Tuesday, July 19, 2005

Agile Management

David Anderson publishes the Agile Management Blog, wrote the Agile Management for Software Engineering: Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results, and works for Microsoft. Robert Scoble, technical evangelist, also with Microsoft, has posted an online video interview with David Anderson on Microsoft's Chanel 9 online.

Quote by David Anderson, from the video: "My work focuses on applying the teachings of two management science gurus, one is Eli Goldratt and the other is W. Edwards Deming".

Take a look at the video and also the Agile Management Blog for all sorts of great posts on software development and management topics. Such as:

Trust is Essential to Agile:
Agile software development brought the idea of trust to the forefront. When there is trust, there is less waste, less extra work, less verification, less auditing, less paperwork, less meetings, less finger pointing, less blame-storming. Building trust between the engineering group and the customers is the first goal for any agile manager. Equally building trust with and amongst the engineering team is also essential.

No More Quality Initiatives
That's why in MSF for CMMI(R) Process Improvement, I've included daily standup meetings to surface issues and monitor and manage risks, eliminate special cause variation and make it everyone's business to do so. That's why we're dropping conformance to plan and conformance to specification in favor of conformance to process and focus on variation reduction. That's why we're encouraging a bottom up, empowered team, consensus model. That allows decentralized decisions to be made quickly. The way to institutionalize continuous improvement across an organization is to make it everyone's business, every day!

The video and blog post provide great ideas on how to apply Deming and Goldratt's ideas from someone who is applying them to improve the performance of the organization.

No comments: