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Each week I capture, mark, and comment on blog posts and news articles around the internet. This is short list of three links that I think others will find valuable for their thought lives.
No iPhone leads 700,000 customer to flee TMobile by David Goldman at CNN Money. I’m a TMobile customer and have been for years. It doesn’t bother me not to have an iPhone but for some people it’s Apple or nothing. The more interesting part of this news is why TMobile doesn’t offer the iPhone today. Can I make my team do agile? by Mike Cottmeyer at Leading Agile. This was Mike’s 400th blog post and …Continue reading >>
What’s the most powerful step in a software development process? It’s not uncommon for analysts to label steps in a process. The critical path, bottlenecks, waste, and non-essential steps come to mind. So I would say that common wisdom agrees that all steps in a process do not hold equal weighting of importance. Maybe there isn’t a single most powerful step in the software development process you follow or maybe it depends on the context of the situation.
For what it’s worth, a few weeks ago it occurred to me that the act of estimating was perhaps the most powerful step. Estimating is completed at the ground level, by …Continue reading >>
Manufacturing is about consistent output.
Steady manufacturing is about consistent output at regular intervals. The Ford Motor Company is the classic case study for an assembly line process and mass production. Think about the big idea for what Henry Ford accomplished. The assembly line reduced the labor hours required to produce a vehicle and increased the number of vehicles that could be produced in a given time period. The assembly line started a consistent output of units. It was incremental output, one car at a time.
The analysis of manufacturing involves incremental costs and margins.
If you studied business or economics in school you’ll remember that the marginal cost of …Continue reading >>
I’ve used the term “Big Bang Software Development” to describe a process where all of the software project scope is delivered at the same time. Traditionally it’s been called the waterfall model. Industry experts have compared the waterfall model to newer agile methodologies for how they differ in the approach to deliver software. But what about the impact these two different approaches have on a portfolio of project work?
Project Managers and Project Management Offices are impacted as well.
Project Management Offices (PMOs) and Portfolio Managers look for balance, priority, and results from the breadth of work they manage. The challenge they have is balancing multiple concurrent projects and maintaining a …Continue reading >>
Working in start-ups and newer organizations has advantages and disadvantages form working in large and more established organizations. With regards to age, more established organizations are likely to use the waterfall method, or a variation of it, for software development. Newer organizations with less people, and not having years of internal process augmentation tend to use more agile software development methods. Just look at how often new organizations such as Evernote and LinkedIn release small incremental improvements to their core product.
A question came to mind this week that we may not fully be able to answer yet. Will new organizations that start with agile software development methods keep those …Continue reading >>
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