April 10, 2015

Tales of Lean/ Agile and Paired Sweeping in Bengaluru!

I was in Bangalore for a few days, in part to attend the Agile India 2015 conference.  The Sunday morning after the conference got done, I decided to go for a walk.  Instead of the picturesque Cubbon Park close by, I decided to go exploring the city.  In keeping with the Lean/ Kanban principles discussed at the conference, I decided to maximize flow – and turn in whichever direction the pedestrian crossings were open.  That immediately put me on Kasturba Road.  I thought fleetingly, “Of course, Kasturba Gandhi (Road) had to be next to her husband Mahatma Gandhi (MG) Road!”
April 16, 2014

Checklists – The Lowly and Well-kept secret of Successful Innovation?

Ideas are cheap. Execution is Everything.  One of the many tenets that one hears often in the Silicon Valley underscoring the fact that successful innovation requires not just the initial spark of an idea but the discipline to execute on it till it truly reaches its full potential and impacts people in the way the innovator perhaps originally thought it might! In fact, the history of innovation is replete with examples of not the one who had the original idea but the one who saw its potential and took it all the way to a huge market success!
February 21, 2014

The Other (and very real) Benefits of Application Lifecycle Management!

What are the benefits of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)? Why should you care about ALM?
January 20, 2014

Capacity Planning for Dynamic Teams

Projects are often executed by dynamic teams. They start with a small core team and as the project gains momentum, add resources over time. This is commonly seen in IT service organizations that do fixed price projects. Fixed price projects have a defined scope that needs to be delivered within a contracted budget and within a negotiated timeline. For the purpose of this experience report, “Dynamic teams” or “Fixed Price projects” will be used interchangeably.
December 31, 2013

Energetic. Responsive. Trying Harder. 2014, Here We Come!

Energetic, responsive, trying harder - those were some of the best compliments we received from our customers.  As one of them, who switched from a competing product to us, said, "It looks like you guys are always trying harder and better than the rest of them." Absolutely!
October 25, 2013

Visual Requirements Management with Kanban

There is a lot of attention given to Lean/ Agile product development teams around the work done and the (Lean/ Agile) processes adopted in by the Dev team once a set of features (backlog items) have been identified for a set of sprints (scrums) and/ or Releases.
September 10, 2012

Why We Hate Process

Process improvement (PI) specialists have historically dealt with the challenge of implementing PI initiatives in any organization – especially the resistance to change from the people impacted by the change. Last week, we had the pleasure of meeting a bunch of great folks at Adobe, where among other people, we met Devin Rickard who is responsible for that exact same task at Adobe.
May 4, 2012

Kanban – Evolutionary or Revolutionary?!

One of the key benefits that David Anderson, the renowned Kanban thought-leader and father of the Kanban Method for software development highlights about Kanban is that it is evolutionary and not revolutionary.  That is to say, it does not introduce a humongous new set of processes in an organization and cause massive disruption like traditional methods have tended to do.
April 5, 2010

Product Engineering depends on ALM Lifeline

If there is one team that epitomizes the 'Structured Chaos, Unstructured Innovation' mantra, it is the Digité Engineering team! Our daily churn across different engineering streams of new releases, maintenance and Patch Releases, as well as responding to Support and field issues are all done in a day's work! As Director, Engineering at Digité, my job is to make sure we are all pulling in the same direction!