Allocating responsibilities and authority to designated roles
A mission that is established for an organization typically must be translated into a set of cooperative obligations with other groups and expected behaviors of internal team members that will accomplish these ends. These responsibilities should be established to ensure that the boundaries between the organization's actors are well defined and comprehensive, and that these responsibilities can reasonably be expected to achieve the business outcomes desired by the organization, within the architecture which the organization has adopted.
Donald Reinertsen describes why organizational boundaries must be taken into account in performing this allocation: Read more »
Synchronization through cycles of elaboration
Requirements are discovered, not collected. This is because it is rarely possible for anyone to think through and write down all of the details required of a target solution. These details require clarity about the problem that is going to be solved, and an adequate understanding of how to characterize acceptable solutions for these problems.
To nail down these details, someone usually must kick-start the process by producing a proposed representation of this information for the highest possible level of a defined requirements hierarchy, which flows from a set of top-level business objectives. This initial set then provides a focus and basis for continued exploration and elaboration at lower levels of refinement. This joint learning and decision-making experience requires everyone to think hard about what they really want, and what can realistically be achieved within the constraints and risks that the project team is given, and can anticipate to encounter over time. Read more »
Managing flow
Nearly all organizations have gaps between their aspirations and their actual performance. These gaps typically are the result of the structure of the organization, the environment in which the organization operates, the capabilities of individuals and infrastructure in the organization, and the interactions of these elements. The way we think about these gaps usually affects how successful we will be in addressing the underlying causes of these gaps over time.
A learning organization can incorporate these performance insights into behavioral changes quickly, efficiently, and effectively. For this learning to gain traction, an organization must design interventions which are affordable, which mitigate the constraints which arise in different situations, and which are appropriate to situations as they arise. Such changes are more likely to get traction when they emerge from the collective insights of the team members rather than mandated interventions from above. Read more »
Attention to details
Throughout my career, I have observed that different people are often attentive to and focused on different levels of conceptual refinement. These perspectives vary according to their roles on a project, their individual personalities, and their experience. I have tended to mentally categorize these individuals into one of two different types of individuals at the top and bottom of this granularity perception universe: a "Roughly right" personality type, and a "Precisely right" type. Read more »
Dynamics of Software Development
Jim McCarthy, the leader of the MS C++ Development team, provides us with a team-centric (as opposed to process or tool-centric) set of practices. The book was first released in 1995, but remains just as relevent and useful today as then. In his introduction, he reminds us that:
The real task of software management is to marshall as much intellect as possible and invest it in the activities that support the creation of the product. Intellect can take the form of abstract human qualities like creativity, cleverness, reasonableness, efficiency, and elegance. Intellect can take on other immaterial qualitieis like timeliness of availability and relevance to customer needs. The point is that to create intellectual property you need the intellectual involvement of the of the creators, and this involvement is the single hardest thing to achieve in any software development effort. Read more »
Discovering and realizing value
The pursuit of value is usually a tenuous and uncertain journey. Like quality, the characteristics we seek in this pursuit are, like beauty, often unique to the eyes of each beholder. The different perspectives of these stakeholders often depend upon their unique domain expertise, lifecycle insights, and understanding of the business and operational environment. Since each of these perspectives are valid within the context they were observed, it can be quite difficult to reconcile them into a single pursuit. Yet without focus, precious resources can be squandered on unsustainable paths or fatal dead ends.
Since the intersection of these factors can be small,, creation of new things requires the creators to embark on a voyage of discovery, with cycles of concurrent experimentation, evaluation, learning, and luck. In his book on the power of adaption, author Tim Harford describes this search for value as a journey across an unfamiliar solution landscape: Read more »
Do enough qualified customers share a common problem?
Technologists never seem to have a shortage of ideas about possible application areas for their technologies. But unless the technologist's sponsors have deep pockets and inexhaustible patience, the enthusiasm of these technologists will usually not be sufficient by itself to fuel the required effort to bring these ideas to fruition across a product's lifecycle, since sponsor priorities and available resources wax and wane with time.
The first customers of new things are called innovators and early adopters, and they receive this label because of their pioneering spirit. Being the first to the finish line with the next new thing could enable them to exploit first mover advantages over competitors. But customers in this red zone typically must exhibit a higher than average tolerance to the uncertainties which predominate this region of technology adoption. Read more »
Evaluating business opportunities
New ventures pour their hearts and souls into developing solutions which will appeal to existing or emerging markets and result in returns on entrepreneurial investments. Yet betting on the wrong horse while in this pursuit can also consume precious limited resources on vague problem statements or unproven ideas.
In order for businesses to make good investments, their endeavors must be based upon a clear set of goals that are consistent with the organization's business model, and will provide 'bang for the buck' for enough customers. This requires a focus on challenges and business scenarios that are most likely to deliver the highest return in the shortest period of time - typically within time frames that are measured in months rather than years. Read more »
Bits instead of atoms
Information is the symbolic representation of ideas and data that are exchanged between or within systems, and which influences the behaviors of those systems. Raw data must be put in context o have meaning. The languages or constructs that we use for the recording and transmission of these exchanges has emerged and been discovered in many forms - transistors, storage devices, and even the genome. The growth in the availability and exchange of information across our society is staggering. Read more »
Principles of Product Development Flow
Don Reinertsen has been providing developers with insightful direction for a number of years. His latest book is a dense, yet passionate argument for adoption of Lean manufacturing principles within new product development projects. His recommendations for tailoring traditional lean methods provides a striking contrast to the 'one size fits all' that have been successfully adopted within manufacturing environments. He does a great job of explaining why adopting Lean techniques within product development activities without these insights can do more harm than good. He provides a rich set of concrete examples about how these ideas and methods can be applied in practice.
Don's biggest emphasis is in these areas: Read more »