Thursday, December 28, 2006

Agile Management on Wikipedia

Does anyone know who wrote the Wikipedia entry for Agile Management?

Social Networking for a Living

It’s a while since I’ve blogged about something I’ve been reading. It’s also been a while since I finished reading Thomas H. Davenport’s Thinking for a Living. I really enjoyed it. It is a well researched book based on Davenport’s own experience working as a consultant (for a major firm) and distills insight and analysis from a couple of hundred organizations. The book describes the management and organizational challenges of leading knowledge workers and measuring their success, productivity and efficiency. A pity I read it riding the bus and didn’t scribble any notes. I hate having a book without notes scribbled in the margins.

The biggest single takeaway for me from this book was Davenport’s decision to dedicate a whole chapter to the concept of building and maintaining a social professional network. It seems that the most successful and productive knowledge workers in his observation spend a great deal of time building and maintaining their social network links. The develop and nurture bonds with professional colleagues and they know who to contact to find information when they need it. It is not what you know but who you know, who they know and what they (those 2 degrees or further) know that can help you.

So, do we add social networking skills to the list of criteria we look for when interviewing candidates for senior individual contributor positions and management jobs? I rather think so. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Knowledge+Work, Thomas+Davenport

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Revisiting Prioritizing Requirements

Wow! A whole month off blogging. I guess it was holiday season. Yesterday I reprised my extreme brandy butter making. Actually I had to go read last year’s blog archive to refresh my memory which prompted me to think that it is about time I made some of my more recent audience aware of the best of Agile Management blog from the past 3 years. Well more of that before New Year. Today I want to revisit a post from 18 months ago about prioritizing requirements.

Since, I arrived at Corbis and I’m leading software development in an IT organization that doesn’t make software or a technology product, I have come to realize that my 3 point categorization scheme of commodity, differentiated and spoiler doesn’t cover all the options. There is a fourth category, cost reduction.

In an IT department it is possible to deploy a system because the features delivered allow for business reorganization or business process changes that reduce costs and increase efficiency. By doing so, these features effectively increase the profit margin on the product or service the business is selling.

Hence, cost reduction features need to be prioritized against the imagined cost saving or improved margin generated through implementation. They need to be mixed in and compared against differentiators and spoilers when making a feature mix selection for an iteration or project plan. Technorati tag: Agile, David+Anderson, Project+Management, Product+Marketing