Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Re-th!nk[ing IT strategy]

My Lean compadre Hal Macomber, one of the leading experts in Lean applied to construction project management and also a speaker at the forthcoming UK Lean Conference [sign up now to guarantee your place at the RSA in September] has beaten me to the punch reviewing Ric Merrifield‘s new book Re-th!nk. Hal’s written a really insightful, thoughtful well balanced review over at Reforming Project Management, go read it now!

The book’s subtitle “a business manifesto for cutting costs and boosting innovation” talks to the times we live in today. However, the book has been about a decade in the making and about 2 years in the writing. Behind the book is an analysis methodology that Microsoft brands as Motion and Dennis Stevens of Synaptus (one of Ric’s collaborators on the early work in the method) calls Capabilities Analysis.

The idea is simple! Companies get hung up on how they do things and try to optimize those while they ought to be asking what they do! For example, if someone in an office is sending a fax then we observe the how - sending a fax - and we may try to optimize that - more functions such as delayed send, automatic retry - or switch to a new how such as email. But if we asked the person sending a fax what they were doing they might tell us that the were confirming an order. If we think more about the what - confirming an order - then this can lead to useful insight, cost savings and innovative thinking.

Capabilities Analysis allows firms to analyze what they do in different divisions and to identify duplication. Instant cost saving! The results on this are astounding. Some firms have saved tens of millions with this one step alone. Meanwhile, the remaining capabilities can be analyzed with questions in a survey of stakeholders and classified into brackets such as stragetic/non-strategic, work class leader/competent/not competent and so forth. Combinations of these can then be used to make recommendations.

For example, if something is not strategic and we are not good at it then we should outsource it and buy the service instead. If we are good or world class at something but it is not strategic then we should spin it out and sell that service to our competitors. This will realize more shareholder value. If something is strategic but we are not good at it then we should invest in it.

Capabilities Analysis is a service that David J. Anderson & Associates is offering to our clients primarily through Dennis Stevens working as an associate.

I should mention that both Dennis and Ric are friends of mine. I’ve known Ric since I worked at Microsoft. Their third collaborator and co-author their 2008 Harvard Business Review article: The Next Revolution in Productivity, Jack Calhoun was an early fan of my book  Agile Management for Software Engineering and used to hand out copies to Microsoft executives. Pity none of them actually read it!

Microsoft use Motion as a method to analyze businesses and make strategic recommendations for investment in Service Oriented Architecture. They teach SOA by showing businesses how to re-engineer into a plug-n-play set of services. This makes SOA easier to implement and more aligned with the business strategy. In my observation Capabilities Analysis is powerful on its own but when tied to a SOA strategy it becomes the Next Revolution in IT Strategy!

Ric’s book is very readable. It’s full of stories of businesses he’s observed that have understood their what’s and haven’t been attached to their how’s. It’s an enjoyable read and/but very light on the theory of Capabilities Analysis. So if you like the message and think Capabilities Analysis is something that would benefit your business contact me and Dennis and I will be in touch. Technorati tag: Ric+Merrifield, Re-th!nk, Dennis+Stevens, Jack+Calhoun, Harvard+Business+Review, HBR, Management, Business

Monday, May 18, 2009

Unbound Developers Podcast

You can here a two part interview with me on CocoaCast Unbound Developers Show Episode 14 & 15. I talk about Lean and Kanban and the (at the time) upcoming Lean & Kanban Conference. Technorati tag: David+Anderson, Agile+Management, Agile, Lean, Kanban, Software+Engineeing, Project+Management

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

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 

Sunday, November 02, 2008

Personal Hedgehog Revisited

[First pusblished at moduscooperandi.com] More than 4 years ago, I riffed off Jim Collins idea of a corporate Hedgehog Concept, with this blog post on Personal Hedgehog Concept. It’s proven to be one of the most popular blog pages on AgileManagement.Net since I started it in August 2003.

The original post used the career of Cameron Barrett as the example. At the time, Cam was pursuing his passion for politics supporting the campaigns of Democratic candidates Wesley Clarke and John Kerry. However, recently I was challenged by Liza Raiser to explain what the Personal Hedgehog Concept means to me.

Actually, I’ve been working on my own hedgehog concept for most of the past 8 years.

First, what am I passionate about? For a long time I’ve been passionate about the underperformance of the software engineering profession and the low rate of success on software development projects. In fact, I was so disgusted with the profession I intended to quit almost 10 years ago. It was thanks to Jeff De Luca, and the original FDD project in Singapore that I regained my enthusiasm for the profession.

So what can I be one of the best in the World at? It’s taken a while, but I started down the path to publishing and what we now call blogging in 1999 at the behest of Peter Coad and Jeff De Luca. 4 years later, Peter was instrumental in assisting me with the publication of Agile Management for Software Engineering. I’ve continued to work at improving my ideas on software engineering process and management of knowledge workers and I’ve continued to work as a practitioner in regular jobs managing software engineers - until recently, when I formed David J Anderson & Associates.

So what changed? Well finally, I was able to realize my Hedgehog Concept. Finally, my skills with software engineering process and management and leadership of knowledge workers were in sufficient demand that they could drive my economic engine. Let’s be under no illusion! There is little to no premium in the market for good management in the software and IT industries. While great individual contributors often become independent contractors and earn high hourly rates, the same does not generally apply to managers. And while employers might be willing to pay a 10%-20% premium for a decent person, often a great manager find him/herself earning far less than the top technical people on the team. This is despite the hard economic evidence that it is management talent that generally constrains the performance of software engineering organizations.

So, for a long time, I’ve known that I had to break out of working as a manager for other people and start my own firm. The question was when? When would the timing be right? Finally in 2008, with a track record that includes successful projects and teams at Sprint, Motorola and Corbis and with a catalog of intellectual property that includes my contributions to FDD, the MSF for CMMI Process Improvement and most recently my contributions to Lean in software development and the innovations with the Kanban method, I finally have sufficient recognition and respect in the industry for it to drive my economic engine.

Along the way, I’ve also resolved my own inner conflicts about whether I had taken the correct career path. I’ve finally come to realize that management and leadership is my real strength and that other things I enjoy are merely hobbies, like painting, art and design, and my synthesis of those talents in user interface and interaction design. It was in fact user interface design that got me started down this road, with my uidesign.net site. Recognizing in myself what I could be World class at, from the things that I can be merely good at, has been the foundation of a new happiness in my life.

So here we are! I’m having the best fun at work since I quit the games industry in the late 1980s and I’m happier than perhaps I’ve been since leaving Singapore in 1999. Finding my Personal Hedgehog Concept has been at the root of that happiness. It’s been a long slog - more than 8 years. A journey of personal discovery. But ultimately it’s been worth it. And now I am excited about the future where I intend to continue innovating in leadership and management of knowledge workers and helping teams deliver superior economic performance.

Are you working on your Personal Hedgehog Concept?