Harnessing Innovation: Lightweight Governance Models for High Performing Agile teams

I recently gave this presentation (harnessing-innovation) at a private, in-house agile community gathering for a large software enterprise. The focus was obvious from the title, how does the larger enterprise harness the agility, innovation (and yes, entropy) of all those newly empowered agile teams? Can they apply governance models that provide for some effective controls [...]

Failing “soft” is an Option in Agile

Recently, I noticed the following interesting post from BMC’s Paul Beavers: To Be Successful with Agile, Failure is More than an Option, it’s Necessary.
Paul highlights: “Failure from time to time is expected – trying, assessing, and adjusting are not optional”. This correlates with my experience as it’s in the stretching, and occasionally failing, in [...]

Announcing SSA Courses, Sep 11 & Nov 6, 2008

I’ll be delivering only two public courses of Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises this fall. Both will be held at Agile University in Boulder, Colorado. You can see the abstract and register for the course here. While the course is based on the book, the material is constantly updated based on my [...]

The Agile “Shine On” (Visibility and Truth in Agile)

Recently the post “Zero to Fear in 60 Seconds” appeared in Agile Juice . This great post highlights some of the challenges with the transparency and fact-based status assessment that agile purports to deliver. Simply put, it’s not unusual (at least initially) that the apparent visibility provided by the daily standups and story status [...]

Agile 2008 August 4-8 in Toronto

The Agile 2008 conference has recently announced the program for this summer’s meetings in Toronto. To quote from their brochure:

“It brings together executives, managers, software development practitioners and researchers from labs and academia. The conference is not about a single methodology or approach, but rather provides a forum for the exchange of information regarding [...]

Recap: SEVEN Principles of Agile Architecture

Those following the agile architecture series will probably note that the principles and labels have morphed over time. I’ve been collaborating with Ryan Martens, Rally’s founder and CTO, and Mauricio Zamora, Executive Director at CSG Systems, in writing a whitepaper to be published on this topic. In the process, we’ve also had some comments from [...]

The New New Product Development Game and the Roots of Scrum

I was recently doing some research on prospective agile governance models for a company in the throes of understanding how to manage the entropy of a large number of newly energized and empowered agile teams. For perspective on the problem, I returned to the following article for guidance: The New New Product Development Game. This [...]

Update on British Telecom Agile Adoption

I met Roger Leaton (British Telecom employee and Agile Advocate) and Geoff Watts (consultant, InspectandAdapt.com) at an in-house agile community gathering last week. They gave a peer presentation of the status of the agile rollout that they have been involved with at British Telecom. (A similar presentation was provided last year at Agile 2007). Roger [...]