Mark Levison's Learning the Best Approaches for Your Brain

Another note to myself about books to read:


Mark and I follow each other on Twitter. Lot's of cool stuff on his blog.

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Waterfall vs. Agile: Battle of the Dunces or A Race to the Bottom?

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The major software methodology wars since the mid 1950’s. Someone was wrong on the Internet, so here we go… In a recent HBR article, It’s Time to End the Battle Between Waterfall and Agile , the author sets up a false premise: There is a war between Waterfall methodology and Agile. The war must end. And finally, you can combine the approaches to get the best of both worlds. This sounds good, but the article is based on a misunderstanding of both Waterfall and Agile. Also, there is no war between Waterfall methodology and Agile. There can’t be, because Waterfall methodology does not exist! Waterfall is a name for large projects that failed in the 1960’s. Waterfall was never a methodology, but a failure to apply the methodologies that existed back then. As I will show towards the end of this article, at least one of the “successful” Waterfall projects mentioned in the HBR article was neither successful, nor a Waterfall project. I got invaluable help from Alistair Cockburn. He fact che...
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Performance Evaluations, Business Strategy, and Agile Methodologies

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It is performance evaluation time in many companies. This can be stressful, both to the people being evaluated, and the people doing the evaluation. In companies adopting agile software development methods, the tension can be extraordinary. Individual performance evaluations run counter to agile philosophy, which emphasizes team performance over individual performance. However, managers and corporate leaders need to take a few steps back, and consider the impact performance evaluations have on the organization as a whole. Especially now, in the midst of a recession, it is important to look at a companies current policies to see if they can be improved, or if they are actually holding the company back. So, how can a manager evaluate policy? Performance evaluation policies can serve as an excellent example. I'll confine myself to discussing the so-called ‘rank and yank’ methods. These are performance reviews were employees are ranked using a forced ranking system. It usually looks so...
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Over the past two years I have seen a lot of debate about the success of Agile software development. Agile methodologies can produce great results. This is well documented. Yet, in many companies, they don't. This has lead many people to question Agile. Some reject it altogether. However, the root cause of the problem isn't in the Agile methodologies. The root cause that makes Agile fail is in the companies adopting Agile methodologies. Let's look back about ten years, when Agile was beginning to gather momentum. It was believed that if a company was functionally organized, like this: Introducing an Agile software development method in part of the organization like this: would cause everyone in the organization to reevaluate their strategies, so that the organization could reorganize into a flow organization, like this: It turned out not to be that simple. An important reason is that most business organizations are designed to be in a stable state. All major playe...
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