Software supportability needs to be anticipated and designed into an enterprise software platform. It is tempting to wait until the software is “stable”, then add supportability to it. This is a mistake, because the time you need the support tools the most is when the software is immature. The investment will have the most payback […]
Little’s Law is an important concept for Kanban. It has its roots in manufacturing and operations management as a technique for characterizing the utilization and capacity of a system to produce finished work. Components of the equation Work in Progress (WIP) = The average number of items in a system (over some interval) Throughput (TH) […]
Implementing Kanban for a large development organization has unique challenges that must be overcome. While at Siemens Health Services, I was part of a steering team that had the responsibility of transforming an organization of three business units and approximately 50 Scrum teams from Scrum/Agile to Kanban. Fortunately we were successful and achieved […]
Kanban has a few key concepts that are critical to being successful with this methodology. Traditional project management valued complete resource utilization to the point of diminishing returns, as valuable human resources spent their time starting and stopping tasks rather than completing work. Rather than work through blockages, team members would start new work […]
Agile development and the Scrum team environment places different priority on what have traditionally been labelled “soft skills”. Waterfall methodology valued heads-down analysis and development over collaboration. It also valued longer decision making under the guise of thoroughness. This is a short list of some of the capabilities that should be incorporated into Agile […]
Many factors influence the composition and effectiveness of a team. Traditional managers create teams based on the skills needed and amount of work. They feel that their skills at directing the team will ensure a successful outcome. This article looks at the composition from the perspective of the team member. Team members often have a […]
The idea for this article came to me while observing senior staff members in a large technology company. These individuals had been working at the company for a long time, in some cases 15 to 20 years or more. These people were recognized as individual contributors, but for some reason have either avoided management roles […]
