Software Engineering Radio, the world’s leading podcast on software development, published an episode on “10 Years of Agile Experience” yesterday. In this podcast Marcus Völter interviews me about introducing agile technology to different organizations, the experiences I made doing this job in the last 10 years, and stratgies I derive from this experience. The podcast […]

Twenty years ago, Peter Drucker wrote about the coming of the new, information-based organization, which twenty years later we now take nearly for granted as incarnate everywhere. While information-based organizations rely on and have been largely created by advanced IT, Drucker notes that not all such organizations require advanced IT. Advanced IT lets firms eliminating […]

I’m a storyteller by heart, which is why I so enjoy the work that I do. Not only my own stories, but exciting stories about what other people have experienced in life and work, which I’ve been privileged to share with them as a consultant.
My last Cutter webinar was about telling stories from 5 companies […]

If agile methods are to go mainstream, it might be when their popularity and legitimacy reach a tipping point. An example that this could be happening is a recent New York Times article called ” Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft” (16 December 2007), which Cutter colleague Ken Orr wrote […]

I just found out that Middlesex University Emeritus Professor Colin Tully, an influential British computer scientist and a long-time friend, passed away on the 26th of December.
Colin and I first met over twenty years ago when I used to live in the UK, and we had many a lively discussion on information […]

We are not alone.
In the struggle for business strategy alignment, I believe we have a compatriot in, if you can believe it, marketing. After all, we in IT have much in common with marketing.
Certainly longer in the tooth and possessing a meaner kick than the young colt known as the enterprise architect, the brand strategists […]

In the one corner stands the fire breathing reptile, Enterprise Architecture and in the other corner we see pacing restlessly an 8,000 pound gorilla known as Agile Development. Eternally opposed to each other, these two ways of looking at the world fight it out year after year.
Enterprise architects like a command and control, autocratic and […]

After studying human organizations for more than four decades, organizational learning guru Chris Argyris accurately, if not cynically noted that organizational problems show up worldwide. All cultures create similar dysfunctional organizations. He further notes that the failure for organizations to perform and learn isn’t just an organizational problem, but also an individual problem. In order […]

[The following is an email advisory written this week (9-13) that generated several comments. I’ve reproduced it here to encourage more interaction.]
I’ve been thinking recently that the term “self-organizing” has outlived its usefulness in the agile community and needs to be replaced. While self-organizing is a good term, it has, unfortunately, become confused with anarchy […]

This is the second post on the German book “Evolutionary Management” by Klaus-Stephan Otto and others. If you missed my first post on this, you may want to start there.
Traditionally evolution is connected with fight and competition. Darwin phrased the mechanisms “Survival of the Fittest”, which is often interpreted as “Survival of the Strongest”. Otto […]