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There has never been a more important time to be outstanding at software delivery.  An organisation’s capability in software development is now a major differentiator.  Possibly the difference between success and failure.  So what’s changed? Project failure According to various studies, almost 70% of all software projects fail. Materially fail to meet their objectives, in terms of cost, time, features, or all of the above. Traditional methods of managing software delivery have failed to deliver the predictability they promise. Economic uncertainty We are living in times of unpr ..read more

A battle-scarred Delivery Director, I’ve been in the Agile world for a while now, and still the debate rages on; why is Agile so hard to scale successfully? And what if anything, can we do about it? Interview questions often focus on people’s experience using scaling frameworks such as SAFe and DAD. But not all experience has been positive and it helps both companies and workers to understand why. So, I wracked my brain thinking of the various organisations, projects and teams I’ve had the opportunity to work with, the growth strategy conversations I have been privy to, and the talks / confere ..read more

In many different projects and organisations, I’ve seen people struggle with techniques on how to solve issues without creating huge issue registers that weigh down the project and takes an inordinate amount of time to manage, resulting in the actual problems often not getting the attention they deserve. There are lots of agile techniques for tracking stories and work, like card walls, but what’s an agile oriented approach for issue management? The following are four steps that I’ve seen consistently work well. 1. Make the problem visible Making the problem visible for everyone to see allows p ..read more

As an avid photographer I’ve learned a lesson that sometimes a well composed photo depends more on what is left out of the photo. More is not always better and can sometimes ruin what could have been a good composition. As an example, this photo is as was taken. I realized there were distracting elements (the house, dead tree) and the composition was just not one that created a compelling photo. The highlighted section is where the final crop was made. I left out more than I left in and I believe the end result was a more pleasing composition. You can see the final image here but that is not r ..read more

I recently wrote a post called 10 Things Executives Need To Do Differently (In Agile).  I also presented on this a couple of weeks ago at the Agile Australia conference. Like many things on this list, the first of the 10 things is easy to say and very hard to do.  It’s a key mantra from Lean thinking – “Do Less”. There is overhead, and therefore waste, in task switching.  And there is also more value in delivering something earlier, rather than progressing multiple things and having them all partially complete and taking longer to finish. Here is a deliberately simplistic exampl ..read more

Jeff Patton recently reminded me of two simple strategies for software development that I’ve talked about from time to time—Build Less Software and Start Sooner. I thought I’d follow up on Jeff’s blog and revisit these simple, but powerful strategies. First, managers and executives complain a lot about not delivering software (or any other product really) in a timely manner. In Preston Smith and Don Reinertsen’s ground-breaking book Developing Products in Half the Time they discussed manufactured products, not software products, but many of their ideas are relevant none-the-less. Their researc ..read more