This post covers the value of estimation in large and small scale projects and views on no estimation.
Joshua Arnold facilitated a workshop about Cost of Delay at the Lean Kanban France 2014 conference. InfoQ did an interview with Arnold in which he talks about the cost of delay: what it is, why it matters, the importance of quantifying it and some tips for getting started.
If organizations want to make informed management decisions to maximize the delivered value they will need to gather evidence about value says Gunther Verheyen. InfoQ interviewed Gunther about evidence based software management and finding evidence, how Scrum relates to evidence-based managing, challenges in scaling agile, and advice for enterprises that want to adopt Scrum.
Less functionality can make a better product according to the “Worse is Better” concept described 25 years ago by Richard P. Gabriel. According to Kevlin Henney and Frank Buschmann we can learn from the worse is better concept for development and architecture with agile and lean.
Focusing on the motivation of individuals can positively impact performance. An interview with Peter van Oevelen about motivating individuals, influencing the mood of teams, applying radical management, economies of motivation and building effective teams with individuals that have their own ideas, preferences and motivations.
Recently we polled a small group of InfoQ editors, consultants and trainers asking them for their thoughts on the state of Agile adoption and what ideas, practices or techniques are emerging or being recognised as useful at the end of 2014. This is not a scientific study, rather an informal collection of opinions.
Organizations are discovering new innovative ways to manage work and unleash the potential of the people who are working there. The Dare Festival Antwerp 2014 focuses on organization design and culture for networked organizations, providing ideas and actionable practices. Frederic Laloux explored 12 organizations who are using fundamentally new ways to manage work and their employees.
Organizations look for ways to increase their agility and becoming more adaptive and responsive. There a new wave of modern ways for managing organizations, supporting transparency and self-organization, taking off. LiquidO is an organizational governance model for arranging activities and decisions and giving credit, allowing everybody in an organization to take part in management activities.
The real requirements of a product are not the functions that are needed, or user stories that have to be delivered. It is the possible improvement of performance that customers can get from using the product said Matteo Vaccari. At the XP Days Benelux 2014 conference he facilitated a workshop together with Antonio Carpentieri about defining the value that is needed by customers.
At the Lean Kanban France 2014 conference Bjarte Bogsnes gave a keynote presentation about beyond budgeting. In his presentation he talked about the problems with traditional management and how transparency and self regulating management comes to the rescue, and the principles and practices of beyond budgeting.
When organizations decide to scale agile they can be looking for agile ways to define strategies, manage direction and sustain alignment. Deploying and stay aligned, is today's challenge said Pierre Neis. At the Lean Kanban France 2014 conference Pierre showed how using Hoshin Kanri has helped global players in their lean agile transition.
Software Development is often considered to be knowledge intensive, therefor organizations look for ways to enable continuous learning. “We need learning organisations and they start with learning individuals” says Marcin Floryan. Individual learning can be difficult and scaling individual learning even more challenging. What can organizations do to become a continuous learning organization?
In stead of feature farming, we need to deliver better outcomes and focus on the business results that we need to deliver. Measurements should provide insight into the outcomes because that is what is important. The Mobius loop can be used to define appropriate measurements.
Blockades in work, like insufficient information, unclear requirements or having to wait for tools or systems to become available can have a systematic cause. It could be the case that similar problems that block the team keep happening until the underlying causes are addressed. You can use your blockades as treasures of improvement to sustainably improve the way work is done.
In agile projects the product owner is often seen as the person who primary assures the connection between business and IT. But for effective IT-Business alignment having a product owner is not enough. What can people from the business, demand and supply parts of the organization do increase the effectiveness of IT – Business alignment?