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Insight
The use of Kanban in software development — is it good or bad?
One particular interest I have as a Cutter Senior Consultant in the Agile Product & Project Management practice is in promoting lean and Kanban principles. So when Cutter invited me to be a contributing author to CBR, I immediately suggested the topic of Kanban in software development, not only because it is a recent lean methodology but also because it is being rapidly adopted worldwide. I am hoping this month's issue of CBR will help us understand why.
Whether or not you end up moving forward with the adoption of a new project management methodology, the deliberation that goes into even the consideration of the possibility can be a daunting endeavor. In this issue of CBR, we analyze the results of a survey we conducted of IT and business professionals to gauge their impressions and experiences with Kanban, one of the up-and-comers on the IT scene.
This survey investigated the extent to which organizations are using Kanban in their software development projects and their experience with Kanban. The 83 respondents are from organizations headquartered or based in the US and Canada (43%), Europe and the Middle East (29%), Latin America and Mexico (19%), Asia/Australia/Pacific (7%), and Africa (1%).
A good contract is important to outsourcing; this is an undisputable statement. The contract is the legal basis of the outsourcing agreement and therefore of fundamental importance. However, there are two different research-based views as to just how important the contract is.
Many managers use the mantra, "do more with less." At the recent Agile 2010 conference, Pat Reed from GAP, who copresented with me, shortened this mantra to "do less." The theme of our presentation was value optimization or, as Pat likes to say, "value imagineering" -- determining the highest-valued chunks of functionality to implement next, whether those chunks are project
In the previous Advisor (see "Seeking Out Systemic Risk," 12 August 2010), I discussed the US Congress's establishment of a Financial Stability Council (FSC), one of the main purposes of which is to put an end to, or at least minimize, the effects of firms considered "too big to fail.