Posts Tagged ‘Apropos’
Apropos is Going Places
Pictured above is a screen shot from the forthcoming Rally implementation of Apropos – the end-to-end Kanban system unveiled by Erik Huddleston, Stephen Chin, Walter Bodwell and me in the Lean Software and Systems conference last April.
Pictured below is Stephen Chin presenting the forthcoming product in the recent JavaOne conference:
The commercial version by Rally builds on the four pillars of the original implementation of Apropos at Inovis and the subsequent open source version:
- Stakeholder Based Investment Themes
- Business Case Management
- Upstream and Downstream WIP Limits
- Dynamic Allocations
These four pillars enable Apropos users to dynamically adjust their plans as needed in accord with the realities of end-to-end execution. Agile portfolio planning and actual execution truly run alongside each other as depicted in the following figure:
Adjustments to allocations can take place in either in the plan or in execution. Here are two typical examples of stakeholders’ dialogs:
- In planning: “In response to the quick growth of the sales funnel, we decide to increase the % of time allotted to tactical sales opportunities from 35% of the total R&D budget to 40%.”
- In execution: “The introduction of product Pj will be delayed by three months due to lack of qualified professional services resources. During this period, the affected R&D resources will be reassigned to help with multi-tenant aspects of a SaaS version of product Pk.”
Recommendations: Consider using the open source version of Apropos for a small-scale pilot as part of your 2011 planning/budget cycle. If the pilot proves a good fit with your needs, switch over to the commercial version in the 2012 planning/budget cycle.
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Considering end-to-end Agile/Kanban roll-out? Let me know if you would like assistance in planning and implementing a roll-out which focuses on continuous value delivery. Click Services for details.
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Open-Sourcing the Inovis End-to-End Kanban System
Source: Gat, Huddleson, Bodwell and Chin, “Reformulating the Product Delivery Process“
Colleague and “partner in crime” Stephen Chin has published a post on the Inovis End-to-End Kanban System (aka Apropos) we presented at the LSSC10 conference on April 23. As readers of this blog might recall, the system tracks features through their full life-cycle from proposal to validation, ensuring actionable feedback cycles. By so doing it firmly anchors the software method in the overall business context with special attention to operational aspects such as deployment, monitoring and support.
Stephen outlines details of the forthcoming open-sourcing of Apropos as follows:
The plan for this tool is to do the initial launch of a BSD-licensed open-source version on May 22nd. This will include support for the Rally Community Edition, which is free for up to 10 users. In future releases we plan to support other Agile Lifecycle Management tools, both commercial and open-source, but will need assistance from the community to do this.
If you are interested in helping out with this project, please contact me. I will have limited bandwidth until after the initial launch, but after that would love to scale up this project with interested parties.
I really can’t wait till the 22nd. IMHO Apropos has the potential to become the leading Kanban system by the community for the community.
Apropos – The Inovis End-to-End Kanban System
Figure 1: End-to-end flow slide from Reformulating the Product Delivery Process
Erik Huddleston, Walter Bodwell, Stephen Chin and I delivered a presentation at LSSC10 on the design and implementation of the end-to-end Kanban system Apropos at Inovis. The presentation highlights four key ingredients of the ‘secret sauce’ that makes Apropos so powerful:
- Stakeholder Based Investment Themes
- Business Case Management
- Upstream and Downstream WIP Limits
- Dynamic Allocations
You can read the slides here. A recording of the presentation will soon be posted by InfoQ. A commercial friendly open-source license of the code will be available on May 22, 2010.
The Agile Executive 