It's the team stupid!

No, you're not really stupid. I just wanted a provocative title to get your attention!

As I've been getting ready to bring Serena's new Agile On Demand product to market, I've spoken with several customers that are trying to optimize resource utilization to improve the throughput of their organizations. This is the classic PPM approach. In PPM, we manage our projects and resources down to a very fined level of granularity. And many Agile/Lean approaches can be effectively blended into PPM practices. But be careful with resource management.

In Agile, it’s the team that is the unit of management. And we want to work on optimization of the team's velocity. Not an individual's utilization. We do this by putting teams together and keeping them together for as long as possible. If cross functional teams are built and sustained, empirical data shows us that their throughput (velocity) will increase overtime.

And for large problems, we can breakdown the work using a variety of approaches (functional, architectural, ...). Now the challenge is getting that work to the teams. Again, it’s not about finding a specific resource with the right skills. It’s about finding the right team with capacity and/or an "appropriate" team backlog. This is a difficult problem and requires the right people, processes and tools. Look to Scrum's "Super Scrum" for process support and Serena's Agile On Demand for tool support!

We know that people are out most important asset in Application Development. It’s when we get people together and effectively communicating on agile teams that we can bring hyper-productivity to our organizations!


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