AGILE IN ACTION

Yesterday at the Agile Business Conference we ran an afternoon World Cafe-style workshop to re-imagine governance. Here’s the deck.

Avast! What better day t’announce our news than International Talk Like A Pirate Day. We be vacatin’ our landlubber lab in Holborn and headin’ t’sea aboard HMS President.

What does the future hold for software development? Trends such as agile, mobile, cloud and open source mean IT leaders are wondering how to ensure their software strategy can keep up with the quickening pace of technological change and use the right combination of in-house and external skills. I worry that the prevailing organizational perception of software development and the obsession with tools, processes and developer productivity will destroy the ability to design and engineer software that is actually capable of delivering the value businesses seek to create.

I’ll be speaking at Agile On The Beach next week (in Falmouth, Cornwall) about managing customer requirements and expectations.

In April, I did a talk at the Hacker News London meetup. The talk was about a startup we’re working with called BuyaPowa, and I did the talk with its founder, Gideon Lask. We only had about 10 minutes. Gideon explained the concept of social commerce at the start and took the last couple at the end to explain how BuyaPowa was currently doing. In between I talked about a few things I thought the tech audience at HNL would find interesting. These were things we’d learned while creating the BuyaPowa Web site and back office.

From the @energizedwork tweet stream with hash tag #rediscoveringkent:

No Bull started with an invitation to write a 10-year anniversary piece on the Agile Manifesto for an InfoQ series by the recipients of the Agile Alliance Gordon Pask Award. It ended up being something bigger. In a way it’s my attempt to record my journey over twelve agile years. I wanted to share some of my experiences and, for what it’s worth, how this agile stuff connects in my head at the moment. It’s not meant to be a rallying call. My hope is simply to raise the awareness of where we are twelve years later; to cause people to stop, step back and take in the present - to celebrate what’s good, be clear about what’s bad and why, reflect on the journey so far and think about the future.

"Technical debt built up in the rush to get software out the door always comes back to bite you. There must be continuous investment to reduce unnecessary rework so that more of the available capacity can deliver value. Diligent attention to the health of the code keeps it habitable. In a way, the code is a place where developers ‘live’. Think of developers as users of the code. Like any other user, for example someone using their mobile phone, they want a good experience each and every time they use it. In that sense, habitable code is a well-kept home that makes it easy for developers to maintain design relevance and prevent obsolescence while increasing reuse and reducing risks along with medium to long-term costs. Long-term business agility begins with healthy software that is constantly deployable. But adapting quickly and cost-effectively in response to changing customer and business needs requires more than flexible software. Greater flexibility is needed in business thinking with reasoning that is open to challenge and new ideas. Business culture needs to embrace a willingness to explore and experiment without fear of failure."

Continuing my last post about the knowledge iceberg, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi tell a story of the Honda City in their book The Knowledge-Creating Company.