Agile Fashion

A lot of popular folks come to Yahoo! and hang out. There are experts, authors, musicians, luminaries, – giving talks, running workshops, attending conferences, performing, and being a presence on the campus.

Our own group has had people in. I’m not sure who they all are. I hear there was Mary Poppendieck, who’s suggestion of eliminating waste may have been interpreted by a few as meaning some roles could be considered redundant. Seems a shame.

Since I’ve been around, there has been two people we’ve brought in. The first was Jim Coplien, who shook things up a bit. People are still referring to his presentation on agile architecture. We have it on video some where. I wonder if I can make it public? Worth finding out and better than me writing about it now.

Today David Anderson came in, and talked about industrial-strength, agile complimentary, product development system. This system is based in the Theory of Constraints (TOC), where customers pull value through the system. It takes advantage of mathematical fact and scientific backing in queuing theory and Little’s Law. The system is monitored real-time with an ever-changing visual board of all work in progress. Product is developed in a cadence, where success happens with enthusiasm. David calls it a Kanban System for Sustaining Engineering, and with a subtle change, it is a system for software engineering.

Slide Deck in the video

We have a few people here that blog, and some are listed in the blogging guidelines as experts. I sent a note out to ask see if they thought I was within the guidelines. Here’s what I got back from JR Conlin:

Hey Aaron,
The fact that you’re asking puts you in a reasonably small group of folks. The fact that you read the guidelines puts you into a smaller one.

You’re doing the right thing.

Looking at the posts on your blog, i don’t see anything that’s a red flag. (heck, I don’t see anything that’s even lightly yellow or a lovely shade of chartreuse.) Even the most recent work related post at:

http://aaron.sanders.name/lean/finding-and-releasing-a-product-development-bottleneck

discusses things from a methodology rather than “Bob was a total idiot”.

* You’re thinking about what you’re posting.
* You’re not posting up something that will come back and haunt you (my boss, the head of YDN, can tell you a nice horror story about that sort of thing and how the news folks can completely goof up regardless of your best efforts to fix it.)
* You’re not posting up something that you shouldn’t (e.g. Jerry was talking the other day about how much PropertyX sucks and is going to be shut down next month…)

I’m happy to keep an eye on things, but for the most part, i wouldn’t sweat it too bad. There are folks here that are doing far worse things than you are.

Still, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask.

Oh yeah, and have fun.

Recently on the kanbandev Yahoo! group, there were some messages going back and forth between Corey and David on the differences between a retrospective and an operations review.

I think it was decided that the decoupled Operations review is more of a presentation, where the retrospective is a focused discussion. Corey was relating the ops review as multi-team stand up in the large, and then it sounds as if the retrospective would be follow-up work for specific teams.

At any rate, here’s David’s explanation:
Anatomy of an Operations Review
Operations Review
Chapter 14 from Agile Management: Operations Review

Introverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiver

INTPs organize their understanding of any topic by articulating principles, and they are especially drawn to theoretical constructs—such as the MBTI.

INTPs are most likely to find interesting and satisfying those careers that make use of their depth of concentration, their grasp of possibilities, their use of logic and analysis, and their adaptability.

INTPs are about 1% of the general population, making this one of the rarest of types.