Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
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Agile methods are empirical: plan, do, evaluate how it went, plan the next thing. When these cycles are very short, learning happens quickly and teams can move into high-performance mode. But discipline is necessary - planning must happen continuously to feed the fast-moving team. For 80 minutes David Hussman looks at the Agile practices around planning a project, a release, and an iteration.
Traditional thinking has turned budgets into fixed performance contracts forcing managers at all levels to commit to specified financial outcomes, although many of the underlying variables are beyond their control. In this Cutter Executive Summary, Jim Highsmith offers an alternative for the adaptive organization: a project performance management system and a team performance management system.
TargetProcess has released a free 5-user Community Edition of its Agile project management software. The Community Edition contains the same features as the full edition of the product with two limitations: a maximum 5 users, and no support.
Aside from "Agile" itself, "Business Value" may be one of the most widely used buzzwords around the floors of any fresh agile project. But, how many of these projects actually have a good understanding of what they really mean when they're saying it? Joe Little presents his thoughts on this very question.
The TargetProcess planning and tracking toolset is evolving quickly. Since release 2.0, they have added Test Cases bound to User Stories and Test Plans, Subversion Integration for requirement-to-source code and defect-to-source code visibility, People Allocation Management and a public Web Services API, making v2.3 a more attractive solution for large Agile shops.
In his Gantthead article, "Get It Right the Last Time: Developing an Agile Attitude," Doug DeCarlo challenged project managers to ditch the counter-productive "get-it-right-the-first-time" philosophy practiced for so long by so many. Instead, he has proposed some Agile attitudes to help managers think differently about what counts.
Traditional thinking has turned budgets into fixed performance contracts that force managers at all levels to commit to specified financial outcomes, despite the fact that many of the underlying variables are beyond their control. As Agility increases the futility of this exercise becomes apparent. Thought-leader Jim Highsmith proposes a helpful alternative more harmonious with Agile values.
Jim Highsmith, Director of Cutter Consortium's Agile Project Management Practice told the APLN Leadership Summit audience yesterday: "...to achieve truly agile, innovative organizations, a change in our approach to performance management systems is necessary... 'Conforming to plan' while delivering scant business value will seriously impede agility, whether in projects or the entire enterprise.
On the high-volume ScrumDevelopment newsgroup, an interesting question has appeared, once again: "Is it possible to run SCRUM with fixed price contracts especially custom projects?". Ron Jeffries, Mike Beedle and others offer replies from experience.
