Paul McArdle of Global-Roam writes about an interesting article by Roger Martin in the Harvard Business Review (which ca be found here, but requires payment for the full article): ‘The Age of Customer Capitalism’.

The main drive of Agile processes is to deliver business value as effectively as possible. For anyone working in a more complex environment, this automatically raises the question of what business value is, and how it should be prioritised. Things like ROI can be clear, but in my experience is hardly ever used with any kind of rigour. The maximising of profits is very nice, but can not often be linked directly to the particular feature that is being developed.

I just came across an old article by Alistair Cockburn, called Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order component in software development that should be required reading for anyone working in software development. The title might be a little off-putting, but the message of the article is simple: It’s the people that make or break a project.

Cockburn first describes his own history in designing methodologies, and running into the same problems again and again:

A colleague of mine, Dion Nicolaas, has written what I think is best described as a manual for Scrum: Seven habits of highly effective scrum-teams. The great thing about this book is that it is incredibly practical, a true implementation guide. The subjects discussed are there in enough detail that anyone using scrum will immediately be able to place them, but are very short and to-the-point, obviously coming directly from practical experience. Of course, working at the same company, I know he’s been very successful implemeting scrum in his team.

The Declaration of Interdependence is an initiative of the APLN, and codifies some guidelines for lean and agile (project) management. It’s not new, but it does make for a nice companion to the Agile Manifesto with a different way of stating the same principles, with a focus to link them to the business reasons for applying the principles.

The fear of economic downturn can make companies reluctant to enter into any kind of commitment (don’t worry, this won’t deteriorate into some sort of relationship advice… I think). They don’t want to commit to their employees, by stopping bonuses, canceling pay-raises, ’no-motions’, and sticking to temporary contracts only.

When seen as a matter of risk-management this can readily be understood: limit expenses, and make sure it won’t be too problematic to get rid of any of your employees, should the necessity arrive. But if we look at these practices from the viewpoint of building a sustainable company other considerations should be taken into account.

A useful tutorial to get rid of the irritating password prompt by the gnome keyring at every login. It uses pam to pass-through the password you logged-in with to the keyring. As long as that is the same password is the same one as the one for the keyring, that is, but that is the default.