Agile

How could we organize if we want flow efficiency? We would reward managers by their span of service instead of control, part 3, stop organizing by function, and move to something that looks like a product-based organization? My transforming idea for this question was to think about the organization as legacy code. We understand how to refactor legacy code. It takes ...

This series is about how you might move to a product-based organization. Part 1 was about how when we organize by function, the recognition and rewards might prevent a successful agile transformation. Part 2 was about one possibility for moving to a product-based organization. Before we get to who moves where, we need to consider the manager roles. Moving to a product-based ...

Developing a successful product is not down to luck or trying hard enough. Instead, product success starts with making the right strategic decisions. But as product people, we are often so preoccupied with the tactics—be it dealing with an urgent support request or writing new user stories—that we sometimes no longer see the wood for the trees. In the worst ...

In Part 1, I suggested that when we organize by function, the recognition and rewards might prevent a successful agile transformation. In this part, I’ll discuss an option for a product-oriented organization. Consider a Product-Oriented Organization Instead of organizing by function, consider a product-oriented organization. Again, I am not saying this is the only way a product organization would look, ...

If you’re thinking about an agile transformation, you already know about feature teams. You might even call them/use them as product teams. You might wonder about organizing all the work as product work. See Your Current Organization   Many organizations use functions to organize people. The “Typical Product Development Organization” shows the kind of organization I see most often. That’s ...

Before starting the search for the right partner for your custom project, you should identify the type of project as clearly as possible. Different projects require different skill sets, so it’s important to map this out to know what you need, both in terms of in-house experience, and what you need from a partner. The following five questions help to nail ...

When you’ve decided that your business needs a custom software solution, the choice of partner will have an enormous impact on your project. At Foreach, we’re specialized in custom application development, and a big part of that is being a reliable partner to our customers. We found that a partnership rarely, if ever, ‘just clicks’, however. It takes communication and ...

One of the big problems I see with a product orientation (as opposed to a project) is in preparing for ongoing work. You might not start the next project for this product after you complete this project. You might have to round-robin projects for various products because you don’t have enough people to do all the projects at the same ...

We hear a lot these days about project-based organizations vs. product-based organizations. Much of what we do in software is in service of products. Products tend to evolve over time. When we work on projects, we learn from the experience. However, once we finish this release, the “product” (the output of the project) doesn’t change and incorporate our learning for ...