and Start Collaborating takes a look at the more human aspects of implementing the recipe for success and how eliminating the hidden information inherent in negotiation helps to develop a high trust culture of collaboration. The effort expended in negotiation, contracts, verification, audit and litigation can be seen in Lean terms as unnecessary waste and by eliminating it, a more agile organization emerges that can produce more at reduced cost.

Read the whole paper…Technorati tag: Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Cutter, David+Anderson, Pollyanna+Pixton, APLN

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Corbis Launches Second Life Gallery

My employer just launched a gallery in the Second Life virtual game world. While much of what we do at the Corbis IT department is the usual grind of financial, HR and other back end system, we do get to innovate and implement cool stuff that show how media and creative services are evolving in the 21st Century.

Here is some of the press on the launch…

Corbis Opens Second Life Gallery<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /?>

Selling Stock
August 29, 2007
By Julia Dudnik Stern

http://www.selling-stock.com/?p=2083

Corbis has announced that it has opened a gallery in the three-dimensional virtual world of Second Life, the online game that has grown to more than 9 million residents since its birth in 2003.

The Insider: Corbis builds A virtual Art gallery in Second Life
Seattle Post Intelligencer
September 2, 2007

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/330048_theinsider03.html

Seattle stock image provider Corbis has opened a gallery in Second Life, an increasingly popular online virtual world.

Twa Corbis
Second Life Insider
August 30, 2007

By Akela Talamasca

http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/08/30/twa-corbis/

Corbis, the famed professional stock photography company, has opened up a gallery in SL, and for once, it’s not commerce-based.

Corbis get a Second Life
BAPLA (UK)
August 30, 2007

http://www.bapla.org/news/index.php?a=show&id=918&from=

Corbis announced that they will be setting up a virtual gallery space in Second Life. The space will showcase collections from Corbis Motion, Corbis Rights Services and the SnapVillage microstock collection as well as providing information on the Corbis Rights-clearing services. Technorati tag: Corbis, Second+Life

Monday, September 03, 2007

Lean Scales Differently than Agile

Corey Ladas posts his thoughts on how a kanban development team daily standup operates differently than a Scrum team standup and why it scales to a larger number of people and can still finish in 15 minutes (and most usually much less).

Corey and I have been talking about this phenomena for a while. The standup meetings on my team last 5 to 10 minutes typically but often involve 20 or more people. For example, our sustaining work processing change requests across any of our diverse IT systems attracts analysts, developers, testers, build engineers, project managers, functional managers and business owners. It’s common to see 20+ people at the standup at 9.45am every morning. On one of our major projects, as Corey mentions, up to 40 people attend the standup meeting because the kanban board is showing work-in-process that interests them or that they are directly responsible for. Despite these large numbers of attendees the meetings are over in as little as 10 minutes. How is that possible?

The main difference is that with a kanban system, the team enumerates over the work-in-process kanban cards, orchestrated by the functional manager leading the meeting. Most of the WIP doesn’t need comment. As Corey says, only the special cause variations, i.e. project issues, generally need comment. And when comments are needed only 1 or 2 people need speak. The whole team manages to keep up with what is going on by simply observing the kanban board and listening to the updates on issues blocking flow.

With one of our major projects, we are running feature squads (a slight variant on an FDD Feature Team or a Microsoft Feature Crew.) In a Scrum style process, each of these teams would hold there own scrum (daily standup) and would send a representative to the scrum of scrums to update the whole project. With our kanban system we are able to do all of this with just one sub-15 minute meeting with everyone present - a flat structure, no hierarchy, no additional overhead. Technorati tag: Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, David+Anderson, Corey+Ladas