Agile Development Blog

The NPR (National Public Radio) inauguration coverage of President Obama got me thinking about patterns for 2009. First, I was enjoying the notion that Obama created today as a national day of service (see a new clearinghouse for local service opportunities at www.usaservice.org and www.mlkday.gov), but I was lamenting that I did not have enough time to drum up some organized effort at Rally or with EFCO.

Listing of Service Opportunities around Boulder, CO from USAservice.org

My Start, Stop and Keep Doing List

That got me thinking about my focus for 2009.  Over our holiday week off at Rally, I took time to create a Stop, Start and Keep Doing list, which is a practice encouraged by Jim Collins, among others.

For example, one of the things on my Start Doing list is to be the Executive Director of EFCO, working on scaling my dream around socially responsible businesses.  I’ll focus more on corporate social responsibility later, but for 2009I think folks who are employed should all be focused on their Stop Doing list.

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“Agility is no longer just an interesting idea to chat about while continuing to do business as usual.” - Michael Hugos, CIO Magazine

Through an article out this week, Cisco shows that software agility can, in fact, scale to organizational agility.

This CIO Magazine blog post from Michael Hugos explores the way Cisco is breaking its internal structure into self-managing Scrums for organizational agility.

Says Hugo, “Now instead of a small group of executives telling everybody else what to do, people have authority to figure out for themselves what to do… People are motivated to coordinate and cooperate with each other by a financial incentive system that rewards them for their common successes instead of rewarding each manager for their individual successes (easy to see how that could be called socialist if you wanted to dismiss the idea).”

This bold move could certainly be called the organization of the future.

Further Reading:

• Top 10 Characteristics of an Agile Organization
• Scaling Lean and Agile Development – Ask Bas and Craig
• More Than One Way to Roll-Out Agile