My post on Overcoming Language Barriers facilitated some very nice sharing of resources. Executives and managers! You need to familiarize yourself with this information; you will benefit through improved understanding of what your IT projects should be doing for you:
1. Excellent discussion on Domain Driven development from Sensei at ActiveEngine’s Cool Stuff post. This is more than a software development discussion- it deals with how to attack problems from a value perspective as you develop “language” between technologists and users. I suggest reading the transcript and paying close attention to Eric Evans’ thoughts- great reading.
2. Great, and thankfully brief, agile …read more

Intelligent Enterprise article “The Seven Pillars of BI Success” closed with a success story where agile software development processes came into play. 1-800 Contacts, winner of 2006 TDWI Best Practice Award, first aligned their BI project with a call-center-incentive project. The agile software development approach fostered high value innovative ideas to allow monitoring and improvement of agent performance mainly by giving the agents a way to monitor themselves. A large part of the success was attributed to the agile approach to collaboration with users:
Before picture: “Business would shout, and IT would do a fire drill and throw something out there.”
After …read more

Margaret Rouse at IT Knowledge Exchange continues our conversation on PMOs. We started by talking about how a PMO relieves pain, then the PMO’s role in dealing with the dreaded mythical queue of projects, and now language barriers in agile software development projects .
My post on how previous experience with lean manufacturing might overcome some of the barriers in language and acceptance of non-intuitive concepts related to agile also comes to mind.
Here’s Margaret’s language issue followed by my response. Sensei at ActiveEngine! I expect you to get involved with this:
Margaret: I’m going to think more about how language remains a …read more

Here is a slightly edited conversation with ActiveEngine following his response to my post on using lean experience to justify agile software development. It may be that non-IT executives don’t need to know about agile processes- just that the IT department is doing a lot more collaborating, testing and verifying throughout the software development process than they used to. I’ve found that lean is clearly different in this regard- i.e., proof of lean process success plus understanding the process is necessary for most executives in a company pursuing lean. Here’s the discussion:
ActiveEngine: Test Driven Development is more of paradigm shift …read more

My discussion with agile software development project managers led to some great insights into overcoming barriers to agile transformation. I started by surmising that a company who had done lean manufacturing would be more likely to pursue agile software development. When asked why, I gave the example of “quality at the source” and compared it to the agile approach of test driven development (TDD).
Both approaches assess results closer to the creation (manufacture) of code (product). In manufacturing, the lean approach gives the operator power to assess quality and stop the entire process until the quality glitch is fixed. I grabbed …read more

A great article in Strategy+Business, “A Blueprint for Strategic Leadership”, concentrates on how to lead innovation. In it the authors emphasize that the best leaders pay a great deal of attention to the design of the elements around them. Seemingly basic, but powerful, things to do are:
1. Articulate purpose,
2. Create effective teams,
3. Prioritize and sequence initiatives, and
4. Redesign the organization to make execution easier.
Apart from revealing the importance of doing the right projects, the article is full of fascinating examples of the deployment of these principles by the best executives; two from the experiences of A.G. Lafley, chief executive of …read more

A Booz Allen Hamilton survey and report in Strategy+Business (register for free) found NO correlation existed between R&D spend and innovation. It turns out that higher innovation performers spent less but made sure that innovation projects aligned with corporate strategy and paid careful attention to customers. This idea that a company can spend less and innovate more makes sense. Throwing money at innovation processes that are not well organized and/or measured and not serving the customer doesn’t work.
Black and Decker revealed the two key factors related to their innovation success:
1. Strategy alignment- align innovation strategies to corporate strategy.
2. Customer focus- …read more

Sometimes you get unexpected insights. My post “What’s Harder? Project Management or Management” elicited a wonderfully simple “boxes” analogy from Ren Garcia at Accounting Solver. In it he said:
“In a standard hierarchical corporate organization, you have specializations through boxes (i.e., departments, divisions, sections, etc) identifying finance, marketing, production, human resources, etc. Frequently, the specializations become rigid over time and the boxes neglect to communicate with each other (The managers or heads of boxes are supposed to be doing this, but often neglect).
Consequently, integration of all the functions / tasks / responsibilities within the corporation becomes a difficult process. The entire …read more

 
Fascinating conversation with an executive of an agile software development firm about transformation projects as they compare to lean manufacturing initiatives. Lean transformations have settled into starting with training heavily laced with practical activities. The reason that this is so important is that the approach is NOT intuitive.
Lean requires a person to experience how the concepts can change and increase the value of a process, whether it be software development or manufacturing products. One of the most valuable exercises is the traditional lean manufacturing simulation consisting of 4-5 iterations of improvement to clearly reveal how each lean concept influences results. Many times …read more

A recent September 2007 Gartner study titled “Building Agile Manufacturing That Enables Transformation” made several great points:
1. Changing forces in market, customer expectations and technology demand more agility and quickness in business processes.
2.  Using a ”myths” leading to “misses” discussion they challenge people to look outside their environment for innovations saying that people and companies tend to “lock in” to solutions because of tradition and inability to search outside their four walls.
3. ”Chaos-tolerant” business processes are what is needed in the future. Using a technique called capable-to-promise as an example of chaos-tolerant business processes, they say that future technology will enable them.
Capable-to-promise is basically the ability to quickly …read more