• A Django site. •
• •
June 1, 2007

Brad Appleton
Brad Appleton's ACME Blog is about »
» Agile CMMI and Dancing Elephants

[updated June 1, 2007]

CMMI on the surface is definitely not very inviting to Agile. CMMI can be done in an agile fashion however. If CMMI is something you have a need for, then for secrets of how to do it "Agile-style", and details of success stories and lessons learned, take a look at the following links:


Also see "Integrating Agile Methods", and "Teaching the Elephant to Dance: Agility Meets Systems of Systems Engineering and Acquisition" (and others) from the CSE 2005 Annual Research Review.

by Brad Appleton at 3:51 PM under agile , lean , links , management
May 8, 2007

Brad Appleton
Brad Appleton's ACME Blog is about »
» Lean Software Development Resources

[last update: 27-April-2007]

For a colleague at work, I compiled a list of resources covering Lean principles & practices, their integration with Six Sigma and/or Agile development methods, and the application of Lean to software development. I thought others might find it useful, so here it is ...

Books:

Presentations:

Articles/Papers:

Websites / Blogs:

by Brad Appleton at 9:19 AM under agile , books , lean , links , management
November 12, 2006

Brad Appleton
Brad Appleton's ACME Blog is about »
» Scaling Agility: Agile Program Management

Over the past months I've come across a bunch of good links & papers on the topic of "Going Agile" at the program-level:

Michele Sliger (of Rally Software Development) has several good articles and presentations on Relating PMBOK Practices to Agile Practices


On using Agile methods in organizations with a stage/gate approach to program management, see some of Per Runeson's work in this area:
Murray Cantor has some good papers on Governance and Variance as it applies to Agility:
Some other papers & resources:

Those interested in some advanced agile planning concepts should look at Jeff Sutherland's paper on Scrum II - The Future of Scrum: Parallel Pipelining of Sprints in Complex Projects (and the presentation slides that go with it)

There are several REALLY GOOD whitepapers on Adopting & Scaling Agile at Rally's Agile Knowledge Portal, including the following in particular:

There's gotta be some other good stuff out there and Agile Portfolio, Program and Multi-Project Management! If you know of any - please add a comment and hyperlink or URL!

by Brad Appleton at 8:28 AM under agile , links , management , project-mgmt , xp
November 7, 2006

Brad Appleton
Brad Appleton's ACME Blog is about »
» Scaling Agility: Distributed Agile Development

Current issues of IEEE Software, CACM, and ACM Queue have articles related to agile distributed development and release management ...

The Sept/Oct 2006 issue of IEEE Software is about Global Software Development. It has several Agile-related articles (like A Practical Management and Engineering Approach to Offshore Collaboration)

This months CACM theme is "Flexible and Distributed Software Processes" with articles on distributed agile development (which are currently available online), including:


ACM Queue an article on Agile/Iterative Release Management entitled Breaking the Major Release Habit.

Other resources on Distributed Agile Development:

Also, although it's not specific to Agility, the book Software without Borders appears to have some good reviews by several folks who are well-respected in the Agile community (also check out the online references section of the book.

by Brad Appleton at 9:42 AM under agile , links , management , project-mgmt , xp
October 16, 2006

Brad Appleton
Brad Appleton's ACME Blog is about »
» Scaling Agility: Summary of Resources

I published a bunch of entries with numerous resources on different aspects of Scaling Agility. I wrote most of them several days apart but many of them got "pushed out" (published) together in sudden bursts. Here they are again:


Feel free to post a comment with other links are anything you feel warrants a new category (e.g., melding Agile with any of Lean, TOC, or Six Sigma)

by Brad Appleton at 3:22 PM under agile , links , management , xp
» Lean view of Deming's 14 Points for Management.

There has been a really great discussion thread on the Lean Development YahooGroup on the subject of "How do I find bottlenecks?"

I particularly liked a reply by Alan Shalloway that linked things back to W. Edwards Deming's 14 points for management from his Theory/System of Profound Knowledge. Allan's translation has a bit of a "Lean" slant to it, and doesn't explicitly mention eliminating/reducing variation quite so much. Here is how he summarized it:


Re respect for people, the best place to start, IMHO, is Deming. Here are his fourteen points (Chapter 2 of Out of the Crisis, by W. Edwards Deming, MIT Press, 2000; originally published in 1982.):
  1. The world has changed and managers need to adopt a new way of thinking. Delays, mistakes, defective workmanship and poor service are longer acceptable.

  2. Quit depending on inspection to find defects and start building quality into products while they are being built. Use statistical process control.

  3. Don't choose suppliers on the basis of low bids alone. Minimize total cost by establishing long term relationships with suppliers that are based on loyalty and trust.

  4. Work continually to improve the system of production and service. Improvement is not a one-time effort; every activity in the system must be continually improved to reduce waste and improve quality.

  5. Institute training. Managers should know how to do the job they supervise and be able to train workers. Managers also need training to understand the system of production.

  6. Institute leadership. The job of managers is to help people do a better job and remove barriers in the system that keep them from doing their job with pride. The greatest waste in America is failure to use the abilities of people.

  7. Drive out fear. People need to feel secure in order to do their job well. There should never be a conflict between doing what is best for the company and meeting the expectations of a person's immediate job.

  8. Break down barriers between departments. Create cross-functional teams so everyone can understand each-other's perspective. Do not undermine team cooperation by rewarding individual performance.

  9. Stop using slogans, exhortations and targets. It is the system, not the workers, that creates defects and lowers productivity. Exhortations don't change the system; that is management's responsibility.

  10. Eliminate numerical quotas for workers and numerical goals for people in management. [We add: Eliminate arbitrary deadlines for development teams.] This is management by fear. Try leadership.

  11. Eliminate barriers that rob the people of their right to pride of workmanship. Stop treating hourly workers like a commodity. Eliminate annual performance ratings for salaried workers.

  12. Encourage education and self-improvement for everyone. An educated workforce and management is the key to the future.

  13. Take action to accomplish the transformation. A top management team must lead the effort with action, not just support.

These go back 60 years. And (I can't help myself) these principles are in the context that process causes 94% of the errors - so work on the process to support the people! (people and process, people and process, people and process, ...) ;)

Alan Shalloway, CEO, Sr. Consultant
Net Objectives, Gold Level Sponsor of Agile 2006.
Integrating people, process and technology through training, coaching and consulting.


Alan's website also has some really great articles, papers, presentations and resources on Agile, Lean, Scrum, XP, Design Patterns, and all things related to Agile development and object-oriented design.

For some slightly different interpretations and summaries of Demings 14 points and Seven Deadly Sins, see the following:
There has also been a thread on another discussionlist (sorry - the name escapes me at the moment) on the relevance (or lack thereoff) of Deming's writings and philosophies in the world of today.

What are your thoughts?

by Brad Appleton at 3:05 PM under agile , lean , management
» Aikidoka Leadership, Influence and Conflict Resolution

There are a few good books about conflict resolution & leadership that use Aikido style/philosophy throughout. I highly recommend them for anyone interested in the connection between leadership and martial arts philosophy:



There must be some of you out there who have some other links to share on this topic! Leave a comment with your favorites!

by Brad Appleton at 3:03 PM under books , management
» Scaling Agility: Agile Systems Engineering

Over the past months I've come across a bunch of good links & papers on the topic of "Going Agile" at the program-level for large systems and systems of systems. Some of these relate to Agile program Management and others are more about Agile Systems Engineering (and some relate to both). I'll mention the ones on Agile Systems Engineering in this blog-entry and leave the ones on agile program management for a subsequent entry:


That's the best I came up with. If you know of other good links on this topic, please send me a comment!

by Brad Appleton at 3:27 AM under agile , links , management , project-mgmt , xp
» Scaling Agility: Seamless Agility across the Enterprise

David Anderson writes about the recent Agile2006 conference in his blog-entry Thoughts for Agile2006:

Scaling Agile. The BIG issue for this year is scaling agile across a whole organization. I see this as having three parts - program or multi-project management and the rollup of schedules and resource plans to a Director or VP level; architecture and enterprise level modeling of a domain and data center; and finally configuration management including build, integration, branch and merge strategies, and work-in-progress batching and related communication.

Ive been dealing with this topic a LOT lately in my own organization as part of efforts to spread amd adapt Agile methods across a large distributed enterprise working with large systems and teams. Ive been researching and collecting lots of resources, including some earlier blog-entries on Agile CMMI and Dancing Elephants and Agile Adoption across the industry.

My perceptions of where the "seams" of the enterprise are that are hardest to introduce Agility into are the close collaboration and alignment required across organizational (lifecycle discipline) boundaries and geographic boundaries (and I find the former to be more difficult to surmount than the latter.)

If I try to categorize them as different areas or aspects that each require the ability to be agile, I come up with something like:
  • Process - Adapting Agile to the Organization (making processes responsive to change)

  • Product - Agile Systems Engineering/Architecture (making the requirements & architecture be responsive to change)

  • Project - Agile Program Management & Governance (making the project be responsive to change)

  • People - Distributed Agile Development (collaborating across multiple sites, teams, and timezones)

  • Organization - Agile Metrics/Reporting, Governance, and Organizational Design

  • Environment - Agile CM, deployment, operation/support, etc.

I'll be blogging separately with lists of resources of found for several of the above.

by Brad Appleton at 3:22 AM under agile , build-mgmt , links , management , project-mgmt , xp
» Scaling Agility: Adapting Agile to the Organization

Here is a list of resources I've found that I feel are applicable in figuring out how to scale Agility for a large organization and project. (On the subject of metrics and values, I personally find Sam Guckenheimers work to be of greatest interest):







Additions and corrections are welcome!

by Brad Appleton at 2:55 AM under agile , links , management , project-mgmt , xp