Dude, where’s my customer?
Startups that operate under a stealth mode achieve over 90% failure rates. While they might have bright ideas, access to top talent, adequate funding, etc., they typically fail to accomplish their original objectives. A key reason behind such spectacular failure rates is premature scaling at each stage of the startup. In this talk, we will examine the mistakes that startups make, and what we can learn from the Customer Development model proposed by Steve Blank to improve better chances of survival and growth....
How Lean thinking improves productivity in software teams?
At its core, productivity for a software team (often wrongly termed as programming productivity because software development is much more than mere programming) looks like a great idea. In its simplest form, it compares output of the team (amount of useful and usable software created, amount of unnecessary rework done, number of defects produced, etc.) to the input (time, effort and resources invested in producing software) factored-in by the uniqueness of the given software endeavor and other external environmental factors (complexity of the software being produced, impact due to team sizes, nature of team spread and its familiarity with the problem at hand, problem domain, and so on). Unless you are willing to discount software development as a non-business critical activity undertaken purely for the labor of love that should not be ‘measured’ lest it dilutes the very ethos of software development as a creative cognitive endeavor,...
What is a Lean Enterprise ?
 A Lean Enterprise is defined as “a business system for organizing and managing product development, operations, suppliers, and customer relations. Business and other organizations use lean principles, practices, and tools to create precise customer value—goods and services with higher quality and fewer defects—with less human effort, less space, less capital, and less time than the traditional system of mass production.” Womack and Jones describe Lean Enterprise in detail as follows: “The objectives for the lean enterprise are very simple: Correctly specify value for the customer, avoiding the normal tendency for each firm along the stream to define value differently to favor its own role in providing it. …Then identify all the actions required to bring a product from concept to launch, from order to delivery, and from raw material into the hands of the customer and on through...
Toyota’s Wisdom for Tomorrow’s Managers
 I just completed first draft of this paper for business review magazine of a city college of business administration. If it gets selected for publication, you will get to read the full paper on this site :). Here is the abstract: Toyota’s pioneering work in automobile production systems continues to be among the most profound and radical departure from conventional thinking since the times of Henry Ford, and has led to unprecedented cost efficiencies and quality improvements for them. For long, it was thought to be a Japanese expertise – one that could not be duplicated by non-Japanese people, or outside Japan. However, subsequent to Womack and Jones’ pioneering works, “The Machine that Changed the World†and “Lean Thinkingâ€, it has not only been adopted outside Japan, its universal principles are also finding huge acceptance in other sectors...
What is the Inventory of your Software Development project ?
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Is Scrum serving your Software Development, or the other way round ?
There was a question on the group Scrum Practitioners on LinkedIn if “…implementing Scrum as a whole should be our goal or would you use aspects of the Scrum methodology to realise an agile culture change ?†Looking at the disproportionately large number (with an increasing trend) of posts on popular mailing lists on Scrum and Agile software development, I am alarmed that most energy and thought is being spent on figuring out “how Agile you are”, how should the user stories be worded, and whether one uses planning poker or not ? I mean…does it really matter whether you use ‘deal hours’ or ‘story points’ whatever that means ? If your team members are not speaking out ‘impediments’ in daily scrum…come on…that was the case in good old days also…expecting that Scrumifying the process will make everyone speak...