Friday, April 24, 2009

Agile Transition Initiatives - Just Say No!

I’ve joined a bunch of my old friends who work for Borland to blog about Agile Transformation at enterprise scale. I have long ties with Borland through my connection to Peter Coad and Togethersoft. I’m delighted to be blogging with my old buddy from Singapore, Stephen Palmer (the Dev team manager on the original FDD project, co-author of A Practical Guide to Feature Driven Development, and guru at color modeling).

My first post is titled Agile Transition Initiatives : Just Say No! And is the first in a series where I’ll be talking about organizational maturity and capability along with the notion of a kaizen (continuous improvement) culture of innovation facilitated from the top, but led from the bottom.

These days Borland is a very different business to the old developer tools IDE business that they spun off as Code Gear. A few years ago they acquired Terraquest, a firm run by ex-SEI and CMM expert Bill Curtis. We became friends while I was working on MSF for CMMI Process Improvement at Microsoft. Bill provided me with guidance on CMMI Level 4 metrics and we talked a lot about Deming and whether “common cause systems” approach could be applied to knowledge work problems like software development.

Meanwhile, as Borland has evolved these past few years, their interests and mine have converged - on Enterprise Scale Agile Tranformation. It turns out that the folks there share my opinion that organizational maturity is a vital part of the mix to institutionalizing Agile development at scale and to creating an _agile_ business. While I’ve been advocating Agile+CMMI they’ve quietly been building traction around their own maturity model concept. I’ll be contributing 3 or 4 blog posts per quarter specifically focused on large scale Agile adoption and business agility over at the Agile Transformation Forum. Check it out! There is some really great community content there with some true experts writing it. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Borland, CMMI, Stephen+Palmer, Peter+Coad, Bill+Curtis 

XP2009: Kanban Tutorial

I’ll be teaching a 1 day class on Kanban at XP2009 in Sardinia in May. Full details are here. This is probably the cheapest and best way to get a 1-day immersion in Kanban in Europe this year. If you are attending XP2009 and have an interest in Kanban please sign up. The classes I teach commercially elsewhere in Europe cost more $$$ (ah hem, Euros, Pounds and Crowns ). Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, XP2009, Sardinia, Software+Engineering, Project+Management

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Best Lean Software Conference in 2009: Still time to attend

Now that the Dear John letters have gone out to the unsuccessful submissions for Agile 2009 in Chicago, I’m expecting a surge of last minute registrations for Lean & Kanban 2009 even though there are less than 2 weeks to go until the event in Miami. Why?

Well Agile 2009 was inundated with submissions, typically 6 times more submissions per stage than there was room to accept. Many Lean and Kanban sessions have been rejected, for example, Karl Scotland’s KFC (Kanban, Flow and Cadence) submission to the Coaching stage. Some potential speakers at the event would only be granted permission to attend if they got a speaking slot. With a rejection in hand they now know that attending in Chicago is unlikely.

Meanwhile, there is an audience that really cares about Lean and Kanban. Even though the program isn’t published, the word is getting out. People are beginning to realize that there will be more and better Lean and Kanban content at the Lean & Kanban 2009 conference than the Agile 2009 conference. The economy of scale argument that suggests Agile is better value doesn’t hold up for these people. Attending Lean & Kanban 2009 will cost approximately half what it will cost to attend Agile 2009 as an attendee.

I’ve already been contacted by one rejected Agile 2009 submitter who now realizes that her interests lie in Lean and Kanban and she wants to make a last minute switch and come to Miami. I’ve also seen a small boost in registration this morning.

Meanwhile, if you do want to come along, the hotel is honoring the group booking rate even though our room block is now sold out. Registration for the full event is only $800 and a single day is available for as little as $295. So don’t miss out. Don’t miss _the_ best Lean software development conference to be held in 2009. Register now and make your travel plans to be in Miami for May 6th-8th! Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

L&K2009 Highlight:s Corey Ladas

At the Lean & Kanban 2009 Conference in Miami May 6-8. Corey Ladas will present his Scrumban approach to evolving Agile teams . Corey will be presenting on May 6th Lean Day at the conference.

Scrumban: Lean Thinking for Agile Process Evolution

The popularity of the Scrum method of Agile project management is largely due to its ease of adoption. In Lean terms, Scrum organizes product development resources into workcells and imposes constraints on batch transfers of work requests, while leaving other concerns to complementary methods. The Scrumban method builds on these simple Scrum practices in order to introduce pull, flow, standard work, throughput metrics, and continuous improvement to the Scrum framework, while also reducing the overhead associated with planning batch transfers. Scrumban aims to reduce cycle time for new feature development, and establish a kernel of flow which can expand along the length of the product development value stream. Scrumban breaks its practices into a sequence of evolutionary enhancements, so that teams can improve their processes according to their needs and capability. Scrumban allows new teams to start with Scrum as a simple starting point for Lean development, or it allows existing Agile teams to improve their processes by making Lean methods more easily available.

Bio

Corey Ladas has been an enthusiastic student of software engineering methodology since the early 1990’s. Encouraged by the cross-disciplinary advancements of the Design Patterns movement and the eclectic approach of Steve McConnell’s Rapid Development, Corey went off in search of unconventional inspiration from the worlds of systems engineering, industrial engineering, and product development. Lean Thinking is one of Corey’s favorite discoveries from that process, and he has been experimenting with Lean methods in software development since the early 2000’s. Corey edits a popular Lean software development blog http://www.LeanSoftwareEngineering.com, and provides consulting and coaching services through http://www.ModusCooperandi.com. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, kanban, Corey Ladas

L&K2009 Highlights:

I’m been remiss highlighting content at the Lean & Kanban 2009 Conference in Miami May 6-8. So I’m working my way through the program this time with James Sutton, co-author of Lean Software Strategies. James is from Lockhead-Martina and will be presenting on May 6th Lean Day at the conference.

Let Lean be Lean, Agile be Agile, and Ever the Twain shall Meet

Software is the last large industry to explore Lean Production. To date, most of our Lean experiments have been based on some form of Agile Development. Agile is a great improvement over traditional approaches for many domains. Applying Lean ideas to Agile practices has proven helpful to both technique and theory.

Nevertheless, applying Lean to Agile carries us only so far. Cognitive psychology says our brains filter out anything that falls outside our current mental models of reality. In other words, we miss seeing things rushing by our car window, if we put on colored glasses before taking the first look outside. Unsurprisingly, Lean seen through Agile-shaded lenses looks remarkably like…Agile. Might we see some new things if we grasped our mental models by their rims, lifted them off our faces, and took a fresh look? Large productivity and quality gains on Lean projects where Agile has been ruled out by external factors (e.g., large safety-critical/military) confirm the answer is “yes.”

In this talk we will first look at what the five Lean principles mean in Software. Then we will briefly discuss how combining Lean and Agile can yield a kind of “hybrid vigor” stronger than either alone.

Bio

James Sutton applies systems-engineering and Lean methods with a business sensibility to software systems development. This has consistently improved productivity and quality by several hundred percent on projects ranging from a few million U.S. dollars to over a billion. In 2007 his book with Peter Middleton, “Lean Software Strategies,” explained this approach and won the Shingo Prize, which Business Week Magazine calls “the Nobel Prize of Manufacturing.” James is a Principal Systems Engineer at Lockheed-Martin Aeronautics Company, and holds the Certified Professional Systems Engineer (CSEP) certification with the INCOSE (International Council On Systems Engineering) organization, along with certifications in Lean, QFD, TRIZ, and negotiation. He is also a keynote speaker (AdaUK London and Lean-Agile Paris in early 2009), and has spoken and published for numerous other conferences. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, kanban, James+Sutton