Announcing the Scaling Software Agility One-Day Course!

I am happy to announce that I’ll be presenting a one-day overview course based on the book: Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises, in London, England on February 27, 2008, and in Boulder, Colorado on March 19, 2008. This course is sponsored and hosted through Agile University.
Who should attend: Software development directors, managers [...]

A Three-Track Strategy for Enterprise Adoption

In my blog entry of a few days ago, (Ideal Training for Enterprise Agility?), I noted that Pete Behrens (www.trailridgeconsulting.com) and I were collaborating on a leveraged enterprise rollout model, that is, a model for education and consulting that could help a larger enterprise (hundreds to thousands of developers) start to achieve the benefits of [...]

Two New Enterprise Case Studies

I’m always on the lookout for documented case studies of agility at enterprise scale which highlight impediments, lessons learned, anecdotal benefits, and wherever possible, hard metrics of improvement in productivity, quality or morale. I’ve (b)logged two such case studies, the transformations at BMC Software and Salesforce.com in this blog under the category “Case Studies”.
Since then, [...]

Ideal Training for Enterprise-Scale Agility?

Pete Behrens (www.trailridgeconsulting.com) and I were formulating a training strategy for a significant enterprise that is contemplating an “all in” (immediate and across the entire company) enterprise scale transformation approach. Based on my experiences at BMC Software and his experiences at Salesforce.com, as well as some of our larger, ongoing clients, we had a chance [...]

How Enterprise Agile Adoption Can Fail

The Top 5 Challenges that I Have Personally Seen

I was in attendance at an enterprise agile rollout risk/mitigation session last week where the topic was brainstorming ways in which the rollout of enterprise agility could conceivably fail. The idea was to identify the potential failures modes, and then put in place a risk mitigation [...]

Meeting Deadlines – “Tiger Teams” vs. Agile Project Management Practices

Often times when introducing some of the basic agile project management practices to new teams (for example, the daily standup) some of the more experienced (ok, older) team members comment on the fact that these techniques look a lot like the techniques they used in the past when their projects were in deadline [...]

Patterns of Agile Adoption

In this months newsletter from the Agile Journal, (www.agilejournal.com) Mike Cohn identifies six core patterns of adoption that have been applied in a number of companies over the last few years. The patterns are:

Start Small or Go All In
Technical Practices First or Iterative First
Stealth Mode or Public Display

This is an excellent article that weighs the [...]

Responsibilities of Agile Product Owner vs Enterprise Product Manager

Building on my own experiences as well as Jennifer Fawcett’s whitepaper (agileproductowner.com) and the webinar from Catherine Connor and Rally, there are indeed some some substantial changes in the role of Product Manager in a before and after agile enterprise, as the table below shows.

As we understand these differences, we start to see a significant [...]

More on Product Manager vs Product Owner, Webinar from Rally

Speaking of product managers and product owners, Catherine Connor from Rally Software (and a former compatriot of mine at Rational), recently presented a webinar entitled “How Product Management Must Change to Enable the Agile Enterprise”. Here’s the abstract:
As more development teams adopt Agile processes to increase their responsiveness to customer needs, traditional product managers need [...]