Posts Tagged ‘LSSC10’
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.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
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.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
It is the Passion, Stupid!
If you harbored some doubts about having good time in Salt Lake City, please take a look at the picture above: Colleague Alex Pukinskis and I “caught” in a minute of pure joy during the Agile Roots conference. I don’t recall the subject we were discussing, but the picture speaks for itself even without a subject.
The relevance of the picture to Agile goes beyond “and here is a picture from the Agile Roots conference.” I actually believe that there is something special in Agile conferences of small to medium scale. These conferences are all about the experience. The program, the presenters and the venue are, of course, important. But, more than anything else these conferences are about savoring the community experience. The value is in the experience.
Over the past year I presented in four small to medium Agile conferences:
My sense is that in each of these conferences the passion of a small group of organizers was the key to success. This passion proved infectious – it affected presenters, participants and volunteers to form an experience that can only be expressed in the words “I wish I were there.”
While I meet many passionate folks in larger Agile/Software conferences, the experience is different. My guess is that it is a matter of “density of passion.” A few passionate organizers suffice to “ignite” a small/medium conference. This core passion does not seem to scale beyond a certain number of participants.
Apropos has been Open Sourced
Erik Huddleston, Walter Bodwell, Stephen Chin and I unveiled Apropos – the Agile Project Portfolio Scheduler – a month ago in the LSSC10 conference in Atlanta, GA. The system is now available as open source. Click here to go to the home page of the project and download the software. It will enable you to:
- Synergies R&D with downstream organizations such as Operations, Professional Services, and Sales
- Increase delivery value through organization-wide alignment of priorities
- Achieve continuous improvement by whole process feedback loops
- Gain realtime visibility into delivery status and potential blockages
The core concept of Apropos – multiple parallel feedback loops – is demonstrated by the following process control diagram:
Figure 1: Process Control View of Apropos
Enjoy Apropos, benefit from it and please give us feedback!
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.
Reformulating the Product Delivery Process
Erik Huddleston, Walter Bodwell, Stephen Chin and I will present and demo an end-to-end Kanban system that addresses the #1 challenge modern software methods pose – reformulation of the product delivery process. We will do so the coming Friday, April 23, 10:45AM at the Lean Software and Systems Conference. Here is the abstract for our presentation/demo:
Software methods can be viewed as the glue that holds the product development process together. With Kanban, the glue is melting on both sides of the process. Traditional portfolio management systems and organizations have difficulty coping with the granularity of Kanban. Likewise, today’s product release and delivery systems and the corresponding organizational constructs are ill-equipped to effectively handle the Kanban flow.
We present a field-tested system for implementing Kanban on an end-to-end basis – from product ideation through continuous delivery. This system reformulates the deconstructed product delivery process to strike an optimal balance between planning, development and operations.
The Agile Executive 