Wednesday, May 28, 2008

APLN Summit: New Flyer

We now have a PDF advertising flyer for our APLN Leadership Summit in Seattle this coming July. Please help us with registrations by downloading the flyer and circulating it at your employer, or on your web page, or favorite discussion group or online community. Technorati tag: APLN, Agile, Lean, Leadership, Management

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

APLN Summit: Dale Christian Confirmed for CIO Panel

I happy to announce we landed a star CIO as the first participant in our CIO and technical leader panel. Dale Christian the CIO of Avanade will be strolling across the railway lines from Avanade HQ in the Seattle World Trade Center to join us for the afternoon panel session and cocktail reception following. Dale is an inspirational leader who was GM of the XIT unit at Microsoft when I assisted Dragos Dumitriu to make some dramatic changes there. [We published these results at the TOC-ICO in 2005.] Dale is the type of leader who gives his people space to innovate. He creates a culture that inspires quality and process improvement and I’m delighted to have him on our panel.

Be sure to sign up to talk to Dale directly. Register now! Technorati tag: Dale+Christian, Avanade, APLN, Agile, Lean, Leadership, Management, Project+Management

New Chief Process Scientist Role at Valtech

The news is finally out! I’ve been working on this deal since the day after I left Corbis. We put the ink on the contract back in April (on my birthday as it happened.) My firm, Modus Cooperandi and Valtech have entered a strategic partnership. Valtech will be offering our change management consulting services as part of their service catalog and I will be assuming the role as their Chief Process Scientist. My first official duty in this new role is to give the key note speech at the Agile Edge event in McLean, Virginia on Thursday this week (sign up now, it’s only $149.)

I’m very excited about the partnership with Valtech. I’m impressed with Brad Murphy‘s vision for the business and their new Software OnDemand business model for outsourcing and consulting. It’s a smart play that shows that Brad and his colleagues deeply understand Lean and want to offer true business agility to their clients through a pull based near/on-shore outsourcing model. Valtech are driving in the direction of a software engineering value chain - a vision I’ve held for several years. In my opinion its part of the natural maturity of our industry away from a hand-crafted neo-cottage industry that it is today. As a thought leader in software engineering process and practice I want to be part of the maturing of our industry in the 21st Century and see it grow and scale like other industries have over the past 300 years. I expect to see craft based labor-arbitrage outsource businesses become a thing of the past over the next decade as Lean Thinking and Software Factories (Software Product Lines) technology combine to deliver orders of magnitude improvement over craft-based development. Teaming up with Valtech helps me progress that vision and I (and the Modus Cooperandi team) look forward to being part of their success with Software OnDemand. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Valtech, Software+Engineering, Lean, Agile+Edge, Brad+Murphy, Modus+Cooperandi, Agile

Monday, May 19, 2008

Eric Landes on Kanban at the TFS SIG

Eric Landes is presenting his experiences of developing a kanban system for software engineering at Robert Bosch, at the Indianapolis TFS Special Interest Group on June 12th. If you live in the area of happen to be passing through Indianapolis in mid-June go check it out. Eric was one of the early adopters of kanban and has been a solid contributor to the community. Technorati tag: Team+Foundation+Server, TFS, VSTS, Visual+Studio, Software+Engineering, Kanban, Lean, Indianapolis

Kanban on TFS

Eric Landes at Robert Bosch has created a kanban process template for Team Foundation Server. So all you Microsoft .Net developers can feel the joy of kanban in the safety and comfort of your own office. Thanks Eric, for a nice community contribution. I’ll certainly be recommending this to Modus Cooperandi clients who develop in .Net.

I wanted to let folks know that I’ve posted a Kanban Process Template for Team Foundation Server on codeplex at (http://www.codeplex.com/KanbanTFS).  This is at an alpha release stage.  I’d appreciate any feedback so anyone using TFS, feel free to give it a test drive.  Soon there should be more reports and process guidance.  I’m hoping this can be used in conjunction with the TFS Sticky Buddy project. Technorati tag: Team+Foundation+Server, TFS, VSTS, Visual+Studio, Software+Engineering, Kanban, Lean