Ants were once thought to be specialists - being born with DNA set up for a specific chore in the ant colony. Recently, however, researchers have discovered that ants are actually generalists and can perform any task in the colony. However, they typically perform one task at a time to increase efficiency through less task switching.
Pete is presenting two sessions at Agile 2009 in Chicago - August 24 - 28:
While conferences in general have been down in attendance this year due to the economy, this is still the most comprehensive agile conferences available and a must see for any new or old agile practitioners.
4th Annual State of Agile Development Survey – August 2009 by VersionOne VersionOne has launched the 4th Annual State of Agile Survey and would love your help to get the word out. Last year they had over 3,000 respondents from ...
Henrick Kniberg does a good job in presenting the differences between Kanban vs Scrum in this presentation at Deep Lean in Stockholm earlier this year.
Key similarities - both are empirical processes, have few ceremonies, limit work in process.
Key differences - Scrum prescribes team roles and a sprint structure.
While it is nice to know the differences, it is better to know why they are different and how they get applied in organizations - here is what I see...
I read this comic last week and found it to be quite representative of what I see in most functional organizations.
While a functional organization reduces complexity to work on only a part of your pipeline, it sure does provide ample opportunities for skirting responsibility, blaming others and generally building trust voids within the organization.
One of the first, and often initially most skeptical, changes that I put in place within an organization is the concept of cross-functional team. But beyond that, a team that is responsible for as much of the pipeline as possible.
I am fortunate to have worked (and continue to work) with many excellent companies that have come to know, live and breath agility. This year, two of them are speaking at the Agile 2009 Conference in Chicago.
Certified Scrum Coaches (CSC) have a unique heartbeat of what is going on at the ground-level within organizations implementing or transitioning to agility. Unlike training, coaches are often knee deep in the real challenges organizations are having. Given this perspective, their stories, insights, and agile knowledge tend to be some of the best out there.
Artful Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work by Rob Austin & Lee Devin – If you are looking at agility from a different perspective, this is a great resource. Rob and Lee compare agile software development ...
Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development by James Coplien & Neil Harrison – They distill years of studying development teams into 100 bite-sized organizational patterns. This work preceded most of the agile ...
Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises by Dean Leffingwell – Dean is a leading enterprise agility consultant and has some wise advice for scaling agility within the enterprise. Dean addresses requirements, ...
Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash by Mary and Tom Poppendieck – Extends their body of knowledge through application of the lean principles. They provide specific examples of how to apply lean in ...
Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit by Mary Poppendieck & Tom Poppendieck – Tom and Mary surface the lean principles behind many of the agile practices – optimizing the whole system, building quality in, ...
Death By Meeting: a Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni – Are your meetings effective? Usually not. Lencioni proposes more meetings are key – context specific meetings (strategic, tactical and daily). Hey, that’s ...
Five Dysfunctions of a Team: a Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni – Agility requires teamwork & teamwork is hard. Patrick has some wisdom on building high-performing teams and they directly apply to Scrum – focus on ...
Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products by Jim Highsmith – An excellent resource focused on the project management role in leading agile teams. Jim provides a framework for success with agile project visioning ...
The Enterprise and Scrum by Ken Schwaber – Ken follows up his two Scrum application books with a focus on enterprise adoption. A key component of this book is the use of a transition team to aid the organization through the ...
Agile Estimating and Planning by Mike Cohn – Probably the most practical guide on the street today in putting the best agile practices to work to drive predictability in your projects. Mike has a vast experience in leading agile ...
June 2009 @ VersionOne Webinar by Pete Behrens
Pete presented a webinar on Agile Program Management for VersionOne. This presentation looks at the critical dependency of the organization in effective program management evaluating three key elements of focus, communication and transparency.
Agile2009 has an incredibly rich and diverse set of agile speakers and practitioners, it would be a shame to miss it. Yet I know most companies are struggling this year with the economy and thus will have more challenges finding quality learning time.
To provide some additional enticement to go this year, I have compiled a few sessions that I believe will be worth their money and are ones that I would like to attend if I don't get caught in a deep conversation with my other interesting peers at the conference.
By Dan Burcher, Enterprise Architect for Graebel (a Trail Ridge client)
Note: This is part of a new and continuing series which is collected under the Agile SOA category.
Here at Graebel, we believe that an Agile methodology provides great benefits to our development teams and our customers. Similarly, the decision to implement a service-oriented architecture has the potential to provide numerous benefits to the enterprise and our users. The question then becomes: Can an Agile methodology and SOA complement one another?
In many ways there are strong synergies between the two disciplines as well as potential conflicts. First, we’ll examine areas where SOA and Agile are complimentary. Secondly, we’ll discuss specific areas where potential conflicts may arise.
By Alan Ruth, Director of Technologies for Graebel (a Trail Ridge client)
Note: This is part of a Graebel blog series which is collected under the Agile Journey category.
In the last post Let there be light! I described how a past project failure and some of its circumstances served as fertile ground upon which the seeds of agile could be sown and nurtured. I examined how the 4 core elements of the Agile Manifesto were relevant to the circumstances experienced on that project. Yet it wasn’t until I joined Graebel in 2005 as the Director of Web Technologies that I was in a position to apply agile software development methodologies within a development context.
Note: We partnered with Pete Behrens of Trail Ridge Consulting to mentor us through our agile adoption and implementation. His expertise and efforts were invaluable throughout the fits & starts we experienced during our pilot project.
Pete will be presenting @ Agile Denver on April 27, 2009.His topic will be: Death by Scrum Meeting This is a new seminar series on Scrum exploring often challenging aspects of applying Scrum. Meetings are typically cited as one of the ...
In a new report released by IEEE, Greg Goth presents the Agile Tool Market Growing with the Philosophy. In it he discusses the market of large and small organizations need for agile tooling and some of the trends found in the industry ...
Come trade your Scrum and Agile wisdom with other practitioners at the Scrum Gathering in Orlando this March 2009. Pete will be presenting Death by Scrum Meeting – a happy topic – about the often found corporate wasteland ...
By Sandra VanWyk-Fancher, Vice President of Operations at Geonetric
You’re a born Project Manager: you love lists, you live to organize and plan, and you enjoy evaluating risks and alternatives. Even the family holiday dinner brings out assignments and due dates.
So when the environment changes and there are new rules to being a successful Project Manager, how do you adapt? The number of professionally trained PMs keeps growing, yet our project success rate remains the same. We need to rethink our approach. If we can’t adapt to increasing complex projects, we will fail.
The changing project landscape calls for alternatives beyond the traditional Waterfall approach. One promising alternative is Agile Project Management. I recently attended a PMI class that taught us “old timers” how to adapt to innovative processes.
August 2008 @ Agile 2008 Conference by Rasmus Mencke
A Slideshare presentation by a Salesforce.com Product Manager sharing his experience in surviving their "ALL IN" agile transition in 2006-2007.
Leadership Agility: Five Levels of Mastery for Anticipating and Initiating Change by William Joiner and Stephen Josephs – An inspirational breakthrough in thinking about agile leadership competencies and creative practices. This ...
Agile Software Development with SCRUM by Ken Schwaber and Mike Beedle – The original Scrum book. It has all of the basics you will need to know about how to run a Scrum Project. A must first read on Scrum to learn the basic ...
Power Up: Transforming Organizations Through Shared Leadership by David Bradford & Allan Cohen – Follows their Managing with Excellence book with a substantially researched body of work evaluating key post-heroic leadership ...
By Eric Engelmann, President & CEO of Geonetric.
As we were in the middle of developing the newest version of our VitalSite product last fall, we weren’t making the progress we wanted-even though the whole team was running full tilt and putting in its best efforts. We had always been a bit informal about how we developed software-somewhere between draconian rigid requirements and completely freeform cowboy (and cowgirl!) coding practices. The problem was that being in the middle wasn’t working. So, we looked at some of the newest practices in the industry.
Martinig & Associates Methods & Tools group recently updated their agile adoption survey and compared their results to their initial inquiry back in 2005. They asked a single question: "At what stage is the agile approach (XP, Scrum, FDD, ...) adoption at your location?" The results indicate a two-fold increase in awareness of agile methods (26% in 2005 to 13% in 2008 not aware if agile methods) and a two-fold increase in all projects deployment using agile methods (8% in 2005 to 17% in 2008). The complete results are shown in the table below and can be found on their website.
Dean Leffingwell, the author of the recent book, Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises (http://scalingsoftwareagility.wordpress.com) and I have been discussing strategies for enterprise-wide agile transitions in preparation for helping a significant software business contemplating just such a move. Dean and I have multiple experiences with enterprise-scale transitions. Dean provided leadership guidance to BMC Software as documented in the Agile Journal case study – How BMC is Scaling Agile Development. I guided an enterprise-scale transition with Salesforce.com as documented in their experience report Large Scale Agile Transformation in an On-Demand World presented at Agile 2007. Salesforce.com is the first recorded “all-at-once” transition of its size and was recently highlighted in an article by Mike Cohn on various approaches toward agile transition in the Agile Journal article Patterns of Agile Adoption.
Dean Leffingwell 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 ...
It is hard to determine what is more detrimental to an organization trying to be effective with agile methods – the belief that agile is about no planning and documentation, the belief that it is easy and requires so little ...
D David F. Rico has released the results of a 3-year study evaluating the Effects of Agile Method on Website Quality for Electronic Commerce (ppt or pdf). You can find a reference to this work and others on our Surveys and Studies ...
I recently completed Patrick Lencioni's Literary Fable entitled Death by Meeting. If you haven't read it, it is worth an afternoon. It is written as a literary fable so it is a quick read. In it, Lencioni highlights the ineffectiveness of meetings and how it drives an ineffective corporate culture. He highlights two primary issues with meetings in most organizations - the lack of conflict and context.
Clarity, Movement, Alignment, Focus
This is the premise of a book called Simple Church. While Simple Church has nothing to do with agile methods, it has everything to do with agility. Its research indicates that most churches are weighed down by all of their various programs and fail to reach their goal - to grow disciples. The multitude of programs they are creating to increase participation and growth are the very thing that are preventing their growth due to fractioning and defocusing people on too many varying objectives. Each program fighting over the same limited resources. Each program success being measured by its own attendance. The programs become the focus. The overall goal is lost in the mix.
Organizations going on an agile trip need agile tour guides, not agile travel agents. There are plenty of agile travel agents. An agile travel agent will mail you pretty brochures of agile. They will offer training courses to prepare you for your journey and for what it will be like when you "get there". If indeed there is a "there" to get to (agility is a journey, not a destination).
Chris Fry and Steve Greene from Salesforce.com presented their past year's agile transformation experience at Agile 2007 with exceptional praise. You can read their report directly - Large Scale Agile Transformation in an On-Demand World.
"Teamwork remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare." - Patrick Lencioni from his book - Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Patrick Lencioni, in his book Five Dysfunctions of a Team, identifies five critical problems leading to dysfunctional teams due to the absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results. His model extends much beyond Tuckman's traditional forming, storming, norming, performing model we are so accustomed to seeing. What I don't understand, is why Lencioni drives his model of dysfunction bottom up (as displayed in the embedded picture).
I would like to invite you to a session I am facilitating at the Agile 2007 Conference in Washington, DC in August entitled Enterprise Agile Transitional Leadership - Tuesday, August 14 @ 10:30AM following the keynote address.
I am honored to be accompanied by three of my client leaders who are guiding agile transitions in their own organizations. None of these leaders is a C-level executive driving agile adoption. Rather, they are all real-world middle managers with titles like Director of Software Engineering, Director of the Project Management Office and Director of Quality Operations. Yet each of them is playing a critical leadership role in their organization's agile adoption - much beyond their scope of management responsibility.
There have been many discussions relating to agile certification and the merits of the Certified ScrumMaster program over the past couple of years. The program has been tremendously successful at educating people on the Scrum framework and prepared them for the challenges they will encounter as they attempt to implement scrum within their organizations. The Scrum Alliance has certified over 10,000 people through this program.
However, the Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) program is only an educational certification process and should be considered the first step in understanding the deceptively simple Scrum framework. The program typically includes a 2-day training program with the expectation of having some experience or knowledge of Scrum prior to attending, although many that attend a CSM course have no previous knowledge.
The software development community is being bombarded with the latest driven-development practices. Test-Driven Development introduced by Kent Beck with Extreme Programming (XP) and Feature-Driven Development introduced by Jeff De Luca have been in the agile community for almost a decade and are generally thought to provide renewed focus on quality and client-valued functionality.
By Dave Coustan, Corporate Blogger for Earthlink
Several people read my short note from earlier this week and asked me for more information on the Agile Scrum training we did. According to the not-for-profit Scrum Alliance: "Scrum is an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or managing any work." Although there's a fair bit to learn about the framework and how you "do" Scrum, once you know the mechanics it's a simple and straightforward process to follow.
Within the Value Added Services(VAS) group at EarthLink, we've recently started to incorporate a few of the methods of Agile development into our overall product development process -- techniques like short and frequent code releases, daily status meetings, and less reliance on a comprehensive up-front documentation process. Some project teams even describe themselves as "agile-esque." With the support of our leadership, the project management group brought in Certified Scrum Trainer Pete Behrens to give us all a deeper understanding of what it really means to use Agile development, specifically the Scrum method, and to help us think about how we could more completely and consistently adopt it as the way we all work.
This is a book review for Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises, by Dean Leffingwell. You can also read more about it at his blog.
As someone who has guided many enterprise organizations in scaling Scrum, this book covers all of the critical roadblocks that are sure to be in your path. Scaling Software Agility is a must read for anyone in a technical or business leadership capacity considering advancing agile beyond a few teams or projects. It combines the organizational influences from Scrum with the development practices of Extreme Programming (XP) and balances it with some of the best practices from the Rational Unified Process (RUP) to provide a scalable agile approach.
Organization Development is a dynamic values-based approach to systems change in organizations and communities; it strives to build the capacity to achieve and sustain a new desired state that benefits the organization or community and the world around them.Lisa Haneberg, in her book Organizational Development Basics, identifies a set of values which guide Organizational Development professionals. Since OD is a dynamic values-based approach, I use these values to demonstrate how Scrum (one agile framework focused primarily at the organization) is being used as an instrument of organizational change.
Sometimes we get so involved in our work, we forget to come up for air. Sorry to be absent for the past few months, but I have been having too much fun...
I don't know when Poker became a sport, but I find myself strangely attracted to the strategies and personalities of the game as shown through the World Series of Poker on ESPN2. I don't actually play poker much myself other than the occasional neighborhood dad get together, but I do enjoy the strategy and luck.
The results to the Agile Tooling Survey we conducted in October are now available online at http://trailridgeconsulting.com/surveys.html. With over 500 survey responses from 39 countries, we feel this survey provides an excellent ...
We are doing some research to find out what tools agile teams, organizations and enterprises are using to enable, manage and scale their agile process.
The agile manifesto states that individuals and interactions are more important than process and tools, but we are seeing an increase in agile project management tools and their adoption to support and scale agile adoption in the enterprise. What tools are they using and why?
Lisa Haneberg, the owner of Haneberg Management, author of multiple management books and frequent blogger on management has a Fireside Chat podcast series containing interviews of industry practitioners. I had the honor of being the ...
