Bindings, Platforms, and Innovation
This presentation focuses on the Internet and separating myth from fact, history from the future, and the mundane from the imaginative. Bob Frankston presents a vision of what could and should be.
Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
Posted by Deborah Hartmann on Sep 28, 2007 04:03 AM
"A fundamental premise of the 'train-wreck' approach to management is that the primary cause of problems is 'dereliction of duty'" said Peter Scholtes in The Leader's Handbook. Under this "management by results" approach, fear of blame drives compliance and performance. Prompted by a discussion on the LeanDevelopment discussion group, Mary Poppendieck posted a short article, Train-Wreck Management, on process, people and systems. In it she looked at Sholtes' book, Deming, the Toyota Production System (TPS) and how Lean provides an alternative to the culture of blame.As business grew and became geographically disperse in the 1800's, a way to run these businesses had to be found. But there were no models outside the church and the military, so investigators into the train-wreck disaster [of 1841, in New York state] looked to the Prussian army for a model. And there they found the classic organization chart - the one we know so well today. Scholtes calls it the "train-wreck" chart. It was revolutionary at the time.So, is a heirarchical organisational structure the root of all evil? The article also included an interesting quote from Scholtes:
All of the empowered, motivated, teamed-up, self-directed, incentivized, accountable, reengineered, and reinvented people you can muster cannot compensate for a dysfunctional system.... A well-run organization with well-functioning systems allows people from top to bottom do work of which they can be proud.Poppendieck's question: "So where does this leave us? Which is more important - process or people?" It looks like the answer might be "both." She concluded:
People like to use effective processes, and they also like to have control over their own environment. The Toyota Production System provides for both. [Taiichi] Ohno made it clear that people must be at the center of improving their own processes.Apparently, while simply "empowering teams" doesn't seem to be the solution, neither does a focus on pure process, divorced from the people-driven "continuous learning" cycle. Scholtes suggested that corporate attempts to impose certified process improvement programs like ISO 9000 across large organisations may be missing the point. What's missing? Those "home grown," self-organizing aspects that would allow these approaches to evolve and improve teams in different and appropriate ways. From Scholtes' critique:
Give-away eBook – Confessions of an IT Manager
Ebook: Scaling Agile with C/ALM
The Agile Business Analyst: Skills and Techniques needed for Agile
I call them "dis-located" teams, sometimes :-) Isn't it interesting that this org-chart driven pattern came about in answer to: "business grew and became geographically dispersed..." ?
I just came across this roundup on Kevin Rutherford's "silk and spinach" blog.
This presentation focuses on the Internet and separating myth from fact, history from the future, and the mundane from the imaginative. Bob Frankston presents a vision of what could and should be.
This article explores the use of JBoss and jBPM to implement design solutions that effectively address the issue of orchestrating long running activities.
This presentation covers the use of graph databases as an optimal solution for data that is difficult to fit in static tables, rapidly evolving data or data that has a lot of optional attributes.
This session introduces Real Options and shows how it can help in running your project. Real Options is a decision-making process that can be used to manage risk.
This article discusses the use of bindings on services and references (including the instance of non-configured bindings) as the means to implement SCA communications in a Web and SOA environment.
After a short introduction to DSLs, Scott Davis plays with the keyboard showing how to approach the creation of a DSL by typing working snippets of Groovy code that get executed.
IBM Rational and InfoQ present, Scaling Agile with C/ALM, an eBook showing organizations how to become “finely tuned software delivery machines” by enabling team integration and scaling.
Amanda Laucher presents a real life enterprise application written in F#. She shows actual code snippets, explaining design decisions and suggesting how to use some of the F# constructs.
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