Promote Corporate Agility

Corporate Agility

Large companies pursuing agility should ask this question: What do we want from agile, and how long do we want it?

As a company, we sustainably adopt continuous-improvement techniques (iterate, measure, reflect, and adapt) everywhere to rapidly identify market need, explore demand, establish product plans, deliver products and delight customers, and support employees, so we gain greater profitability indefinitely.

Agile practices are surprisingly fragile: you can lose them with a manager resignation and/or a bad hire.  Continue reading

Should we work over 40 hours per week?

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A colleague recently ask for evidence that 40 hours per week is an optimal work schedule. Here is a document that talks about past studies on “crunch time”, working more than 40 hours a week.  It shows that after 4 weeks of crunch time work, productivity declines below the productivity teams had in prior weeks working 40 hours a week.

This result was most recently repeated by High Moon game developers, in 2008, see Snap, Crackle, Crunch Time.  However, this just confirms that game development replicates what others have shown for different industries, including Henry Ford about 100 years ago.
See Rules of Productivity for some nice summary slides.

Can You Combine Waterfall and Agile?

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Many well-meaning people think they can be the First Person Ever to combine waterfall and Scrum, name their new process with some catchy name, start teaching this Frankenstein system, then cause internal organizational chaos or sloth. Continue reading