So, your organization wants to go agile? Great. How do you role out agile across a big organization? Tricky! David Wilby, the VP of Products from Borland Software, gave a great look at how Borland rolled out agile throughout their development organization.

First, why did Borland go agile? High-profile strategic projects were sending up some serious signal flares. They were being developed using the traditional waterfall methodology. Borland’s development was living in a reactive environment and the reaction time was SLOW. To rescue the sinking ship, they needed rapid discovery and resolution of problems.

The Pilot Project  Read the rest of this post

This weekend, a friend of mine showed me a cool little piece of software called Lifetick that helps you set, track, and achieve your goals. I played around with it for a while and realized, this is a little too much for me. Setting goals and achieving them should be simple, and not something that requires some software to help you do it.  Read the rest of this post

A lot of organizations I’ve worked with have said that they think adopting agile practices requires a tremendous amount of discipline for teams to be successful. I’ve thought about that a lot and I’m not sure I agree. Actually, it’s more that I don’t like the word discipline. Usually, when people refer to discipline in terms of successfully implementing agile practices, they mean the self-discipline of team members. Looking up self-discipline on Wikipedia, here’s what I found:

Self-discipline refers to the training that one gives one’s self to accomplish a certain task or to adopt a particular pattern of behaviour, even though one would really rather be doing something else.  Read the rest of this post

I’ve been reading a great book called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. It’s not a book about business, agile, marketing, scrum, branding or anything else that I usually write about. Instead, it’s a memoir written by a great novelist about running and training for marathons. But, there was an interesting passage that I think really applies to agile teams (or anyone for that matter). It’s about finding and setting the right pace for sustainability. Here’s Murakami on sustainable pace:  Read the rest of this post