Dr. Ivar Jacobson was invited to present the keynote at this year’s TUP conference held on December 10, 2011, in Beijing, China. TUP (Technology/User Experience/Product) includes a series of events hosted by CSDN, the biggest IT community in China. The speakers invited for these events are famous IT experts; and attendees are IT and management people who are interested in IT product development.  I was very pleased to present lean and agile development sessions along with Dr. PanWei Ng at the conference. With three IJI members presenting it became an IJI day at TUP 2011.

Dr. Jacobson presented “Liberating the Essence from the Burden of the Whole: A Renaissance in Lean Thinking”. Ivar’s lively and engaging session clearly demonstrated to attendees the new reasoning around lean and that to stay lean you need to stay lean from the beginning of a project rather than trying to eliminate waste later.  By presenting three case studies representing business, software product and process method, Ivar demonstrated the concept of a “kernel” --representing the essence of something as a good starting point for most things you build.  You start lean and you stay lean throughout the life of what you build. 

Read More

We’ve probably all been there at one time or another in our careers. We knew that change within our organisation had to happen. We were careful and we sought input before creating our plan. With careful consideration we built a plan that encompassed all our critical stakeholders; our budget was approved by management and our first critical new changes were implemented successfully.
Great first signs – right? But wait…our plan begins to die before it even takes off. Key stakeholders who appeared to be onboard are now complacent. And perhaps even worse, they are becoming large barriers to the success of the project.

Can it be turned around?

Implementing corporate change can be one of the toughest challenges for large organisations. Software development departments that want to scale their agile projects often run into this obstacle. The agile project that may have been extremely successful within a small team or department begins to crack and fall apart as the organisation attempts to scale Agile.  Read More

On the evening of November 14th, Ivar Jacobson International hosted an evening of camaraderie for our friends: staff, former colleagues, customers and partners at our office in Kista, Sweden.

It was an evening to share our experiences and update our guests on IJI’s recent activities and developments.

Ivar Jacobson, Svante Lidman, Graham Marsh and I presented IJI at the event and presented topics ranging from Scaling Agile to our new Use-Case 2.0 that our customers are currently using.

Svante Lidman presented an engaging and interesting presentation called “Learning’s from Large Scale Agile Transformation”. Svante discussed how a large client with thousands of developers and a large legacy system who was following a waterfall approach to software development is now making a successful transformation to becoming more agile.

Ivar updated attendees on Use-Case 2.0 (read Ivar’s previous posts for more info on this topic) and also presented Semat and Liberating the Essence from the Burden of the Whole: A Renaissance in Lean Thinking.

If you would like to be on our mailing list to be invited to one of our future events, drop me an email.

Another week, another event! This time it was the turn of the Agile Business Conference in London. It was encouraging to see an excellent turn out for this 3 day event, and an overwhelmingly positive attitude from delegates, speakers & sponsors. The thing that most struck me about the whole experience was that agile software development really is breaking out and growing up. This was a conference not just for people wanting to know what it’s all about and how to get started, but for people that want to improve and grow, and use agile in ever more complex and challenging environments. But in the words of the famous american baseball player, Casey Stengel: “The trick is growing up without growing old”....let's hope the agile movement is not just another fad in the development of the software engineering profession.

Quotation source: www.brainyquote.com.

It was great to see Ivar Jacobson present the award last week to Christine Henly of Allianz. Christine was one of a group of five Business Analysts from Allianz, Barclays, Lloyds and The Post Office that were shortlisted for the award – so well done Christine!

Ivar presented the award just after his (typically amusing) key note speech in which he introduced Use Case 2.0 – an elegant bringing together of the popular and powerful use case approach with user stories, which is currently much in vogue with the agile community. Use Case 2.0 provides an agile requirements approach that scales for large and complex systems development.

In this photograph, Christine is flanked by Ivar Jacobson (left) and AssistKD director Paul Turner (right). Picture Source: AssistKD

Learn more about the conference and the award program by visiting the IIBA event website.

The 6th annual Agile China was held in Beijing from September 1 – 3, 2011. Agile China is a summit of agile world enthusiasts gathering in China. For the past five years, it’s attracted world-class agile experts, such as Martin Fowler, Kent Beck, Dave Thomas, James Grenning, and Mary Poppendieck et al, and tens of  thousands of attendees across China and overseas. It represents the highest level of development and adoption of agile development in China.

This year’s conference proved to be another successful event. The three-day event was packed by some 700 attendees. The conference was opened by Mr. Wang Jun, General Secretary of China System and Software Process Improvement Association, the host of the conference, and keynote by Linda Rising, the authour of “Fearless Change”, followed by parallel sessions on agile training camp, agile new trend, and agile testing and quality control. People gathered to share their experience and to explore new ideas and  trends. The conference atmosphere was full of energy and excitement. Particularly, I truly enjoyed the free style of discussions and presentations – in a real agile spirit. Read More

As discussed in an earlier blog post, you need to measure the desired results.  If Agility and Agile Transformation is going to make you better, then look at the things it is going to make better and set some targets.  If it is going to make you faster, then look at the things it is going to make faster and again set some targets and track against them.  If it is going to make you cheaper and happier, then focus on those things.  This approach begins to make your measurement framework much more inspirational.

Historically, many organisations struggle with their Organisational Measurement getting any traction.  I have seen many organisations where every year they introduce some key performance indicators and by the end of they year, they have abandoned them.  I have seen many organisations with large dashboards with graphs no one understands and no one looks at but a lot of money is spent on them.

You need to change this whole approach.  Measurement needs to change at the organisational level to become more agile – valuing people over processes – collaboration over contracts etc. All the great things from the Agile Manifesto should be visible within your measurement program as well. 

A balanced scorecard organized around the four goals of better, faster, cheaper and happier is a great place to start.  Recently, we worked with KPN and implemented a organizational measurement program using the better, faster cheaper, happier framework. It was an excellent framework for their organisation. It allowed them to look at what is important in terms of getting better – Were they becoming more predictable and were they delivering a higher level of quality?, faster – cheaper - , and happier -    The framework allowed them to look at the problem areas and phrase questions that business and IT could understand. It was so successful that everyone in the whole organization, including the business, embraced the measures with both enthusiasm and commitment. See the case study / webinar for more details.

A better, faster, cheaper, happier balanced scorecard provides a way to communicate the effectiveness of IT in a way that everybody in the organisation can embrace and understand. It also allows you to measure success in a way that is independent of the processes used by the projects and teams being measured – essential if you want to demonstrate that an agile approach is better than more traditional approaches or build a platform to enable you to continually improve and adapt your agile way-of-working.

The Software Development Process Challenge

*The first post in this series can be read here

Before I describe the deck of cards, I’d like to set the stage for using the cards. We can view software development from three time-scales (see Figure 1). Successful software development process is in essence, being able to coordinate the three time-scales effectively.

• The broadest time scale covers from the beginning to the end of a software development cycle which is marked by several key business decision making milestones. This is of great interest to stakeholders and decision makers on whether development can proceed or whether the software is suitable for release.
• The next time scale breaks the lifecycle into time-periods – months, or weeks, or what is known as an iteration. It is a fixed time-box where a number of target objectives are to be met by a development team. If there are multiple teams, then each team would be assigned their specific set of objectives. This is where team leaders operate.
• The lowest time scale is what a team member does. The work done here can be in terms of hours or days depending on the complexity of the work.

Figure 1:The Three Perspectives to Software Development.

A major problem I see in many development organizations is the serious disconnect between the three levels. The objectives set at the higher level do not easily translate to work at lower levels. Lower levels are unable to see their contribution to higher level objectives. There is a  miscommunication between the levels, and poor coordination within the same level, which leads to blockages which should not even happen. We need to solve this.

Nowhere is the change in values of iterative development planning and measuring more important than in the management team. If the project is to iterate successfully, it must be managed iteratively.

The project manager must believe that an iterative approach is the best way to manage the project and must be prepared to set aside any inflexible, predictive, waterfall management practices that have been used before. This doesn’t mean that you should throw away all the good management practices and experiences you have built up over the years; good, disciplined project management is essential to the effective application of iterative development techniques. It is just that you must put aside some of the conventional wisdom about planning to give yourself the freedom to fully exploit the flexibility and power of the iterative approach.

The conventional approach to planning is prescriptive, based on the assumptions that the work which needs to be done can be predicted with great precision and that the unusual rarely occurs. This is true for many things—building a bridge over a highway or a standard family dwelling or a prefabricated commercial building, for example. These engineering efforts are technically predictable, and planning this kind of work is based on hundreds of years of experience. This experience has given rise to the generic project lifecycle in which the different types of project activities are aligned to the single phase that bears their name (i.e. Requirements, Analysis, Design, Code, Test and Deploy). Read More

Adopting an agile approach has a lot of benefits, not just when developing software and improving team working but for all aspects of our business. When it comes to measurement, I recommend that we all take an agile approach and keep things simple, open and adaptive to change. 

A simple, intuitive score-card is essential for any team or organization embarking on any form of agile adoption or transformation. The Better, Faster, Cheaper, Happier framework provides a great starting point for motivating and measuring your changes.

Agile: What’s the Point?

Let’s stop and think about why businesses get involved in agility.  What is the promise of agility that is so attractive to businesses?  What we at IJI have found when talking to business people is that agility is appealing because of the belief that better products will be built.  Not only will they be better software products but they will be built faster and cheaper than before. The promise is certainly there  and this is what people want to see as they make investments in agile adoption and, in particular, any kind of large scale agile transformation. 

The other significant result claimed for agile ways-of-working is that there will be an overall increase in everyone’s happiness - happier customers; happier users; happier sponsors; happier purchasers, and happier developers. Read More