My post on Overcoming Language Barriers facilitated some very nice sharing of resources. Executives and managers! You need to familiarize yourself with this information; you will benefit through improved understanding of what your IT projects should be doing for you:
1. Excellent discussion on Domain Driven development from Sensei at ActiveEngine’s Cool Stuff post. This is more than a software development discussion- it deals with how to attack problems from a value perspective as you develop “language” between technologists and users. I suggest reading the transcript and paying close attention to Eric Evans’ thoughts- great reading.
2. Great, and thankfully brief, agile …read more

Intelligent Enterprise article “The Seven Pillars of BI Success” closed with a success story where agile software development processes came into play. 1-800 Contacts, winner of 2006 TDWI Best Practice Award, first aligned their BI project with a call-center-incentive project. The agile software development approach fostered high value innovative ideas to allow monitoring and improvement of agent performance mainly by giving the agents a way to monitor themselves. A large part of the success was attributed to the agile approach to collaboration with users:
Before picture: “Business would shout, and IT would do a fire drill and throw something out there.”
After …read more

Margaret Rouse at IT Knowledge Exchange continues our conversation on PMOs. We started by talking about how a PMO relieves pain, then the PMO’s role in dealing with the dreaded mythical queue of projects, and now language barriers in agile software development projects .
My post on how previous experience with lean manufacturing might overcome some of the barriers in language and acceptance of non-intuitive concepts related to agile also comes to mind.
Here’s Margaret’s language issue followed by my response. Sensei at ActiveEngine! I expect you to get involved with this:
Margaret: I’m going to think more about how language remains a …read more

Here is a slightly edited conversation with ActiveEngine following his response to my post on using lean experience to justify agile software development. It may be that non-IT executives don’t need to know about agile processes- just that the IT department is doing a lot more collaborating, testing and verifying throughout the software development process than they used to. I’ve found that lean is clearly different in this regard- i.e., proof of lean process success plus understanding the process is necessary for most executives in a company pursuing lean. Here’s the discussion:
ActiveEngine: Test Driven Development is more of paradigm shift …read more

My discussion with agile software development project managers led to some great insights into overcoming barriers to agile transformation. I started by surmising that a company who had done lean manufacturing would be more likely to pursue agile software development. When asked why, I gave the example of “quality at the source” and compared it to the agile approach of test driven development (TDD).
Both approaches assess results closer to the creation (manufacture) of code (product). In manufacturing, the lean approach gives the operator power to assess quality and stop the entire process until the quality glitch is fixed. I grabbed …read more

Sometimes the conversations that we have on-line are revealing and illuminating. My recent discussion with ActiveEngine Sensei, who focuses on software development processes, allowed us to share lean, agile and best practice collaboration processes that drastically cut wasteful activity and accelerate business processes. He comes from a software development perspective whereas I come from a business process strategy perspective. Here is our unedited discussion:
Sensei: Bob- I agree with your position that project management is viewed as fix for broken processes. The PMO should be the “library” or internal consulting group that the units turn to when they need to embark …read more