The free monthly resource on business-change and technology using Agile techniques for the wider business community.
Agile Business Change - December 2006 by Marcus Price, Agilier Ltd
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1) Book review: "Assumption-based Planning" by James A. Dewar
2) Agile Business Conference 2006
3) On Hotels and Kano Models
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1) "Assumption-based Planning" by James A. Dewar
Assumption-based Planning (ABP) is the standard work in how to reduce the effect of unintended consequences when planning. Although the technique has its roots in high-level strategic activities such as military planning, it is also directly applicable to systems development activities. There are also interesting links between the techniques in ABP and between scenario-based software development. Read more here...
2) Agile Business Conference 2006
Agilier was very pleased to attend the Agile Business Conference 2006. Some of the highlights were:
- A workshop on an agile version of Earned Value Analysis (EVA). EVA is the industry-standard technique for measuring project budget and schedule variance. One of the criticisms of the technique is that is heavyweight to use, with thirty-three indicators. The agile version of EVA that was demonstrated used just a handful of key indicators. Although in the research stage, it looked very promising - one of the criticisms of agile technologies is that they lack heavyweight credibility with senior executives. This approach may go a long way to ameliorate this.
- An open-source version of one of the most popular software development processes - the Rational Unified Process (RUP). The new version is called the Open Unified Process (OpenUP), from IBM. This is a free version of RUP; much simpler and with fewer documents – all positive things in my opinion. They are various plug-ins planned for different agile methodologies. More details here...
3) On Hotels and Kano Models
As I have been staying in hotels rather often recently, I have noticed that Internet access varies widely from establishment to establishment; varying from almost-nil (“we’ve got dial-up”) through pay-as-you-go up to free wireless access in all areas. This started me thinking about Kano analysis...
Have a Happy Christmas and best wishes for 2007.
Kind regards,
Marcus Price
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Copyright (c) 2006 by Marcus Price
