State0 Blog

Walter Bodwell is a local venture laborist. He has been doing agile development for a long time. Now he has an agile consulting company called Planigle. I heard him speak a couple of days ago at an Agile Austin event. He talked mostly about taking BMC from Waterfall to Agile development. It was the first time I had heard much about large companies doing agile development. In general, the terms “big” and “agile” seem to be at odds with each other. After listening to Walter for an hour or so, I can almost say them both in the same sentence.  Here are some of the points about scaling agile that I thought were noteworthy:

1. First get management to start thinking in terms of priority lists instead of requirements docs
2. Work hard to get a common build running every night
3. When the common build breaks, make it highest priority to fix it
4. Stay releasable
5. Do not use velocity or other metrics to incentivise or compare: it will cause inflated metrics and competition over collaboration
6. Architect just what you need for this iteration and maybe the next
7. Get your sales team to talk value not features
8. Do not commit to anything in the second half of the release plan
9. Do not accept anything that breaks something else
10. Stay honest technically by refactoring when you see need
11. When outsourcing, hire like you do here and hire full teams
12. No “scrum butts” - meet every day
13. Date based releases work well - when time is up, ship

A general theme that I picked up on was Team collaboration over compensation competition. This seems to be the internal version of “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation“.

I went to a smartphone gathering last night and met some guys from AccessAble Systems. They are smart, fun folks. They are trying to solve an interesting problem: helping people with disabilities navigate the UT campus. At BarZ, we have done accessibility work in a similar way with parks and zoos and the like. It has generated good press and been a rewarding investment. We may even have closed a few deals based on our accessibility offerings. 

I often wonder what the best way is to fund social entrepreneurship is. AccessAble is directly focused on ADA and related initiatives. The entrepreneurial endeavour is dependant on an already socially conscious movement. BarZ is slightly different because we derive our primary income from tour rentals to non-disabled individuals. That is not to say it is better, but it is different. Google, on the third hand, has ventures that may have no clear connection to their primary mission. They do get benevolence points for it though, in the same way that BarZ gets good press for some of the stuff we do and how AccessAble got funding to start with. 

In the US, non-profits can only generate income in ways that align with the general mission of the non-profit. This implies, to me, that this is the model that we support in the US for social entrepreneurship. However, that is not how I would decide where to get funding. I think a more appropriate model/metric in deciding how to generate funds would be sustainability. Will you continue to keep your doors open and your eyes on the goal while generating income doing x? If you answer yes, that is a good way to generate income.

But what do I know?