Agility and Project Leadership

Here's a nice video from NetObjectives on a new hybrid form of test driven development called "Acceptance Test-Driven Development" (ATDD) where UAT is integrated directly with unit testing:

Unit tests are typically done to reduce technical debt, but usually at a cost of increasing development efforts.  As in everything in life, nothing is free but if executed well, the benefit to cost ratio usually weighs to the positive side when unit tests are employed correctly.

ATDD seems to offset the increase in development efforts since it allows the whole team to collaboratively discusses acceptance criteria, with examples, and then distills them into a set of concrete acceptance tests before development begins.  This ensures that everyone has the same shared understanding of what is actually being built.  It may also facilitate a better shared understanding and definition of what it means to be Done.

For those in software development doing Scrum and XP, I'd advise looking into this.

A study conducted by Yoh seems to show that companies advertised a total of 558,918 agile jobs from 2010 to 2012. During the same time period, there were merely 121,876 active candidates, just 17 candidates for every 100 jobs.  Of the available job seekers, more than 50 percent have 10 years of experience or more, while less than two percent have one to two years of experience. The agile gap exists across the U.S., varying only in its degree of severity:

• Demand outstrips supply by nearly 4x
• Companies have to pay a premium for Agile expertise
• The agile talent gap is most significant in the Pacific Northwest
• Labor pressure for agile talent goes from bad to worse
• Competition for agile talent is fierce

This is revealed in their infographic below:

As I've mentioned in a previous post, the US government is adopting Agile even going so far as requiring the use of the method as this section of a 2010 DOD mandate stipulates:

SEC. 804. IMPLEMENTATION OF NEW ACQUISITION PROCESS FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SYSTEMS.

I'm seeing signs where Kanban is becoming what the Gantt chart was to project managers in the 20th century.  It's becoming all the rage in Agile and rightly so, since it provides the kind of simple dashboard to visualize where the status of your backlog of requirements are at the moment.  Futhermore, the simple and effective way to visualize the WIPs lends itself well to both high tech and low tech implementations.

Though it may seem like the newest thing, it is in fact a creation by one of the greatest process improvement thinkers and guru that also symbolized the resurgence of Japanese manufacturing after the second world war.  He pretty much is the founding father of Lean that launched the infamous Toyota Production System.

Here's a great introduction to Kanban and the history of its creation by Taiichi Ohno:

My future articles and posts here will involve many discussions of Kanban, so I thought I'd pay tribute to it's great founder.  For those who may want to read about his system directly, I would recommend reading his famous book Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production.

I was directed to this interesting Q&A panel discussion on Agile Portfolio Management by Rally Software that is archived on YouTube:

This post from Scott Dunn of Software Development and Human Capital highlights a section from the talk that is a great quote from Dave West, VP Research Director at Forrester Research:

"It's interesting, what we at Forrester have observed across the industry this particular kind of  maniacal kind of addition to the program management kind of practice. PMO's have grown in size and stature in organizations and become incredibly…big, in terms of their execution. One thing that it illustrates is that complexity does not solve complexity.  As organizations wrestle with increasingly diverse portfolio, time-to-market pressures, one thing that they want to do is add more complexity. "When in doubt, add more governance!","When in doubt, add more people to manage the people that are managing the people!" "When in doubt, get more Gannt charts!" And I think that we've found that that does not work. I think it's clear that breakthrough companies or companies that are definitely driving the industry around change and innovation are not solving those problems with complexity."

Despite the fact that Frederick Brooks wrote about the absurdity of this notion in his infamous book The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering nearly 40 years ago, this idea still perpetuates itself!

It's time to start incorporating the Lean and Agile mindset to the PMO!