Suppose your organization doesn’t truly know what would be valuable to your customers and you don’t have good technical practices, delivery capability or Agile project management. What would you improve first? Would a focus on customer value lead to improved technical practices? Would a reliable delivery process enable the organization to explore and meet customer […]

Before I make the case that there’s a secret, first step in the Theory of Constraints (ToC)—that a lot of people seem to dismiss—I’d first like to run through a little thought experiment. Tell me, what’s wrong in the following situation? What would your prescription be? I once worked on a Point-of-Sale product with quarterly […]

According to the Theory of Constraints (Eliyahu M. Goldratt), organizations are prevented from achieving their goals because of one or more constraints. The constraint in Agile, or any kind of software product development, might be some team or individual in the value stream that produces working-tested-remediated features (i.e. the production of value). Or, the constraint […]

In his book “Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency”, Tom DeMarco makes the point that you can’t be creative when you are overworked or overburdened. Stress kills innovation as does busyness. Little slack leads to little time to look around leads to little improvement. To be creative, your mind needs to feel free and […]

What’s a Spike? Who should create it? And what should it look like in VersionOne? (Or in Agile Central, Pivotal Tracker, HP AGM, Jira, or your ALM tool.) Excellent questions! I thought I’d share my thoughts on the topic: What’s a Spike? Sometimes a story is too large or overly complex. Perhaps the implementation or a 3rd party […]