value stream

management, MPD

Why Shared Services “Teams” Don’t Work with Agility

One of my clients wants to use shared services “teams” as they start their agile transformation. Their developers work on a product for months and years at a time. However, the testers and UI people are part of pools of people. The organization calls these testers and UI people, “shared services.” Shared service-thinking denies the […]

management, MPD

Help Managers Visualize Their Problems

I’ve been working with several managers at organizations large and small, who want to capitalize their software “earlier.” These managers have some strongly-held beliefs about the people: People are resources Resources can multitask on several projects at a time If “headquarters” does the difficult work, you can move the “grunt” work to lower wage areas

agile, MPD

How Long Are Your Iterations? Part 2

When I teach agile, I explain I like small and short stories. I want to see value in the product every day. Many developers can’t do that. That’s because they have interdependencies with other teams—not developers on their team, but other teams. They can’t implement in the way the picture next to this shows: small,

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