Across several blog posts, we have covered agile development for teams as well as agile development outsourcing for startups. It should not be a big surprise to anyone therefore, that we have been forwarding our experience in outsourced agile development to a growing list of clients.

What we offer are dedicated agile developer teams where the development is completely managed through us. Welcome to your outsourced project office.

We can do the writing of the user-stories (core story, wireframes and acceptance tests), the project management of the development (iteration planning, daily update meetings, status tracking & reporting) as well as the initial acceptance testing. What we find is that every project is different and we adjust our agile development outsourcing framework to these requirements. The existence of a concise framework allows us to quite rapidly set-up operations for new clients and ensures that learning's can be leveraged across our clients.

At the heart of all project management stands communication. We use a range of tools to support communication across distances. These are in no particular order Skype, conference-call rooms, project intranet and a fantastic collaboration/ white-boarding e-room. We've played with the idea of sending Mac Mini's out to clients that have a permanent team-size of >=5 to allow smooth video-conferencing via iChat (as opposed to the poor quality in Skype) but have yet to act on this thought.

We strive to provide the ultimate in transparency and as much information as possible as to the current status and delivery dates. And working in short iteration cycles of about 3-4 weeks, depending on the client, with tools (currently XPlanner, although we might start using TargetProcess) to monitor the progress of a project provides us with a wealth of information. Every day, a core group of people receives a daily update status mail that lists progress on the different stories we would be working on. Every other week, we issue a bi-weekly report and at the end of every iteration we issue a report on what was completed and moved to the next iteration.

It can be challenging to attempt agile development across distances and throughout the last year we have had many good learning experiences. Not everyone has a unit-testing framework for example so continuous testing and starting with tests is not an option (although we will propose implementing a framework at no cost as it will help us increase our overall throughput and raise code quality). Not having the customer with you means that acceptance testing feedback can be difficult to collect (we now do 'live' testing sessions using our e-rooms screen sharing and note-taking facilities). Knocking on doors to get quick feedback on interaction designs will not be possible (so we always start with a wireframe exercise, now using Axure to create very realistic demo's of the user-interface).

All in all though we know that the outcome using our agile development outsourcing framework guarantees our clients greater flexibility in their planning, increased ability to provide us with feedback that will actually be integrated, a better sense of the different project status and a higher overall output than compared with outsourced development teams operating "the old" way.

Soon we will provide some examples of how we perform our iteration planning sessions, keep clients on top of things and collaborate with them and our outsourcing team on project requirements and execution. We are considering providing a "test-drive" to a selected few interested parties tempted to try our agile development outsourcing services as well, more on that coming up.

For some time now I have been wanting to share some of our own experiences with the different agile development methodologies we have used during the past few years. This post will be about the realities "on the ground", unfiltered and hopefully be another piece in the puzzle to make agile methodologies become further accepted in the corporate business world.

We have worked with different agile development methodologies in the past. We've never been religious about implementing everything these frameworks recommend but rather chose what we felt really worked. We started to work with ExtremeProgramming (XP) in Seattle in 2001 at Amazon.com . I had the honour to manage the web-development technologies platform team there, which had just started using XP shortly before I arrived in the States. More recently we added parts of Scrum to our mix and have been applying it since the beginning of 2007.

I get surprised time and again that not many people seem to be aware of the concept of agile software development. Even worse, when people have heard about it they don't seem to have had very good experiences. There seems to be suppliers out there who use it to sell their services without really knowing what agile development entails. When a new client believes that we are no different, it can be very frustrating.

Let's do a reality check. Based on my personal experience, the application of agile methodologies delivers results much more consistent with the customer’s expectations than waterfall methodologies. All while increasing overall quality and lowering the likelihood of breaking stuff when introducing changes and additions to existing functionality. There is no doubt that projects with agile teams don't always succeed. But what is the percentage and overall customer satisfaction of agile-driven projects? And how does it compare with standard waterfall methodology?

I strongly feel that when it comes to building web and software applications, the only way to allow a company to increase innovation, but not downtime and bugs, is to become agile. This will mean a change in internal company culture. Implementing agile teams is much more a change management project than anything else. All of a sudden, business owners and software developers have to meet and talk. Instead of (often not so useful) business and technical specification documents that can become longer than a standard-length novel, internal customers have to slice and dice up their big ideas into many little, more digestible pieces, which will in turn be prioritised against all other internal and external demands by their software development team.

After an initial phase-in time for the business analysts that now have to create compelling and easy to understand so-called user-stories that are only "reminders for conversations" with other people within the company, the prioritisation and waiting in line until a project is started can be difficult to get used to. Although, when compared with the world before, there are no more false "Yes I understand what you want", "Yes, I read your specification document" or "Yes, we'll get it done next week, promise". Instead, the software development team should have become much more customer-centric and service-orientated. True, they may not promise to get it done immediately, but the more they learn how much they can get done in a certain duration of time (agile really helps development teams in tracking their time and estimations) the happier they will be to give deadlines for project deliveries. And those deadlines will stand the test much better I am sure than deadlines before the "dawn of agile".

With time, the internal customers of the software development team will understand that they actually get what they wanted in the first place. More and better communication will lead to a teaming-up of the technical and business teams. There will be no side-picking any longer but an understanding that both "sides" need to work together to create the best results.

All of this may sound a bit utopian to the ears of someone not accustomed to working with real agile teams. I recall very vividly an experience not so long ago with an outsourcing company that we had hired to do some product-development. Stupidly, we sent them specification documents. Didn't meet with them on a daily, sometimes not even weekly, basis by Skype. Had heated exchanges by e-mail on what we "actually meant to say“ in a certain paragraph of our specification document. And ended up receiving results far below our expectations. Why did we not do what we preach to our clients when consulting with them? Well, I guess any organisation needs to learn. We did!
Now contrast this with a new day, a new team and an agile development framework. Daily meetings to catch up on what was done the previous day, what will be done the following day and any blockers they have encountered that we might need to get out of their way (processes, tools, etc). We are getting what we want, are able to test and code-review what they build. And most importantly, everyone just seems darn happy to work with everyone else. So maybe not so utopian after all. I swear to never go back to the twilight zone of waterfall project-management.

Last but not least: A senior level buy-in - as is true with any other larger change management project in any organisation - is absolutely mandatory for the overall health of the transformation from pre-historic to 21st century development methodologies. There is no way that a team manager all by himself will be able to push through all he needs and make everyone happy at the same time without an approval from the highest ranks within the organisation. If such a buy-in exists though, there is no doubt in my mind that overall happiness and productivity will increase as a direct result from the change in software development practice.

Following our presence at the CEO Symposium, here an overview of the range of services Theandb can extend to clients in Australia and world-wide in the form of a Flash-enabled presentation.

The CEO Symposium 2007 was an excellent event and it was a great pleasure meeting so many outstanding people in such a short time. Looking forward to future interactions.!

We are very happy to be present as sponsors of the CEO Symposium tomorrow and Wednesday (26th and 27th of March 2007). The speakers, attendees and other sponsors look super-charged and we feel that we can add something special and unique to the mix; consulting with compassion, passion, energy & heart combined with extensive experience in the online world and an outstanding network of partners.

Here a quote from our event-brochure that gives a good overview of our offer. Please also see the complete slides in our previous post further below.

"Consultants Of Compassion, Theandb is helping its clients to succeed in the initial concept, startup and planning phases of an online-product creation with a specialisation in e-commerce, portals and marketplaces. Supported by the directors 16+ years of experience in Fortune 100 companies, including managing Amazon.com’s online assets, we will help you to save valuable time & costs before the implementation commences and ensure that there will be no gaps between business’ expectations and the final online product.

Theandb further uses industry-recognized intangible intelligence analysis in their work - created and endorsed by the Intangible Management Standards Institute – to support companies in financially valuing intangible assets such as staff engagement/ disengagement levels, knowledge, collaboration, culture, and others on an activity-by-activity basis. This results in productivity improvements of 20+ percent and considerable increases in cost efficiency for project- and risk-management, engagement with (outsourcing) suppliers and selection of strategic technology platforms."

The CIO has a great article entitled "Taking A Systems View" on Intangible Management, written by Sue Bushell.

Some excerpts below but read it yourself; time well spent. I also encourage people to sign-up for the global cost to value taskforce as passive listeners or active participants if the topic of intangible management interests you.

"Talk about perverse consequences. BP sets out to slash 25 percent of its fixed costs and ends up killing 15 workers and injuring 180 others, in the worst industrial accident in the US in 15 years. Instead of counting its savings it finds itself having to sink $US1.6 billion into a legal defence fund, facing a congressional investigation and with some of its officers exposed to potential criminal sanctions."

"General Motors reviews the real impact of its IT cost-cutting initiatives, only to discover that all of its efforts have amounted to much ado about virtually nothing. CTO Tony Scott tells a CIO summit that not only had almost no money been saved, the effort had provoked perverse consequences that proved painfully expensive."

"Traditional business analysis, with its preoccupation with breaking everything down into its component parts and then studying the parts, is useful when dealing with machines," Parsons wrote in a 2000 paper called "Productivity Measurement in the Service Sector". "In the early days of the industrial age it was possibly convenient to adopt such an approach, but such thinking will mislead, often dangerously, when applied to today's complex conditions of existence."

"By December 11, 2007, he is confident the Global Cost to Value Taskforce (see "Going Global", page 48) will provide an agreed and tested method to let managers and executives quickly and easily financially estimate intangible benefits and value to create new ways to increase productivity, reduce costs and risks, and boost service, engagement, retention, profitability and shareholder value."

"One of the very interesting things is that productivity today is caused, from the Standards Institute perspective, by intangibles, and when we look at intangibles we're looking at activities to do with knowledge, collaboration and leverage," Standfield says. "So if we look at an organization and just basically say: 'Well, this particular organization has a certain number of staff; they're doing certain activities throughout the day, all of which can be broken up into those three different categories', basically we get a time fingerprint of the organization. Now from there what we do through the more than 40 international intangibles standards is to assess that fingerprint."

More to come on the taskforce and pilot-projects. As always, feel free to get in touch with us directly for discussions.

Since October 2006 we are proud to have gone through the first level of certification (ii101) of Intangible Intelligence Analyst through the Standards Institute and under the rewarding mentorship of Dr. Ken Standfield.

This certification enhances our capabilities in project-management and process-analysis. It also allows us to expand into complementing areas such as risk-management. All next to the fact that we can now offer our services in ways never possible before; it literally opens up new doors of potential for us and our current & future clients. We are certain that it will convert into vast cost-savings and value creation for them through our support as Intangible Intelligence Analysts.

We have not had the chance to blog nor market our new capabilities since our certification as we have been focused on the creation our hosted knowledge-management solution transLucid. Expect us to communicate more about intangible management and its effects in the near-term future.

Why use Intangible Intelligence
"A study comparing market value to the book value of 3,500 U.S. companies over a period of two decades shows the dramatic upward rise in intangible value. In 1978, market value and book value were pretty much matched: book value was 95% of market value. Twenty years on, book value was just 28% of market value. Lev Baruch, an accounting professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, reckons that in the late 1990s businesses invested a staggering $1 trillion per year in intangible assets" (taken from The Hidden Value Of Intangibles).

Intangibles are usually invisible. International Intangible Standards make the invisible visible. They provide scientific and quantifiable answers how to measure - as in hard $ - as well as improve intangibles value and the chain of value creation. Resulting in cost reduction, time savings, productivity improvements, and risk reductions.

What it is
Intangible intelligence® applies international intangible standards through software to visually map operational reality - the costs, risks, productivity losses, efficiency, and effectiveness associated with the actual application of service resources (knowledge, collaboration, and process-engagement).

Intangible intelligence® maps visually show best practice gaps which are new sources of (1) cost reduction, (2) time savings, (3) productivity improvements, and (4) avoidable risk reductions.
When best practice gaps are reduced/removed employee stress, risk, and costs are decreased and productivity, results, and success increase. The central focus of intangible intelligence is therefore to "make life easier and less stressful for every employee" by identifying and removing best practice gaps using international intangible standards.

Areas of application
They are not surprisingly vast. In a next entry on intangible standards, I will focus on the standardized pilot projects to introduce intangible management into a company and create measurable financial improvements for a companies bottom-line. The potential results of a good management of intangibles using the international intangible standards are:

1. Improved customer service,
2. Enhanced employee satisfaction,
3. Increased expertise and knowledge,
4. Enhanced brand value, reputation, and corporate exposure,
5. Increased motivation, engagement, and relationship quality,
6. Improved knowledge quality levels,
7. Improved employee morale,
8. Improved quality
9. Enhanced leadership ability,
10. Enhanced management skills and quality,
11. Increased customer retention and satisfaction
12. Decrease in stress
13. Increased work-life balance, autonomy, and flexibility
14. Decreased “time to market”
15. Enhanced problem-solving and decision-making ability
16. Decrease in process overheads
17. The financial valuation of product/service benefits,
18. Increased competitive differentiation,
19. Increased market share and market growth rates,
20. Increased ability to identify changing customer tastes and preferences,
21. Reduced error rates and rework rates,
22. Improved data entry consistency and accuracy
23. Enhanced ability to identify and control risks,
24. Enhanced ability to lead competitors (instead of following),
25. Increased collaboration
26. Enhanced innovation ability
27. Increased reliability
28. Enhance in consistency
29. Increased product/service customization,
30. Enhanced ability to demonstrate social responsibility
31. Increase in goodwill

And most probably many others but this list should suffice to show the scope of an application of intangible standards in a company, supported by an Intangible Intelligence Analyst. As said, more to follow soon.