Abraham Lincoln used to ask a riddle: “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?”
Answer: Four, because calling it a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
Abraham Lincoln used to ask a riddle: “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?”
Answer: Four, because calling it a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
Last year I was involved in rescuing the delivery of an Educational Loan Servicing system for a couple of state education departments (the trials and tribulations in another blog). Like a number of projects in the Financial, Insurance, and Investment Banking industry, this project involved a significant number of back-end batch processes.
There were a few problems that the teams faced when attempting to discover the stories:
Let’s tackle these two separately.
General Colin Powell in his Leadership Primer says that:
“Organization doesn’t really accomplish anything. Plans don’t accomplish anything, either. Theories of management don’t much matter. Endeavors succeed or fail because of the people involved. Only by attracting the best people will you accomplish great deeds.”
So, how do you attract and choose the best people to work in your organization? What are the qualities that you look for when hiring people – is it the length of their resume, their past positions, their degrees or where they obtained them? Is it their familiarity and expertise with the specific technology or domain that the company needs at the moment?
When people ask for “a sense of urgency” or “ownership” what they are really saying is “show me that you care about delivering this as much as I do”. Here are a few suggestions in an Agile context in no particular order of importance:
I recently got invited back, for the third time, by a client in the “Leisure, Travel & Tourism” industry to develop applications for their Cruise business. I play the role of an Engagement Manager and Business Demand Manager, whereby I am responsible for business idea harvesting and business idea vetting for the client
In the past two years, this client has moved from a crappy Agile implementation to doing Agile the right way to implementing a lean software development system. They have taken the concept of smaller batches, removal of waste, and continuous flow of value to heart.
[Read more...]
I recently encountered a situation where we had three development teams working on the same product. Two separate clients that were supposed to act as one had jointly financed the project and were planning to individually sell it to educational institutions in their respective states (Texas and New Mexico). Needless to say the goal of acting as one never happened and conflicting requirements became the norm. Conversations were not working as the clients could not agree amongst themselves; prioritization wasn’t working as the clients had different short-term needs and were afraid that the other client’s needs would be given preference.
Why RUP isn’t Agile?
I work with a number of people who come from a RUP background and who claim that RUP is Agile because RUP calls for iterative development. While a cursory reading of RUP literature may show that the RUP framework doesn’t really mandate anything — it is a framework not a process — and leaves things up to the team and organization, it’s spirit couldn’t be further from Agile. I just have a hard time reconciling some of the ideas behind RUP to Agile values and principles
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This is an example of a widgeted area that you can place text to describe a particular product or service. You can also use other WordPress widgets such as recent posts, recent comments, a tag cloud or more.
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