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Is Agile a Subset of Lean Manufacturing?
If you hang around agilists long enough, someone will mention lean manufacturing, Toyota Production System or Kanban. Since these concepts predate Agile, you might wonder how they relate, and perhaps why lean manufacturing wasn’t directly applied to software (until perhaps recently with Lean/Kanban). You might wonder whether Agile is just a subset of Lean Manufacturing.
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Develop Agile Managers, or Agile Dies
To sustain rapid adaptation and innovation, we need good agile managers. But management talent is rare, and agile management talent even rarer. Danger lurks when executives and managers don’t understand agile. You can tell when managers don’t understand agile: they don’t use it themselves. Agile methods, Scrum particularly, are perfect for managing creative teams, including management teams planning…
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Strategy Scrum Teams
Management teams can use Strategy Scrum to manage themselves and more effectively finish important work.
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Are We Agile? Answer 6 Questions to Find Out
Are we agile? The highest performing innovators follow 6 progressive agile base patterns. To assess your agility, ask how well you follow those patterns. To stay agile, follow the agile base patterns indefinitely. Audit your business agility with this guide.
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Smart and Lazy: Our best generals!
“I divide my officers into four groups: smart, diligent, stupid, and lazy. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are smart and diligent—their place is the General Staff. Some are stupid and lazy—they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Some are both smart and lazy; they are qualified for…
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Metrics, Trust and Communication
Good managers try to measure important aspects of their business with leading metrics (aka “key performance indicators”) that precede desired outcomes. Managers seeking agility often try to measure behavioral compliance to agile practices, but can inadvertently create a lying culture. When people don’t understand the metrics or can’t provide feedback, they perceive metrics as bureaucratic…
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The Goal Revisited
The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt is a business novel that recounts how a factory manager shakes off complacency and isolation to save his factory and its employees. Many MBAs, system scientists and agilists have read it. I read The Goal 7 years ago. I was so excited I sent our CEO an email. “Have you read it? It has…
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Failure Rates
“If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”—Thomas J. Watson, IBM
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Converting from Waterfall to Scrum – The First 30 Days
In a 30-day period, Senex Rex motivated and shepherded a 700-person company, with development teams in 4 countries, to convert from waterfall to Scrum, with two training courses, one in the USA and the other in India. Today Dan Greening watched the CTO answer employee questions perfectly in front of 68 Indian, Ukrainian and British…
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Velocity Variance: Should we seek consistent velocity?
Rhythmic experimentation defines Scrum. A good Sprint experiment seeks to improve important metrics, such as increasing velocity or decreasing bug count. Some managers claim consistent velocity is important. Percent velocity deviation, σ(V)/E(V), is a reasonable metric to compare teams’ consistency. However, software companies usually look for innovation and profitability. Staid, old companies recreating boring stuff…
