Agile Management

Posted on July 19, 2005  Comments (4)

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.

4 Responses to “Agile Management”

  1. Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog » Agile Software Development
    April 4th, 2007 @ 12:18 pm

    The basic idea: reduce the initial planning phase and increase the iterations (similar to turning the PDSA cycle quickly) and interaction with users…

  2. CuriousCat: Deming Companies
    April 5th, 2008 @ 7:28 pm

    David Anderson has incorporated Deming ideas within Microsoft and then Corbis – see his Agile Management Blog…

  3. Curious Cat » A Programmers Take on Agile Software Development
    April 6th, 2008 @ 9:25 am

    I am also a strong proponent of agile software development. Information Technology projects have a poor success rate. The best method, I have found, to provide better software solutions is agile development…

  4. fazrul
    April 6th, 2008 @ 5:08 pm

    It is interesting to know that trust is so important in agile software. Do you think that the trust is only applicable in software development aka at job place or it should be all the way outside the job place? Please comment though on the current scenario on trust. Trust is given or built?

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