Monday, August 25, 2008

Would the real Enterprise 2.0 please standup?

Jim Benson of Modus Cooperandi starts to lay out our vision for the future of the enterprise and management in the 21st Century over at Social Computing Magazine (how quaint). Technorati tag: Jim+Benson, Modus+Cooperandi, Social+Media, Management

Kanban at Xclaim

Overnight, Dave Laribee drove a lot of new traffic to the Kanbandev Yahoo! group with this post about his kanban implementation at Xclaim. Seems Dave has been carefully reading Corey‘s posts on implementing kanban. Dave’s implementation looks quite sophisticated. Technorati tag: Agile+Management, Lean, Kanban, Corey+Ladas, Software+Engineering, Project+Management, Dave+Laribee

Agile Conference in Sao Paulo

I’m giving the key note speech at the Speaking of Agile event in Sao Paulo this October. I’m also giving a 2 day Zen of Agile Management tutorial prior to the event. If you are a follower of agile in Brasil, I hope to see you there. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile+Brazil, Sao+Paulo, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering, Project+Management

Friday, August 22, 2008

Kanban Training in Seattle

Modus Cooperandi (my firm) will be offering regular kanban training classes starting in September. These classes are open to any participants. Initially, they’ll be held locally in Seattle just a few blocks from our office. We’re looking to take the classes to other locations in the USA and UK later this year and next year. You can sign up to learn kanban from Corey Ladas here. Technorati tag: Modus+Cooperandi, David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Lean, Kanban, Corey+Ladas, Software+Engineering, Project+Management

Monday, August 11, 2008

Agile 2008 - Future Directions for Agile

There has been some demand for me to publish my slides from Agile 2008 in a permanent location for people to reference. This was intended to be the library reference page on the moduscooperandi.com site but somehow that never happened. I am going to post a bunch of 2008 material here on agilemanagement.net. I’m going to back date the “posted” date so that the papers/presentations appear in cronological order.

Agile 2008 - main stage - Future Directions for Agile: Principles, practices and community. [Downoad in PDF 12MB] Watch the video on InfoQ and read some of the attendee feedback.

This talk was aimed at the agile community - the Agile Alliance members. The message is simple. We need to be open-minded and embrace change in our own practices and thinking or we face the possibilty of being marginalized by the next generation of advances in our industry and profession. It seems silly to say it now but “agile” could become the “old way” and viewed in future the way we view 1990’s big process, CASE tools and SDLC/Waterfall method today.

I underscore what I believe agile is truly about, compare with the American definition of Lean, and talk about future trends the biggest driver of which is the need for enterprise scale adoption. I make the observation that I believe that enterprise scale adoption requires organizational maturity as a necessary condition and that there is an existing model for organizational maturity with 20 years or iterative development behind it - the CMMI. I then go on to look at future trends like kanban, real option theory, software factories and DSLs and suggest that we need to be ready as a community to embrace ideas from these fields and to recognize them as agile based on underlying principles and a model for agility, rather than by comparing practices.

I conclude by suggesting that the Agile Alliance needs to provide an institution home for evolving an underlying model and pattern language for agility and that a program with the Agile Alliance is required to do this. The evolution of our understanding of agility and agile development methods has to based on a fundemental understanding of WHY agile is a better way to do things. So that when new ideas come along we have a way of testing them for alignment with our ideas and the underlying need for agile methods. If someone comes along with an agile approach to software factory usage and re-use - will we let them in to the conference to present? are we open-minded enough to see agility in other practices and technologies? Technorati tag: Agile+2008, David+Anderson, Software+Engineering, CMMI, Lean