Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Agile+CMMI Conference Anyone?

In a similar vein to the Lean & Kanban 2009 conference I am thinking of pulling together an Agile & CMMI event. I really feel that a small focused event is needed to kickstart the Agile CMMI community and energize potential adopters.

After some initial market research via my Agile Management Yahoo! group and Hillel Glazer’s Agile CMMI LinkedIn group and Twitter, it looks like we are targeting early December or mid-January somewhere in Florida.

Please leave comments indicating which dates you would prefer, which location (a) Tampa, (b) Orlando, (c) Miami, and please recommend anyone you feel should be an invited speaker at such an event. Would you like 1.5 days or 2.5 days and how much of that time should be dedicated to open space?

[Current voting as of 6/17 - will try to update this daily for a while]

1. Tampa 60%
2. Orlando 20%
3. Miami 20%

Your comments and commitments to attend are vital if this event is to go ahead. Without sufficient interest we won’t run the event. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile, CMMI, SEI, Hillel+Glazer

Review on Agile Journal

This is a very thorough review by Brad Appleton. It was posted to Agile Journal several years ago but I don’t remember reading it. It accurately describes how the book synthesizes Don Reinertsen’s work with Eli Goldratt’s work and applies them to agile software development. Brad describes me as the Peter Drucker of software management. Quite a compliment!

Monday, May 18, 2009

More blogosphere buzz about Lean & Kanban

John Strickler has this thoughtful piece about Lean & Kanban and how he was introduced to Agile via Mary Poppendieck and Alan Shalloway following a background that including reading Factory Physics and learning Six Sigma. Nice to see someone with a background in reducing variation and an understanding of queuing theory talking about this stuff. So few Agile folks seem to understand what I mean when I say Kanban has an underlying model.

Meanwhile, Jeffrey Palermo picks up on my piece for Borland on why you should just say “No!” to an formal Agile transition initiative, Why Agile Transition Initiatives Might Fail!

Margaret Rouse highlights Kenji Hiranbe and I and observes that Kanban is a way to visualize bottleneck in a software development project.

Keith Henry’s been researching how to tailor agile to your organization. While he cites my work on Agile+CMMI he might enjoy my series for Borland more: Agile Transition Initiatives - Just Say No!; Creating an Agile Culture!

Jason Yip rediscovered one of my older gems identifying that liberal versus conservative culture is a bigger influence than high trust versus low trust in driving Agile adoption.

Pascal Van Cawenberghe asks “Why Estimate?” and cites several leading thinkers on this space including Amit Rathore, Joshua Kerievsky and me.

Richard Veryard tickled me with his wittily titled Restaurant at the End of the Universe over at his Demanding Change blog.

Defense Industry Daily was so impressed with my Top 10 rated talk at the SEPG conference that they suggest it’s time to Sharpen Yourself a Kanban System for Software Engineering. Yes indeed! :-D We already have a Kanban implementation with the Danish Department of Defense. I’m hoping for more traction in the defense sector in the next year. I really do hope that Kanban becomes the unifying force that brings the Agile world and the big software and system engineering firms together.

Hillel Glazer noted that my SEPG session on high maturity metrics and Agile was packed and locked out and no one left early. I wonder who I impressed? His notes from Wednesday tell the tale of the Agile + CMMI open space with a super picture of how many people we had at that session and then with another wonderful picture of one of my slides we get Hillel’s take on my Agility & High Maturity talk - naturally Kanban is at the heart of it but Hillel calls it correctly - set high maturity behavioral expectations early and choose metrics and data wisely. His Tuesday notes cover the CMMI + Agile: Why not embrace both talk given by Mike Konrad and supported by Hillel, Jeff Dalton and I.

The folks at Enthiosys (Luke Hohmann et al) have been thinking about Agile maturity models and comparing my work on Agile + CMMI with Bas Vodde and Jeff Sutherland’s Nokia Test.

Allan Kelly gives us a list of 10 Things to Know About Kanban Software Development. Very handy! Allan also helps us to Make Sense of Kanban.

Meanwhile, Boris Gloger describes my use of Kanban as “harmful for software development.” How many people actually doing it believe that? I wonder if Boris has ever tried it? Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, CMMI, Software+Engineering, Project+Management

SPaMCast - Agile Management

Here’s another recent podcast featuring me with Tom Cagley. His Software Process & Management (SPaM) cast attracts some stellar people. Click the main link and look at the company I’m keeping: Tim Lister; Lisa Crispin; Capers Jones; Esther Derby; and a personal favorite of mine Bill Phifer from EDS whom I got to know while I was with Microsoft. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineeing, Project+Management, CMMI

Friday, May 15, 2009

Creating an Agile Culture to Drive Organizational Change

The second of my series of articles for Borland’s Agile Transition Forum is available now, Creating an Agile Culture to Drive Organizational Change. This is the follow up to my somewhat controversial, Agile Transition Initiatives - Just Say No! article. Actually they are both part of series. The next two are already written and you can expect to see at least 4 more in the series appearing through June and July.

It’s occurred to me that in aggregate these articles would a great little book or pamphlet on enterprise scale agile transition. I’ve been greatly impressed with the work Wordclay did on the Lean & Kanban 2009 proceedings book, so I’ll have a discussion with them about publishing these in a book format. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Borland