Monday, February 7, 2011
More meaningful accounting to visualize software economics for more informed decision-making
Posted by Simon Baker
In this article Ross Maynard says it’s unhelpful, even dangerous, to use the same methods to compile management and financial accounts. Regarding financial accounts he talks about matching accruals:
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Thursday, February 3, 2011
Track costs and benefits visibly together
Posted by Simon Baker
Have you noticed that costs and benefits are rarely seen together? I mean literally on the same page or board. Are we afraid of what the truth might tell us? I think this is the case when I've seen business sponsors protect initiatives dear to their heart. Also when product managers continue to add features to their product when user demand has already been satisfied. The blinkers are on. They pretend they can't see anything that might cause harm to their 'darlings'. If it can't be seen it doesn't exist, right?
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Thursday, January 27, 2011
Business cases are in the eye of the business sponsor
Posted by Simon Baker
Projects typically get funded based on their business cases. Business cases that seem to stack up on paper usually get budget. Business cases that don’t stack up are either rejected, because they’re clearly absurd, or, they do get budget because the business sponsor shouted loudest or had more political influence.
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Friday, October 29, 2010
Stopping the line to run with zero known defects
Posted by Simon Baker
At the Agile Evangelists Meetup last night, I said something like “we run with no known defects”. Thank you to Rick Vugteveen for asking me to clarify this. When we discover a defect we take steps to fix it as quickly as possible. It's a take on the Lean manufacturing concept of stop the line. We do this in two ways.
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Thursday, September 2, 2010
Old norms from Training Within Industry get a dust-off
Posted by Simon Baker
When we created our training materials we included a time line stretching back to the 1700s, which identified significant events, revolutionary breakthroughs and key people that have influenced how we work today. This required quite a lot of research, which proved to be both interesting and enlightening. One of the small gems we got from this effort was a lovely set of norms from Training Within Industry, which was created by the United States Department of War during the World War II to provide consulting services to war-related industries.
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Friday, August 20, 2010
Acceptance tests ain't noise pollution
Posted by Simon Baker
I had an idea for a splash screen for a future Energized Work session about acceptance test-driven development but then a friend suggested a t-shirt.
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Thursday, August 19, 2010
Boards for a more user-focused discovery-oriented approach
Posted by Simon Baker
Backlog out. Mind-map in showing user activities and high-level tasks
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Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Sketchnotes made during one of our training sessions
Posted by Simon Baker
You might've already seen these sketch notes but I wanted to publish them on this blog because, well, I think they're just wicked. They were drawn by the inimitable Tim Malbon at Made By Many during an Energized Work training session.
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Sunday, August 15, 2010
PDCA-powered learning
Posted by Simon Baker
Deming's Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle is a scientific method for problem resolution. But it isn't just about resolving problems in a timely fashion. Used properly it raises awareness of context in order to solve a problem by identifying and removing its root cause so the problem won't recur and thus improve the long-term performance of the system.
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