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If your backlog is not a graveyard then you may be short of ideas. In my 20+ years of software, I’ve always had a backlog for software development. The list is full of ideas, customer requests, and defects. It fills faster than the team can implement and some items become aged and never resolved. I’ve come to realize that if I don’t have a list with aged items it’s probably because I don’t have an open channel of incoming ideas and I’m no listening to my customers.
I used to stress over an overflowing backlog and it was a source of frustration. As I matured a bit with software development …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 >>
Last week I provided some thoughts about organizational agility and a few of the root causes for why organizations suffer issues related to non-productivity. Getting work done into today’s organizations often becomes a game of who can beat the system. Management wants you to get your tasks done quickly to deliver results, but they can’t condone actions that don’t follow the established procedures and approvals. That’s the rub. Often times, existing process and approval steps are burdened with layers of red tape, people, and committees. So we play games to jockey and position for priority of work and assignment of resources. Who pays for this at the end of the …Continue reading >>
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