Better Software - March 2009 - (Page 30) Figure 4: Each iteration delivers working software, measured in “story points.” The release status can easily be tracked in a burn-up chart. These sub-organizations could appear in any IT organization, no matter what industry the business is in. These organizations fail a simple litmus test—clear line of sight with a business product. By organizing in this sub-optimal way, projects are delaying integration, which is a clear violation of the lean principle “optimize the whole.” Another common pattern observed in PPM organizations is when large projects track status against a plan that indicates progress in each engineering phase. Agile principles emphasize that the most valuable indicator of status is working software. Large engineering efforts often show “green” status through the requirements, analysis, design, and build phases, but then mysteriously indicate “red” (as in two months behind) overnight. Lean claims that inventories hide true status and quality. Large inventories also mean delays in detecting errors, which cause waste. These two factors combine for yet another waste: large integration costs when unexpected events occur, due either to timing or to dependencies between the projects. 30 BETTER SOFTWARE MARCH 2009 Lean Focus—Speed and Quality An enterprise IT organization that is truly in sync with its business clients positions itself to help identify minimal releasable features and is structured to release them quickly. Organizations successfully making the transition to lean-agile discover that by going fast, impediments are quickly exposed so that the organization can self-correct. When the entire enterprise is focused on speed, market opportunities and threats can be leveraged and rapid savings or profits realized. In order to accommodate this, IT must begin to see delivery and quality as sustainable activities, which are constantly improved by short-cycle feedback loops. Once time to market becomes the focus, quality paradoxically goes up, as validation becomes more practical (through tight business coupling). Building littleused function also diminishes with this focus. This has the benefit of creating less complex systems because they are smaller, resulting again in higher quality. www.StickyMinds.com A common pattern that emerges from organizations seeking this competitive advantage is that test-driven development and attention to agile design patterns are necessary for sustainable scaling of lean-agile teams. The reason is simple: Allowing productive teams to deliver quickly will not scale if they rapidly deliver disparate and redundant systems. For agile teams to scale successfully, they must pay attention to quality and integration. Quality comes from rolling out test-driven development approaches and leveraging emergent design patterns. This allows agile architectures that are geared toward change tolerance to emerge, giving business clients the competitive advantage of quick time to market. The Lean Portfolio— Expected and Unexpected Benefits The lean portfolio is a set or container of capabilities, defined at a high level, which the business requires to implement market or response strategies. These capabilities map loosely to capability state- http://www.StickyMinds.com
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