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Solving the Gordian Knot of Chronic Overcommittment in Development Organizations

Why do we promise more than we can deliver? Why do we say yes when we are already too busy? Chronic Overcommitment is a pervasive problem in the IT industry. In this article we take a look at the behaviors that drive over commitment and the dynamics at play in your organization the make it a difficult problem to solve. Finally, we offer some advice to those who suffer from this affliction.

Rolf Häsänen Morgan Ahlström
on Feb 13, 2014
Kanban’s service orientation agenda

This second article in the series on the Kanban “nine values, three agendas” model explores the service orientation agenda. Building on the sustainability agenda, this agenda adds the values of customer focus, flow, and leadership. Individually, each of these brings some challenge; collectively, they can represent to a significant sense of direction, a much more outward-looking approach to change.

Mike Burrows
on Jan 29, 2014
Interfacing between Linear Waterfall and Agile Approaches

Michael discusses ways to integrate agile & scrum approaches with linear management styles often required to achieve organizational control in large complex environments. He talks about how to achieve an Agile PMO and how it can be applied in environments which are not naturally perceived as being agile-friendly.

Michael Nir
on Jan 21, 2014
Tracking Schedule Progress in Agile

The challenge of knowing whether we are on track to deliver haunts projectmanagers and developmentmanagers at various levels as their organizations take on agile approaches to product and project development. Driving towards smaller work items and lower work in process brings the benefits of both better project risk management as well as more effective agile execution and learning.

Yuval Yeret
on Jan 01, 2014
Meet Elaine: A Persona- Driven Approach to Exploring Architecturally Significant Requirements

Often, requirements elicited from stakeholders describe a system’s functionality but fail to address qualities such as performance, reliability, & availability. Documenting these requirements is often overlooked because there are implicit assumptions that the system will perform to expected levels. This article describes a process developed on the idea of persona sketches to address this problem.

Jane Cleland-Huang
on Dec 15, 2013
Sell Before You Build

“Before you write any code, make sure you have a failing test.” This was revolutionary when first pitched in the late 90’s. Many successful entrepreneurs have practiced a similar idea: “Before you build a product/service, make sure you have paying customers.” Naresh Jain explains his approach of finding effective MVPs to validate his Educational Product and why Agile Methods simply fail to do so.

Naresh Jain
on Nov 25, 2013
Interview with Simon Brown about Sustainable Competence

Why are some teams successful while others are less than stellar? Can teams use processes to do their work? How can managers help teams to become better? And do we need incentives to improve the quality of software? InfoQ did an interview with Simon Brown about sustainable competence for continuous improvement, balancing people and processes, and software quality and architecture.

Ben Linders
on Nov 14, 2013
The Integration of Agile and the Project Management Office

Agile and the Project Management Office (PMO) are no longer considered diametrically opposed phenomena. With an ever-changing business landscape, organizations are required to adopt more nimble approaches. In many cases, Agile is more suitable within the PMO than people think.

Peter Schmidt
on Nov 01, 2013
Discover to Deliver: Author Q&A

Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman have written a book titled Discover to Deliver: Agile Product Planning and Analysis. The book addresses the planning and analysis activities needed in implementing business products, with a focus on software products and business process change initiatives.

Shane Hastie
on Oct 14, 2013
Much Ado About Commitment

Great projects are generally the end result of commitment from three basic sets of actors: individual team members, teams and projects. With agile teams committing based on the needs of the business and their capabilities, and delivering against the commitment they make.

Meghan Cagley Thomas Cagley
on Sep 28, 2013
Planning and Controlling Complex Projects

Planning and budgeting large projects is often based on trying to predict how development will turn out. Stories are estimated by the development team, but the budget for the whole project is independent from those estimates. Especially for complex projects this leads most often to (unwanted) surprises. Insights from beyond budgeting can help to increase flexibility, and focus on business value.

Jutta Eckstein
on Sep 02, 2013
Interview with Brian Murray from Yammer about Lean Startup and using Minimum Viable Products

Enterprises want early and frequent customer feedback to be able to understand their needs and be able to deliver products that create value for them. Brian Murray explains how Yammer uses Minimum Viable Products to test their business customer hypotheses, and why they focus so much attention on the architecture of their products.

Ben Linders
on Jul 29, 2013

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