Business Agility & Software Engineering Excellence

In statistical project management (SPM), we simplify the project management approach by eliminating many concepts that the dominant project management methodologies consider central. Objects represent a repeatable thing that non-IT people can wrap their minds around. They are supposed to be concrete, like a balance sheet report in an accounting system or an employee demographics data-entry Web form. Since objects are supposed to be repeatable, project managers and the IT organization would find it very helpful to know how long, on average, it takes teams to create and operate related objects. Thus, objects become an important list of deliverables and one that is crucial to estimate accurately. Objects represent, from the user’s perspective, the list of things that are delivered to them — a kind of a bill of materials.

Agile is spreading and changing at such a rate that we are devoting a second issue of Cutter Business Technology Journal to the topic. As with our first issue on cutting-edge Agile, the articles come from a diverse group of authors, both male and female and from different countries.

After outlining the benefits of his com­pany’s experiment with transparency, the author discusses the difficulties with loss of power and control, slower decision-making processes, and what he calls “frictional costs,” when ordinary workers, not specialists, are making corporate decisions. He describes his com­pany’s approach to these difficulties.