Evolving Web

Agile Methodologies – One Size Does Not Fit All

Scrum, XP, etc. don’t work for everyone.  Does this mean that Agile does not work for everyone?  Well, if Agile is a process, the answer is yes.  But if Agile is a set of principles, the answer is clearly no. 

Principles are guides to help you create better process.

Bill Tozier (the taller one in the picture) pushed my buttons by leaving this excellent comment:

Pushing a little harder: I'm not sure but I think that there is often some set of circumstances for which any strategy will outperform any other. Some folks I know piss people off when they point out that Extreme Programming or "Agile" (whatever that is supposed to be) cannot be better in all cases.

It's a useful exercise to objectively explore realistic business cases where being (or becoming) "agile" or "lean" are bad ideas. There's nothing new in what we do, and we are not revolutionaries except insofar as we can understand more cases of the real world and arguably communicate them better.

The 21st century still involves moving metal objects around, and communication networks don't ensure efficient communication, and archives don't ensure knowledge capture, and politics don't transform smoothly into communitarian panarchy. And that's as it should be.

Nothing technological, cultural, social, or even philosophical happened after 2000, that didn't have a counterpart in 1900. Telegraphy and telephony and electrification and corporatization and stuff made Scientific Management possible... why should not our latest, super-enhanced versions of the same stuff not make Super-scientific Management the next big craze?

Or, shorter version: Every advantage from doing things "differently", for any difference, must have risks as well. And lacking universal adoption of the difference, there must be cases where these costs outweigh the benefits.

Posted by: Bill Tozier

Here is my reply:

Nothing is universally applicable. In fact, we don't presuppose any methodology is universally applicable.

We use principles to guide the creation of processes that apply to specific realities. Different teams require different processes.

Scrum or XP are fairly rigid in the out-of-the-box application. This ridigity is what people are bucking against - this one-size-fits-all approach.

The principles behind Agile - dynamic teams, frequent and short group meetings, ritualized communication, limiting work in progress - are all, I believe, universally applicable.

Some groups will want time boxed work-limiting mechanisms, others will be better suited for a kanban capacity style limitation. In the end, the principle is what needs to be kept in mind, and not the dogmatic application some guy invented for his particular project.

Technorati Tags: Agile methodologies,lean,scrum,XP,kanban,bill tozier

Blogged at My House before a day of errand running in Seattle, WA

Organizational Entropy and Information Abuse

My friend Jay Fienberg left a comment at the end of my Intellectual In-Breeding post that raised this point:

I think this is an interesting idea, but either overstated or in need of more exploration:

"Information is, by its very nature, subversive. Information tells you the right thing to do."

I think one could just as easily assert that "information is, by its very nature, oppressive. Information tells you the wrong thing to do."

As a conjecture: when has anyone every done the wrong thing without doing so based on some information? – Jay Fienberg (Jay’s Site)

I read this in the car, parked outside Top Pot Doughnuts in Seattle and laughed. It’s an awesome observation.

Cuts Like a Knife

I would argue that information in this context is an object.  A social object. Subversive, Oppressive, Liberating, Enlightening. 

And like a knife, it can slice a tomato or your throat.

When organizations lose shared purpose and principles – their sense of community – they are already in process of decay and dissolution, even though they may linger with outward appearance of success for some time.  -- Dee Hock, Founder of Visa in Birth of the Chaordic Age

The game of a new organization is to be noticed. To be noticed, you want to be the best.  Quality is job 1.  This is an expansive mode.

The game of an old organization is to continue to exist.  This is a protective or entropic mode – the focus is now inward.

What Mr. Hock is noting in this quote is that when an organization switches from an expansive mode, it enters an entropic mode. Maybe this is inevitable – that’s for further debate.

When you combine these two observations, the questions become: How do organizations in an entropic state abuse information?   And, perhaps, is information abuse itself a signal that an organization has entered an entropic state?  Can we use it as a diagnostic tool?

The entropic organization is readily recognizable by the dysfunction in how it exchanges information.  So, the last question, I’d give a yes.  The middle question I would give a probably – it’s certainly an indicator that you need to do an entropy check. 

The first question would take volumes.  Rules, policies, even outright fabrication in some cases.  Worldcom, Morgan Stanley, and the Bush White House can all provide ample examples of half-truths and lies being released in the form of information and information that has bowed to the whims of control.

But It Feels so Right

Why do organizations do this?  What is it about entropy that causes this type of bending of information?  Why do people feel that obfuscation and withholding information is useful?

We return to Dee’s Quote.  “When organizations lose shared purpose and principles – their sense of community – they are already in process of decay…”. 

Decay is pervasive.

Systemic.

Now the darkness only stays the night-time
In the morning it will fade away
Daylight is good at arriving at the right time
Its not always going to be this grey
All things must pass
All things must pass away
-- George Harrison, All Things Must Pass

Decay and rebirth are life itself.  Why are our institutions expected to be immutable?

Change requires acceptance. People leading large companies are already scared of tomorrow. Every day they fear someone will build something better, do something smarter, create something less expensive.

Keeping information hidden until the last possible minute is a natural reaction by people in power.  Power corrupts – but corrupt people are not evil.  They have been corrupted, often unbeknownst to themselves.  Retrospection is our teacher in this regard.

Feeling that they are protecting the company, they will hoard information.  There has been no handbook to tell them otherwise. 

The more information is withheld, the more purpose and principles are lost.  The gulf between the organization and the community widens.  And entropy escalates.

I coulda sworn we had it all worked out

Entropy is natural and inescapable. We’ve spent our entire history as human beings denying it. 

Does this mean things are hopeless?

No, it means that systems need rejuvenation and management.  Entropy should be anticipated and accounted for.

IBM has done an excellent job of reinventing itself.  Many governments have sunset dates for their ministries. And (thank you FDR) we have term limits on the US presidency.  With every new presidency, with every new reinvention of self, introspection and forward vision both happen.  Rebirth ensues.

Agile Methods and Lean Principles both dictate frequent reviews and check-ins. Information is designed to flow as freely as possible and create systems to quickly note when it is not. 

Human nature works for us and against us in this regard.  We naturally protect ourselves when under pressure – but we also naturally cooperate when goals are clear and shared.

Leadership becomes critical in open structures.  It’s not anarchy and it’s not communism. Open structures require strong leadership. Someone needs to be on-point to make sure all the members of an organization are comfortable.

This requires true leadership, not autocratic positional power.

Way beyond the shadow of a doubt

Society abhors an information vacuum.

The future requires an introspective organization.  One that won’t stand for misinformation or information being withheld.

Will it still happen?  As sure as the day is long it will.

But it will happen a lot less and be noticed more quickly.

Murphy’s Law stands.  Things going wrong isn’t the problem – it’s things festering.

(And for the record, I really can’t stand that Bryan Adams song and it’ll be stuck in my head for days now….)

UPDATE:  An Bui has posted a thoughtful extension of this conversation.

Technorati Tags: Jay Fienberg,Dee Hock,Agile,agile methodologies,lean,social media principles,social media,FDR,murphy's law,earworm

Blogged at Top Pot Doughnuts on Queen Anne in Seattle, WA – I’m free of the snow!

A Look Into the Clouds – Twitter as 2008 Retropective

2008 has been a challenging 12 months. So, I’ve been having a hard time saying good things about it.  To be fair, I thought I’d just look at 2008 based on my public face.  So I generated some tag clouds to see how the year was brought out in my conversations.

Here is my Twitter Cloud generated by Wordle

I’m relieved that despite some of the challenges of 2008, words like good, awesome, and thanks were most prominent in my tweets.  Social and media showed up (no surprise there).  I do seem to mention Britekite more than necessary, but I think there was one very long conversation in November that made that happen.

I see that I mention morning a lot.  One thing I love about being in Seattle and having my office on Lake Union is the sunrise over Capitol Hill.  The light on the water.  And in the summer, people out rowing before work.

This is the tag cloud from this blog.  Anyone who reads this blog, will not be surprised by the large focus on information and people.  I’m surprised that community is so small and that I don’t talk about context enough any more (but stick around, context is about to make a comeback.)

But at the very least, this shows me that in 2008 I was able to talk about a lot of the things that really matter to me in my blog.

Alas, I couldn’t find one that would let me cloud my Facebook status.  That one might have been a bit more morose.

So, 2008, I send you off with at least an acknowledgement that you weren’t all bad. :-)

Technorati Tags: Twitter,clouds,2008,facebook,evolving web

Blogged at My House AGAIN due to endless snow in Seattle, WA

Intellectual In-Breeding and Mutations of Corporate Governance

Why do people resist change?  What causes stasis in organizations? Why do groups run for a while and do really well, then get bogged down?

(And why do I feel I can answer this in a blog post?)

The meeting of social forces and business forces sets the stage for answering the questions above. Social forces usually take the form of a new group of people in a team ready for action. They have a task and they are geared to complete it.

So far so good.

Business wants to be successful. But business is harsh. We have employment laws, EEO laws, labor and industry laws, OSHA standards, Sarbox, HIPPA, insurance requirements, competitors spying on us, on and on.

When this happens, businesses find it easiest to spout rules.  Rules aren’t all bad, but many of them are created with an air of expedience and a core set of assumptions.

Chain of Command and Flow of Information

Perhaps, the biggest assumption is that chains of command and information flows are in some way synonymous.  In siloed organizations, information is sucked up one silo and trickled down another.  Each link in the hierarchy is a point of information dissemination. 

Why is this an assumption?  Because historically, information was very expensive to create and usually was disseminated by large, cumbersome and specialized reports.

This meant that people who read these reports were trained in the reports themselves.  In turn, this meant that segments of the organization became highly reliant on these specialized reports.

What happened then?  The silos began to serve the reports and not the other way around.

Cost of Change Used to be High

With large costly reports and even more costly hard machinery, business of the 20th century had extremely high costs of change. It was rarely feasible to make even minor adjustments to these complex systems.

The Result

Organizations grew to assume that silos were the very definition of business. You had to have a marketing silo, a development silo, a management silo, etc.

In a high cost of change, high cost of information transfer world – this almost makes sense.

The cost of this was members of an organization were always thirsty for information.  Information became a valuable commodity within companies and therefore represented power. This meant that people made a determination every time they received information.  Do I hoard this or share it?

A very combative question and world view.

The value proposition for sharing had to be high in order to get past the opportunity cost of hoarding (saving) it for later use.

This means that teams became rigid. If you moved around too much, you had too much information.  You could make connections other people couldn’t.  You’d short-circuit the org-chart. 

The org chart became the ladder.  The ladder became predictable.  Predictability became institutionalized.

Today is Different

What we are learning now, is that in a world with a low cost of change and a low cost of information flow – many assumptions from the 20th century no longer apply. 

Agile Methodologies are creating new paradigms for the management of small teams. 

Lean thinking gives us reasons to rapidly communicate value to the largest possible audience with the least effort.

Social media gives us the principles for collaboration, ad hoc team development, institutional communication, and the broadcasting / retrieval of information.

This creates a more dynamic workplace.  Informed workers have the information at their fingertips to make decisions and improvements.  Information is now the enabler of power and not the power itself.  Power now becomes how much can we execute.

Dynamic Teams

Information in the right hands inevitably leads to conclusions that certain people need to work with certain other people not in their silo.  That’s why is was hoarded in the first place. Information is, by its very nature, subversive.  Information tells you the right thing to do.

That’s why Stalin limited information flow, it’s why corporations do too.

Ad hoc workgroups and the creation of a workforce that embraces not only change but improvement is at the core of this new paradigm.  Dynamic teams built from a diverse talent pool reduces the chance of in-breeding.

These pools can be obtained by having a large staff to draw from (like Microsoft or IBM) or from gathering the right contractors at the right time. 

Either way, you are increasing the gene pool of ideas when teams shift.  We learn from each other – new partnerships spawn new ideas.  Different viewpoints temper group think.  Complacency is neutralized.

Without this diversity, without mixing up the gene pool, we get mutations. The people in companies who cannot be fired.  The policies that no one will question but everyone loathes. The inability to change even simple things for the good of the organization.

Conclusion

The Soviet Union crumbled under the weight of its own bureaucracy and inefficiencies.  Too many resources were going to trying to withhold information and stop people from acting in the best interests of themselves and the state. 

Business currently suffers (granted to a lesser extent) from the same affliction. In a time of rapid economic decline, can we continue to support this waste?  Business as usual = bailout or collapse, eventually.  Business as usual is not sustainable.

Technorati Tags: bill tozier,brian kerr,soviet union,genetic,microsoft,IBM,10 social media principles

Blogged at My House AGAIN due to endless snow in Seattle, WA

Rules Beget Rules – Social Media Principle #5

This post is fifth in a series of my Social Media Principles.  The base post is 10 Social Media Principles.

“Rules are not necessarily sacred, principles are.”

Franklin D. Roosevelt

5. Rules beget rules – The more rules you have, the more rules you make.

Rules and law are reactions to disturbances in society. In being reactions, they tend to be created in the heat of the moment and within a psychological framework driven by some specific event.  This limits the applicability of rules and laws.  Exceptions soon ensue.

We make more rules and laws to cover the exceptions.

Then there are exceptions to the exceptions.

And we make more rules.

Soon, we are drowning in the overhead of administering rules with cascading exception sets.  We get loopholes, we get workarounds, we get special permissions (which require new special rules).  So, rules create waste.

As waste is created, people buck against rules. They stop acting because they don’t want to encounter the overhead.  When they stop acting, they stop producing.

Social Media shows us that projects with limited but clear rules foster creativity and that game theory is a better arbiter of human interaction.  The question is, can you build games that have rule sets flexible enough to allow creativity, and stringent yet predictable enough to allow healthy gaming?

“The golden rule is that there are no golden rules.”

George Bernard Shaw

Sites like Digg and Twitter, have shown that, left unchecked, people can game the system for personal benefit and to the detriment of the community. However, when the games are anticipated and thoughtfully moderated (and as much as possible by the community), then you can build games that have rewards for the main constituencies:

• The community – those supplying the material (content / labor / product)
• The organization – that which takes that material and redistributes it for profit or societal benefit
• The users – those that use the material

The main point of the game … to remove the distinction from the community and the organization as much as possible.  The more they are the same, the better material you get and the more game theory drives the organization.  The greater the separation between organization, the greater the need for rules.  And the more rules …

Update: An Bui has posted her take on Rules Beget Rules, her’s is very different, check it out.

Technorati Tags: Peter Kim,Nicky Cakes,Twitter,Digg,George Bernard Shaw,game theory,gaming,community,rules,law,freedom,Franklin D. Roosevelt,FDR,10 social media principles

Blogged at My House AGAIN due to endless snow in Seattle, WA

That Guy’s An Asshole – Two Stories of Information Hoarding

This is a companion piece to my 10 Principles of Social Media series. This post illustrates Principles 2 and 4.

For quite some time, I was an urban planner.  I worked for some agencies, but for most the time I was a consultant.  I worked with all levels of government from tiny towns to the Feds. 

While that time left me with more than enough stories to fill a book, I’ll tell two of them here:

They Hate Us

The planning director for the City sat across from me.  I said, “This major road needs to have coordinated signal timing between you and that suburb.” 

“That’ll never happen,” he said, “They hate us.  Every time we change our signal timing, they change theirs just to screw us up.”

“Hmm,” I said, “Well, it’s got to happen, I’ll go over and talk to them.”

So I go to the suburb in question. 

“This major road needs to have coordinated signal timing between you and the City.” 

“Take it up with them then!” Was the reply, “We hate them! Every time we change our signal timing, they change theirs just to screw us up.”

That Guy’s An Asshole

We were creating an event management plan for a major city.  They had a huge complex of sports stadiums all grouped together.  It was possible for nearly 200,000 people to show up during concurrent events.

We had created a system to guide people to parking and to dynamically move police, roadblocks and traffic revisions based on available parking and pedestrian movements. The system would close roads, re-route traffic, and move police around.

That required communications.

“What streets have fiber?” I asked.

“We don’t have any fiber” I was told.

I was incredulous.  “what do you mean you have no fiber?”

“No fiber, has to be wireless.”

“There’s nothing with franchise agreements or other shared use?”

“No, no fiber.”

So we created a system with all wireless tech which, at the time, was much more expensive and harder to make reliable.  It greatly added to the complexity of the system.

The day we were launching, I was walking through the City offices.  I passed by a desk and something caught my eye.  I went to the guy upon whose desk it rested.

“Is that what I think it is?”

“It’s a fiber map.”

There was fiber (lots of it) down every single street.

“Can I borrow that?”

“Sure.”

I went to the project manager and put it on his desk.

“What is this?” I asked.

“It’s a fiber map.” He said.

“You told me you had no fiber.”

“Well, we didn’t want to use fiber. That guy’s an asshole.” he said referring to the person at the City responsible for the fiber. “We don’t want to deal with him.”

What This Shows Us

Even though these are examples in government, we all have stories like this from business, from school, from families.  When we stop talking and close ourselves off, only waste will result.

Technorati Tags: 10 social media principles,social media principles,social media,urban planning,obstruction,management,government

Blogged at My House due to endless snow in Seattle, WA

Decentralization is Freedom - Social Media Principle #4

This post is fourth in a series of my Social Media Principles.  The base post is 10 Social Media Principles.

4. Decentralization is freedom – Decentralized power structures spur creativity, growth, and innovation.

Note:  Writing a short blog post on this is like writing a short blog post on why it’s hard to cure addiction.  I will nonetheless give it a shot.  This is a blog post.  A blog post.  It may appear utopian.  An Bui has posted on this topic as well from a more network effects perspective.

 

Technology changes the rules of governance.
– Robert Wright in Nonzero 

Centralized Power

Centralized power structures do one thing: centralize power.  Centralized power tends to:

Hoard Information: When power is centralized it is hoarded.  Power, as we’ve discussed, most often takes the form of access to information.  As power is hoarded, so is information. 

Restrict Decision Making: Centralized power also centralizes decision making.  As fewer and fewer people are empowered to make decisions, fewer and fewer people feel they have control over their lives.  As this happens, freedom is curtailed.

Curtail Movement and Access: As we have less information and less ability to make decisions, we are more likely not to “stray”.  People who benefit from centralized power are more comfortable when they know where those who are controlled are and what they are doing.

Invoke Fear and Complacency: When we are in a situation where we have acquiesced to centralized power, we tend to protect ourselves by not “rocking the boat”.  In such a situation a “team player” is not a person who benefits the team – it is a person who does not harm the team.  Teams and their members become risk averse, innovation is stifled.  (And soon you have a automaker bailout).

Decentralized Power

Decentralized power does the opposite, it takes the decision making from the central authority (C-Level staff, managers, party leadership) and places it where it has the best chance of success.

Decentralization tends to:

Distribute Information: A decentralized organization can only work well if the information involved in running the organization is available to those who need it and when they need it. (c.f. Information wants to be free: Jim Benson, An Bui)

Empower Decision Making: People won’t care about the information if they can’t do something with it. A decentralized organization should empower all people in the organization to make decisions that are reasonable and they are capable of executing.  When people have this ability they, not surprisingly, feel more in control of their lives.  They also feel more respected by the organization.

Encourage Movement and Access: Movement and access are important for any human being. We incarcerate prisoners partially to keep them away from other people, but mostly because having our freedom of movement taken from us is actually that shocking. Yet businesses repeatedly limit people’s movements.  Not just by making them beg for things like vacation, but by limiting whom they can actually talk to within their own companies.

A decentralized organization allows freedom of movement and access.  It allows freedom of association.  This enables groups to form based on the rapid completion of critical tasks.  Ad hoc groups in a company can form spontaneously, efficiencies and satisfaction result.

Invoke Creativity and Growth: Decentralized organizations foster growth and creativity because the game of the organization ceases to be “how do I not get fired around here?” and becomes “how can I make things work better for my team?”   The absence of fear and complacency is a very strong motivator.

Closing:

Most companies today are run on a very top-down Soviet style model.  Autocratic, inflexible, and personality driven.  This type of system is what led to the automaker bailout and most business collapse.  People at the companies who are actually responsible for success are disempowered from making decisions or creating growth.

Social Media has shown us that the decentralization of power and information have led to very rapid advances in productivity and a very different set of assumptions about personal empowerment.  People coming into the workforce now become very disgruntled very quickly because they’ve grown up with social media.  They are used to being able to build teams quickly, execute projects quickly, and to fail often (and inexpensively) in the service of ultimate success.

Warning and Caveat:

Does this mean that organizations should have no leadership, rules of governance, or structure?  Certainly not.  Having the tens of thousands of Microsoft employees do whatever, when ever and with whomever would be foolish.  It would be bedlam.

In Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky has a great chapter entitled “Fitting Our Tools into a Small World”.  In it he makes one major distinction, which I’ve paraphrased:

In a hierarchic command and control organization, nodes are imposed and have coercive power.  In decentralized networks, nodes are connectors and have cohesive or connective power. (Jim Benson’s paraphrasing)

Decentralized networks still have structure and power.  But structure is still necessary.  Structure still rests on nodes.  The structure of a small group should not be mirrored after the structure of the entire organization.  (see my post on why scaling agile is like scaling a cherry.)

The purpose of nodes in a decentralized organization is to strengthen and not limit information flow.  Managers and leaders provide coherence to the organization.  The decentralized world is not a leaderless world.  It’s merely a much freer world.

Technorati Tags: clay shirky,robert wright,microsoft,automaker bailout,management,10 social media principles,an bui,decentralization

Blogged at My House in Seattle, WA

Social Media Principle #3 – Economies Have Currencies

This post is third in a series of my Social Media Principles.  The base post is 10 Social Media Principles.

A currency is a unit of exchange, facilitating the transfer of goods and/or services. - Wikipedia

Every economy has currencies – items that are traded or exchanged.  Items to which the members of the economy ascribe value. 

In a social media economy, the currencies are most often a combination of artifacts and recognition. 

ARTIFACTS

In Flickr the artifacts are fairly obvious – they are pictures.

Pictures are taken and put on the site, people enjoy your pictures and you enjoy theirs.  Affinity groups develop around types of pictures or specific communities. 

The cost of entry, though are your pictures.  You put them up to demonstrate your activity in the community.

The same is true for links in Delicious, reviews in Digg, or music lists on Last.fm.  There is an artifact of exchange that the members of the community exchange and derive value from.

RECOGNITION

Recognition is a key factor in any social network.  Ideally, recognition should come from an automated source (“you did x of these last month, good job!” or “Dave Thomas is the #2 smelt canner in the whole cannery!”) or recognition  should come from people in the community (“I vote Dave as the best smelt salter of the week”).

While recognition can be a contest, many studies show that performance in an open and transparent environment yields the best recognition.

Various sites have different metrics for this.  On Plurk it’s Karma.  The people at twitter.grader.com have created a similar score for Twitter.

The key for both these scores is that you need to use the tool often and effectively. 

For blogs, metrics can include number of readers, number of subscribers, number of comments, number of people who link back to you, and so forth.

WHAT WE LEARN FROM THIS

Healthy communities have currencies that they trade in or hoard.  If you don’t plan up front for how currency trading will impact your new community – it is very possible that the game will become based on hoarding.

If you have a company and your currencies are information and decisions.  This can be (and often is) very damaging.  Similarly, if you give rewards based on something that isn’t seen as of value to the community – it’s a value-less currency.  It’s like giving them counterfeit money. 

This social media principle is a strong warning that if you don’t control the economy of your community, it will spin out of control.  If you manage it well, it is much more likely to stay healthy and grow.

Update: See An Bui’s post for Economies have Currencies

Technorati Tags: 10 social media principles,social media,social media principles,plurk,delicious,twitter,flickr,business,management

Blogged at My House in Seattle, WA

Depiction 1.0 Launches!

Depiction’s what-if mapping software has launched.

Much like a "serious game" Depiction is easy-to-use software that runs on standard laptop and desktop PCs. Depiction's powerful mapping technology allows users to quickly depict scenarios that answer "What if" questions. For example: "What if this levy broke? What would flood? What areas would be cut off from rescuers?" In an emergency, Depiction provides such rapid and intuitive scenario mapping integrated with live reports transmitted from other locations.

Patrick Meier at the iRevolution blog says:

I really like the ideas that this platform brings together: crisis mapping, simulation and decision support. Being able to play out what-if scenarios is key to making more informed decisions. For example, this interactive component allows users to identify the best route for an evacuation or the delivery of relief supplies should the primary route become inaccessible.  The platform can also receive live reports via email and have them mapped in real time.  I hope the developers will add an SMS component.

The Depiction press release can be found here.

Technorati Tags: depiction,patrick meier,what-if mapping,gis

Scrumban Book Published – Extend Your Agile Teams

We are pleased to announce the first Modus Cooperandi Press book:

Scrumban - Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development by Corey Ladas

Is published and ready for order.  Many of Corey’s incredibly popular writings on lean over the last year are captured in Scrumban. 

Readers of Scrumban will gain an understanding of how lean principles, when combined with agile methodologies, create software development processes that are sustainable, scalable and measurable. 

Using a Scrumban approach, agile teams can keep the processes they are comfortable with but extend them with powerful management savvy that allows teams to improve and communicate better with their larger organization. 

Table of contents below