As a consultant on a client site there are client tasks, tasks for my consulting firm and tasks I need to perform as a 1099 consultant.    My firm has a weekly status report that I have to submit and has the following topics:

• Accomplished this week
• Not accomplished this week
• Plans for next week
• Concerns/Issues

It is tough to remember everything you need to do or what has been done without tracking.  I have tried to-do lists, task lists, etc and they all came up short.   So I took matters in my own hand.

Using OmniGraffle for the Mac I created personal Kanban board to keep up with my weekly status report.   I used  the BPMN 2.0 stencil to make the diagram.   I then exported the diagram as a PNG file and made it my desktop background.

Click to download

Next using Desktop Notes applications to create my Kanban cards I use colors to denote personal, business, and client tasks.   This helps me keep up with what is important and quickly identify repetitive tasks so I can add them to the backlog after I do my status report for the week

If would like to modify it for your own uses I have made the Creoss-Weekly-Kanban OmniGraffle file available.

+Geoff Corey is consultant for Creoss.

It happens.  For whatever reason a release is blown.  Maybe it was an estimate too low, hardware failure interrupts productivity, team member sick it doesn’t matter.   The release is not going to happen in the manner as it was planned.

Hopefully you are using an agile process such as Paceline, Kanban/Lean, SCRUM and detected the release is not going to happen early.   Unfortunately if you are using a waterfall development process it is likely too late and you will begin to see turnover as your team also knows it isn’t going to happen and do not want to stick around for the death march.

So what is management to do?  You got your release manager or project manager showing the current projection of the release and there just isn’t enough days?   Well the worse thing management can do is announce the  death march.   Visions of Bill Lumbergh peering over your cube wall with coffee mug in hand telling you that you need to work on Saturday and Sunday too will likely bring out the unmotivated Peter Gibbons in all of us.   It actually is dentrimental to the organization.  Not only will it result in demoralizing the team and likely increase turnover, it will also teach the remaining team members to sandbag the estimates.

The best thing management can do is hopefully be capturing week by week, retrospectives on how to improve the process, eliminate roadblocks.  Maybe you should do a software development eco-system assessment as an unbiased way of discovering opportunities to make a more effecient environment.

So now your saying, “yeah, yeah, we did that and we still are not going to make the date!”  Fair.  Did you meet with the team to get their perspective on how to make the date?   Maybe eliminating or scaling down the solution to a tactical approach and do the strategic solution later?   Maybe adding another resource from an under utilized team can bring it in the date.   Did you look at your cumulative flow chart from you kanban tool and eliminate bottlenecks?   Maybe the team is unbalanced number of analysts, developers and quality engineers to have a good flow.

Lastly, did you go back to your customer and tell them to make the date you would have to cut scope?   Maybe the customer is willing to push the date out or cut scope to make a date.   If you are not communicating with the customer on a week by week basis this becomes a painful topic.    However even in fixed-bid projects I have negotiated the reduction in scope to make a critical date for the customer.

In short, the command and control days are over.  Simply saying we will make the date at all costs is part of dinosaur managerial thinking (or lack of thinking).   That is not managing, that is dictation.   Work together as a team with regular dialog with the customer and deliver business value frequently and you will be part of the success of the business instead of an impediment.

Creoss presented this interactive session at the Agile Denver Monthly Meeting on Feb 28, 2011, with members of the Agile Denver users group. In Part One of the session, participants were broken out into groups and asked to answer the question “Your shop is struggling with Agile today, what are the top/first 5 techniques you would apply to put it ona successful path”. The teams then worked diligently to compile their list, select a lead, then present their list. After each team presented their list, we moved into the next part of this meeting. In Part Two, we compared the techniques enumerated by team members in Part One, to techniques that have been found to be extremely effective in accomplishing scalable and sustainable Agile adoption.

The collection of techniques represented in the attached presentation are the top 5 from Paceline, an Agile Adoption Accelerator. Paceline provides foundational, collaborative and artifact techniques that provide “LIFT” for any shop struggling with Agile Adoption. Paceline is value-added to well known Agile approaches such as Scrum, XP. Paceline employs Lean concepts and is highly compliant with Kanban techniques. Paceline focuses on Portfolio, Artifacts, Collaboration, Engineering and Metrics.

Paceline has been applied in over 125 projects/initiatives, across 10 vertical markets, across technology realms as well as numerous geographic configurations.

The following represents the top 5 (out of over 20 techniques) that comprise the Paceline Ecosystem:

• Heartbeat
• Buy/Sell
• Cycle Artifact Review Meeting
• Portfolio
• Cycle Transition Meeting

The above list was presented and compared to the list of items enumerated by participants in the audience.

Click here for the actual presentation

Excellent interactive case study details how a medium enterprise business intelligence software vendor improved ecosystem through best practice approach to Agile adoption.

http://techeloquent.acrobat.com/agilecreoss/

How are you currently managing this process? Are you doing it at ‘Agile’ Speed?
What’s working?  What is not?

Check out the event content. Neat to see Agile serving as a foundation for enterprise modernization.

http://caplex2echicago201009.eventbrite.com/?ref=etckt

Check out this Computer Associates sponsored event on Agile Adoption and Legacy Modernization.

http://caplex2ecincinnati201009.eventbrite.com/?ref=etckt

CREOSS Business Systems is proud to announce the launching of their new Agile Website. Great source of information on Agile Principal and best practice