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