Agile Complexification Inverter

Apple and IBM joining forces - oh really?  Will George Orwell be rolling over in his grave - will his 1984 become truth in 2014? Well, one must follow the news to make sense of that gibberish... and the 1984 reference.... it goes back to the famous Superbowl Apple commercial introducing the Mac . An IBM/Apple partnership to tunnel into the enterprise walled garden for devices is a great idea.  As a consumer it works for me.  I don't know of any enterprises that can pass the Starbucks Test (test for the ubiquity of access for the digital native). In 2005 (years before the iPhone) Apple joined forces with Motorola to launch the ROKR, a cell phone and iTunes connected music player. It took the world a few years to recognize that the Wright brothers had flown the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, NC (first flight in Dec. 1903 to 1908 public demonstrations). -- The Wright Brothers by  David McCullough   "Jointly developed with Motorola and made available on what was the

Is your "Agile Project Manager" driving the team to increase their velocity?  Has the Agile Death March begun? Fred Brooks warned us of these dangers nearly 25 years ago in The Mythical Man-Month . One antidote to the PM schedule crunching technique of throwing warm bodies at the problem is to remove the impediments that are known (or just under the surface) within the structure and environment that holds the team back from performing at more efficient delivery rates.  So many times the line workers (developers and testers) are well aware of these issues, and feel as if they have raised them many times and gotten little attention (mostly negative attention) from managers.  A classic game (Innovation Game) to expose these impediments is Speed Boa t. I just saw this image of the anvil holding the balloon down and thought it would make a great visual metaphor for the Speed Boat game .  See the article by Alan Dayley  Velocity is Like a Helium Balloon  to get a hi-res pos

Many companies have initiatives to become innovative.  There are some companies that don't appear to need a leadership sponsor to get competitive innovation - wonder why.  Perhaps they have some fundamental aspect to their organization that allows them to be creative.  What would be those aspects? Why It Feels Like We're Falling Behind It can take years to notice a life-changing invention.  - Motley Fool It took the world a few years to recognize that the Wright brothers had flown the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, NC (first flight in Dec. 1903 to 1908 public demonstrations). Here's my research on the topic of creativity. The musical group OK-Go! describes their process to achieve creativity - and the math behind the wonder and surprise they are reliably able to deliver. An awesome lesson in discovery - planning to play - to achieve innovation. Predicting Creativity in the Wild -- a research paper on the use of sociometric monitoring of teams by Sociometric S

I'm working with a large networking (telecommunication) company on a mission critical new initiative to replace existing B2B account services functions that are siloed and separate with a new sexy UI where all the services are aggregated in one portal.  The development has been underway for over one year.  It is touted as an "agile" program.  Yet an interesting impediment has never been resolved.  That is the internal WiFi/Lan systems appear to be overloaded with the strain of development, over utilized with the number of people that are squeezed into the floor plan (I call the sardine can).  This system fails quite frequently, it is a well know impediment to sprints being completed, stories integrated into the build, builds tested, access to the QA server, etc.  Yet this impediment remains after months and continued growth of the program. I wonder if the problem is that management feels that they can't do anything about infrastructure at one of the largest telecomm