Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Mon Nov 3rd - Bay Area APLN

I’m going to reprising my key note from Brazil at the Bay Area APLN meeting in San Francisco on Monday night November 3rd. I hear that RSVPs have been strong already. If you’d like to come along, details are here. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, agile+management, APLN

Kanban Flow and Cadence

Karl Scotland has a good introductory article on how to do kanban for software engineering. Karl likes to use the catchy acronym KFC - Kanban, Flow & Cadence. Another useful addition to the body of knowledge on kanban. Thanks Karl! Technorati tag: David+Anderson, agile+management, Kanban, Karl+Scotland, Lean, Software+Engineering, Project+Management

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Achieving Success with Agile Management

Here is my key note speech from Falando em Agile 2008 in Sao Paulo this week.

[Download Achieving Success with Agile Management in PDF]

I need to thank Barry Boehm, at USC for inadvertently giving me the inspiration for this speech. The first half of it is based on the lecture I gave to his masters degree class last Wednesday. I had to find a suitable level for the Brazilian audience. The key note I’ve prepared for closing the Agile Practices event in Orlando next month wasn’t the right level. Also opening a conference and closing it down are two different problem statements. So I had to write a new one. And somehow I stumbled on it when Barry asked me to lecture on “managing for quality with agile methods.” That was the inspiration, so I wrote a speech that describes how to manage to achieve my Recipe for Success. The first statement of which is “focus on quality.” Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Falando+Agile, Agile+Sao+Paulo, Agile+Brasil, Barry+Boehm, Software+Engineering, Management

Zen class in Sao Paulo

Here are a few pictures from my 2 day Zen of Agile Management class in Sao Paulo this week. I’d like to thank Adail Muniz Retamal of Heptagon for organizing the event and hosting me in Sao Paulo. The class was a huge success and I hope to be back in 2009 teaching it again and expanding the offering to include Agile+CMMI and FDD+Color Modeling. If you are interested in attending these classes in Brazil please get in touch or contact Adail directly.

Explaining advanced iteration estimation and planning by showing how to incorporate the velocity of the bottleneck, and its spread of variation, the anticipated waste as transaction and coordination costs against the iteration, and insuring against external (special cause) variations by buffering the schedule. This technique for estimating is both quick, as it’s based on historical data, and compatible with high levels of organizational maturity that require predictable (low variability) and quantitative management. It’s good all this material was included as the participants included folks from CMMI level 5 organizations.

The class breaks out into four teams for the exercises. Here they are trying to imagine how to destroy trust in an organization. We do this exercise to help them reflect on angti-patterns that exist in our organizations. Not so that they go home and implement it. :-D

And after a long tiring 2 days, it’s 6.30pm on Wednesday and time to celebrate and decant to a local hostelry for some chopp and pastel.

I’d like to thank everyone for coming. I really enjoy teaching this class and you it wouldn’t be the same without each and every one of you. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, agile+management, agile+CMMI, agile+brasil, Adail+Retamal, Heptagon, agile+Sao+Paulo

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Practical article on implementing kanban

Eric Landes of Robert Bosch, one of the earliest adopters of kanban, and an enthusiastic member of the kanban Yahoo! group, has a pragmatic article on implementing kanban for software maintenance published at developer.com.

“But how will limiting our work to one item at a time increase our productivity?” Tristin asked. Jake replied, “That is a great question, Tristin. I believe that the multitasking of requests that we currently have is not an efficient way to work. A blog post I read from Johanna Rothman mentions the evil of multitasking and how it is the root cause in reducing an organization’s throughput. We want to focus on the right things. I believe that focusing on work until it’s completed should increase quality and eliminate the waste encountered when switching between tasks.”

Congratulations Eric!Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Eric+Landes,Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineering