January 2011 Archives

The Leader's Guide to Radical Management: Reinventing the Workplace for the 21st Century
by Stephen Denning

Summary: Traditional management practices are failing to create value in the new economy and a new way of managing and leading in the workplace is needed to foster innovation

Intended Audience: Influencers in both old and new organizations

Since I started working at Embotics in 2007, we have always used an iteration length of 3 weeks.  I don't know why three weeks was chosen, though I suspect it provided a convenient trade-off between the amount of planning required to track the project and the amount of knowledge about where the project was going.  As we increased our level of agility, we continued to use 3 weeks since it worked for us.

I've been talking with a number of others in our community and doing a lot of reading and it seems like we are an outlier here.  Almost everyone else appears to be operating on 1 and 2 week iterations.  The The Wisdom of Crowds indicates that we may be missing out on something here.

I recently wrote about some planning that went into our first FedEx day.  Now that we have run this experiment, it is time to share the results.

The day started in a slightly chaotic manner as we were completing our move from our old offices.  However, we were able to quickly sort out some minor issues like power and get started more or less on time.

Scrumban - Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development
by Corey Ladas

Summary: A series of practical essays on how to apply Lean techniques to Agile, and in particular Scrum-based, software development organizations

Intended Audience: Scrum practitioners who want to investigate Lean concepts to improve the way they work