Organizing at Scale: Implementing Spanning Features

Prompted by the discussion of feature and component teams, a reader recently sent in the following question:
“I have a user story, that on its face, appears to have been structured in such a way that it simply cannot be independent.  That is, the story itself cuts across teams, and even across product lines.  If the [...]

Organizing at Scale: A Basic Scrum Framework for Enterprise Teams

Recently, I was working with a smaller, but distributed, team that was trying to establish a basic framework for working together in a lightweight, Big Picture, enterprise pattern. We were rolling out a basic scrum practice for the individual teams, but one that lends itself to scaling well into enterprise release planning, and is also [...]

Organizing at Scale: Feature Teams vs. Component Teams – Part 3

As the title indicates, in the last two posts (Part 1 and Part 2 – and also be sure and check the comments from others) I’ve described the conundrum of organizing agile teams at scale, and said I’d provide some additional input from others along with some recommendations.
Should the Agile Enterprise Lean to the Feature [...]

Organizing at Scale: Feature Teams vs. Component Teams – Part 2

In my last post, I reintroduced this topic, describing the conundrum of organizing large number of agile teams to better address value delivery for new end user features and services. I described two basic approaches, feature teams and component teams, and some arguments for each.
I’m still waiting for some feedback from a couple of others [...]

Organizing at Scale: Feature Teams vs. Component Teams – Part 1

While continuing my work with a number of larger enterprises facing the cultural change, new practice adoption and organizational challenges of a large scale agile transformation, the topic has again come up as to how to organize large numbers of agile teams to effectively implement agile and optimize value stream delivery.
For the smaller software enterprise, [...]

Patterns and Anti-patterns in Enterprise Adoption

I gave this presentation to a SPIN meeting the other day and promised that I would post it. So here it is:
Patterns&Antipatterns in Enterprise Adoption
I’ve blogged on this topic before ( see post) but as agile continues to cross the chasm to the enterprise, new anti-patterns emerge (or perhaps they were always there and I just didn’t [...]

More on the Lean and Kanban 2009 Conference

On reflection, the Lean and Kanban conference was one of the most impactful events I’ve attended in many years. In addition to Mike Cottmeyer’s blog, John Heintz has done at  an excellent summary of the conference. Also, a few of my personal reflections can be found at Israel Gat’s Agile Executive blog here.

Agile Release Train: A Whitepaper

Recently, I’ve been working with a  software enterprise helping them tune their agile process to better align the agile teams to the broader enterprise objectives. One particular subgroup has twelve agile teams, each of whom has a specific product mission in the marketplace. (Think “point products”). However, they must now also cooperate on building their [...]

Reaching the Agile Enterprise Tipping Point – A Workshop

Recently, I’ve been working with a number of large companies who are reaching the agile enterprise tipping point. In most cases the development teams or some outside agents have introduced agile as a potential solution to a host of problems – productivity, quality, time to market, whatever – but the managers and [...]

New Book: The Software Project Manager’s Bridge to Agility

I just finished reading this recently published book by Michele Sliger and Stacia Broderick (both of whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with in the field). This book fills a critical agile enterprise gap – that is how to transition from traditional project management to agile project management. Michele and Stacia, two long-time (neither [...]