What company wouldn’t love to have its product development efforts be more effective? Be able to release new products and product updates with fewer delays and overruns, with higher quality and at lower cost? And be sure of the product-market fit, too?
Many companies spend inordinate amounts of time, effort and management attention on just this. And yet reap little in the way of benefits from that investment.
Why is this? What are the blockers (constraints) frustrating these ambitions?
The Agile approach to software and product development has been around for something like fifteen years now. Its roots go back at least another fifteen years before that. In all that time, more and more folks have tried it out, and more and more of those folks have found it wanting in some degree. This presentation explains where Agile fits in the broader scope of organisation-wide effectiveness, and suggests what needs to change to move on from the Agile approach.
In a nutshell, the issues that plague SIPD seem obvious. They’re mostly the same issues that plague all forms of collaborative knowledge work. Issues compounded by the gulf between conventional or traditional work and the new world of work (i.e. the world of collaborative knowledge work) – a new world distinctly unfamiliar to most in the world of work today.
If we believe in the Myth of Leadership, we may leave it up to “the leaders” to lead change. Incollaborative organisations, where leadership is more distributed and diffuse, this can be a recipe for frustration, inaction and diffusion of effort.
For some clues on how to procede with collaborative change, how about we take a look at Schein’s culture change actions though the lens of fellowship.
What does the Ideal software development organisation / business look like and work like? If our existing organisation / company / business was totally destroyed last night, what would we choose today in rebuilding it? What are the key concepts and principles that we would choose to focus on in creating our ideal organisation?
Creating, sustaining and continually improving effective ways of New Product Development requires the efforts, commitment and active participation of everyone in the organisation. It’s not something that can be delegated, offloaded or left to just one department, function or silo.
If we believe in the Myth of Leadership, we may leave it up to the leaders to lead change. In collaborative organisations, where leadership is more distributed and diffuse, this can be a recipe for frustration, inaction and diffusion of effort
The Antimatter Model For me, the power of any model lies in its predictive ability – that’s to say, in its ability to help us predict what might happen when we intervene in the domains, or systems, to which it applies. “Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.” ~ George Box For example, …Read More
Many proponents of Agile in the field of software development suggest that the whole enterprise (company, firm, organisation, business) could benefit from adopting Agile – i.e. the principles set out in the Agile Manifesto – across the board. I suspect that most of these proponents have little to no clue about the realities of running a business.
The Antimatter Transformation Model Lean bugs me. For no other reason than its blindness to the social sciences. Yes, Toyota and Lean proponents pay lip service to the “Respect For People” principle supposedly at the heart of Lean. But how often does this actually happen in any meaningful way? And I have issues with the …Read More
