Social Glass

I’ve just finished reading and highly recommend Rework by the guys from 37Signals.  While the book is over 250 pages, it’s a quick read (I read it in about 2.5 hours).

We recently dove head first into Scrum where I work, and I’m having my team read this book as an Agile “reinforcer”.   But Rework isn’t about Agile software development tactics per se.  Instead, it affirms the cultural and psychological shift that’s necessary in reducing the waste that’s often manufactured during product development cycles.

Let me know what you think.

It’s been two years since my last trip to China.  This time I’m here to conduct Agile training.  I conducted a two day workshop with practical, hands on sessions.  My team of 18 asked a lot of questions, which is usually a sign that I was getting the point across.  If we’re successful, I’ll be writing whitepapers on how to be Agile with offshore resources.  If we’re not, well, that’s another story.

And Chinese Sprite was my favorite, throat wetting drink during the session.

(cross-posted from the active.com Product Development blog)
I came across these while reading the Agile Software Development blog and thought they were interesting enough to share here:

1. Active user involvement is imperative
2. The team must be empowered to make decisions
3. Requirements Timescale is Fixed
4. Capture requirements at a high level; lightweight & visual
5. Develop small, incremental releases and iterate
6. Focus on frequent delivery of products
7. Complete each feature before moving on to the next
8. Apply the 80/20 rule
9. Testing is integrated throughout the project lifecycle – test early and often
10. A collaborative & cooperative approach between all stakeholders is essential

It’s a difficult transition to move from Waterfall to Agile, especially with a distributed team. But if done correctly I’m convinced the payoffs in improved efficiency and quality could be great.

I’ve been finding it difficult to stay focused on Enterpise 2.0 after having worked at Active for about 9 months now.  As a consultant, I was living Enterprise 2.0 every day.  As a Development Manager, I’m more concerned with keeping a team of Software Engineers, QA and IT busy and engaged.

I have a new found appreciation for the middle management layer,  and I’m ever more aware that management is an art (and I’m not sure how good of an artist I am yet).

But, I plan on visiting this blog more often, hopefully to include more information about how I’m working with my offshore team, the business and IT in the most efficient and emergent way.  I also think we should be talking more about agile software development when we talk about Enterprise 2.0.  It seems agile wants to remove barriers and flatten hierarchies for the sake of efficiency and high-quality output, just like Enterprise 2.0.  As we’re trying to be more agile at work this is definitely a topic I’ll be touching more on.