Since we announced the forthcoming “Big Agile” webinar (click here for details), I have been exposed to numerous questions and comments about “Big” vis-a-vis “Lean” in the Agile context.  The intensity of some of these discourses was so high that I decided to comment on the subject in advance of the webinar. A lively debate during the webinar is, of course, goodness. In contrast, starting the webinar with a potentially gross misunderstanding as to where we are coming from and where we are heading is not too desirable.

In general, “big”, to me, can be “lean”. As a matter of fact, big should be lean as otherwise scale will quite possibly pose a problem.

Specifically, in the Agile context I expect “Big Agile” to incorporate various elements of Lean. For example:

Utilize Value Stream Mapping Measure Cycle Time Read more …

In 2011, and with increasing speed in 2012, Enterprises are embracing the whole-system view of themselves. This means they will take an increasingly strategic view of improvement, coordinating change across divisions and functions to achieve a higher overall level of performance. This trend is reversing the short-term, every-division-for-itself fractionalization that many organizations adopted during the financial pressure years 2008 – 2010. In the coming year we will see more of the team mindset (with some “taking one for the team” while others seemingly gain) than the “spread the pain” approach. The most successful organizations will compensate those groups which bear the greater pain so the whole can prosper.

The systems-wholistic trend will continue even if the economy goes back into recession. Many who took the fractionalized approach and “squeezed everyone equally” are now weaker players than they were before. Those Read more …

I see the demand for actual performance results over declarative symbolic victories (e.g., certifications) taking a significant bend upwards. I’ve already begun to see the more forward-thinking companies maturing in their thinking about how they use “named” business, technology, and management concepts, e.g., Scrum, Lean, Kanban, CMMI, ISO 9000, ITIL, COBIT, Devops, etc. There’s growing skepticism in the efficacy of popularized approaches. Executives are less likely to rush into using new ideas just because they’ve heard “the name”. Whether they’re skeptical for the right reasons or not, their cautious approach offers a better have a chance of implementing these “named” initiatives effectively, keeping them off their list of failures – a list that contributes to the skepticism in the first place.

[Editor's Note: This post is part of the annual "Cutter Predicts ..." series, compiled at the Cutter Consortium website.]

Kanban has become the hot topic of discussion amongst the IT community since 2010, due to its accelerated rate of adoption and remarkable impact on organizations — from the few-employee company to the tens-of-thousands-employee company — where it has been adopted despite its young age. This fast pace is both good and bad, Kanban is benefiting organizations when adopted properly, but there is a risk of doing it wrong by rushing an adoption without fully understanding it.

For example, people frequently ask if Kanban is a methodology for software development, or for software maintenance, or for project management, or a systematic approach to cultural change in the organization, or something else. Another frequent question is if Kanban is the next logical step after Scrum and if that means Scrum should be done before doing Kanban. Having a good understanding Read more …

2010 saw the rapid growth of quantitatively-driven performance improvement among organizations serious about getting lean and seeing results.  Much of this can be attributed to newer techniques in agile practices such as Kanban for software, and related awareness resulting from these practices.

Organizations getting serious about real, measurable improvement take being a learning organization to heart. They  have started to explore blended approaches where they may bring together more than one “named” approach, firmly internalize the salient themes from them and synthesize a custom method that meets their specific business needs.  Some of these organizations have also started to investigate and pursue use of CMMI as a framework for organizing and benchmarking their performance accomplishments.

In 2010, these efforts were nascent.  In 2011, I see this growth accelerating.  With more demonstrations of the success of mature practices (a la CMMI) in Read more …

I see 2011 as the pivotal year in which top and middle management realize they play a crucial role in making Agile and Lean work.

While systems thinking gains some more traction in looking at organizations as systems, for many it will remain too vague to be useful.

We will see the first signs of simple and pragmatic Agile/Lean practices specifically developed for managers.

[Editor's Note: This post is part of the annual "Cutter Predicts ..." series, compiled at the Cutter Consortium website.]

I have four predictions that I’d like to share with you:

The decline of Scrum will become obvious in 2011. The shine started to come off Scrum in 2009 when teams started to publicly report that they had run into trouble applying it effectively and this snowballed in 2010. The squabbling between the Scrum thought leaders over their various certification schemes exacerbated the problem in 2010 and there seems to be no end in sight. My recent 2010 Scrum Certification survey found that only 27% of Certified Scrum Masters (CSMs) were willing to admit publicly that they were CSMs and another 37% would do so seldomly, an indication of the Agile community’s growing embarrassment surrounding “Scrum certification”.  I suspect that Scrum will continue to decline in popularity in 2011 and that the vast majority of people claiming to be doing Read more …

I recently worked on Kanban adoption with a new customer, who informed me that Kanban was already underway and wanted me to help finish the adoption.

On the first day, I was taken to the Kanban boards, two of them, and was introduced to the 15-person team. I noticed right away that the Kanban boards lacked a good number of essential elements to be considered an actual Kanban board, such as explicit policies and well-defined classes of service. Furthermore, the boards were not for separate projects. One was for the development phase; the other for the test phase. Also, the adoption work was delayed by a month because a key person (the champion) wasn’t available earlier.

In this company’s approach to adoption, the champion read a portion of David J. Anderson’s book, Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Read more …

Under pressure from the continuing economic crisis, enterprises are struggling to maintain their level of competitiveness, or even remain in the market. What has been considered key to success will begin to shift, from the search for effective methodologies to the realization that innovation and value are the most important differentiators for success.

For many years, enterprises have considered effective management of scope, schedule, and budget as the key to success. This has been proven over and over to be incorrect. (Just ask the professionals you know. How many projects have they been involved with where scope, schedule, and budget were really effectively managed?) Furthermore, there are projects that accomplish this goal and still do not succeed. (Think “no sales.”) The success-failure reports from some well-known firms are misleading because they are based entirely on those evaluation parameters and continue Read more …

It was a dark and stormy day when it dawned on the project manager. Many full moons ago a new project was planned and leaders established a firm deadline (how ironic!). Technical people slaved day after day and night after night in their cubicle-shaped dungeons, under the promise of succulent bonuses if they worked like zombies until they closely resembled the real ones. Unflinchingly they coded away not knowing if ’twas day or night or dusk or down, unaware of the many little creepy creatures their code was creating. But one night, right before down the bugs started coming out of nowhere and from everywhere. And leaders spoke: “Let the little creatures be, for what matters is reaching deadline and that will save us!” The zombies continued coding in the dark confines of their dungeons, and more little creepy creatures Read more …