Portfolio Management:
"Value-Driven Investment and Portfolio Management" (VD-IPM) is a discipline for C-Level and management teams to organize their project investments based on value to their business. In Lean terms - "optimizing the whole". Value can be simply classified with the IRACIS acronym: Increase Revenue, Avoid Costs, Improve Service.
This draws upon Lean principles with a focus on finishing over starting work - with projects staffed and funded for success, not merely muddling along. It requires the courage and insight to make investment priority decisions and match development demand to to objectively determined development capacity.
Jay Conne, a Certified ScrumMaster-Practicing, has launched many Agile-Scrum software development teams, has co-taught Certified ScrumMaster(CSM) certification training, and has developed Lean-Agile-Scrum Seminars and Workshops.
Project Management:
We use an Agile approach to projects which integrates principles from Lean, Agile, Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), and more. Agile has become the umbrella term for this whole scope, while Scrum is a flexible framework for getting started. More specifically, Scrum is an interaction model for members of a cross-functional creative team and between that team and the management/customer team.
Our goal is to offer an alternative to the traditional demand for inappropriate certainty about detailed requirements in the name of professionalism, which simply confuses speculation with knowledge of details and making delivery commitments. The Scrum approach dramatically improves trust between the management and development teams by delivering useable results in as little as 7-day iterations. At the same time, we allow the management team to adjust priorities for future iterations at zero cost. We insist on clarity of requirements, but at no more detailed a level than is appropriate for the current stage of the project. We support the process of discovery that is inherent in any product development including software development. We do not pretend to know what we do not yet know.
Lean-Agile-Scrum-XP Coaching and Training:
Our software development approach is available as training and coaching for your internal teams.
The training can be sized to fit your needs, but is typically a three to five day sequence consisting of:
- 2-days of Lean-Agile-Scrum-XP Process Discovery
- 1 to 2-days of Project Discovery - depending on the complexity of your project
- 1/2 to 1-day of Team Discovery to start the team going on your project, establishing team agreements for self-organizing & self-managing and preparing for the first iteration.
The most courageous of teams start 1-week iterations as the initial week ends. One pair of teams in a prominent company has two teams still happily running 1-week iterations for many years now with a tremendous rate of learning.
Business Systems:
We specify, design, deliver and evaluate systems to fit the real complexity and rate of change of business. We focus on identifying and clearly communicating requirements that have explicit business value. Value expressed as increasing revenue, avoiding costs or improving service and reputation. We design systems that can be understood and changed as easily as possible. We lead and train teams to incrementally deliver quality software. And we provide business development and training for conceptually demanding technologies.
Database:
A data-centric view of systems builds a foundation on the most stable aspect of a business, the objects it needs to track, i.e. money, inventory, staff, customers, vendors, orders, work-in-process, projects, etc. In contrast, the most dynamic aspects of a business are its processes and procedures as it continuously responds to market demand. Databases are the keeper of a business's digital assets and require a discipline to match the value of the assets being managed. Transactions then provide the units of update and inquiry against those assets, thereby automating the business.
Programming Languages:
Programming languages are most effective when they permit problems to be described in the language of the experts in the discipline being automated. High level language descriptions of problems can keep them understandable and thereby maintainable. Two historic projects have pushed the envelope on such languages: Water Language from Clear Methods for prototyping; and Object Process Network (OPN) for complex, collaborative, systems architecting, from Benjamin Koo's January 2005 Ph.D. thesis in MIT's Engineering Systems Division.
For details on these, please see Special Projects in the nav-bar on the left and click on Water Language and OPN.
