I was just reading Susan Kuchinskas’s 360 blog where she interviewed “IT management guru Mary Poppendieck” about Web 2.0 and ‘agile’/'lean’/ ’scrum-style’ development processes.Toyota’s ‘development’ approach was discussed as well.That industry works with steel and plastic, our industry works with bytes, but the basic objectives and practices are similar.

Back when I lived in Japan in the 90’s, everyday I saw that culture’s focus on the elimination of ‘muda’ or waste: how not to waste time, waste resources, or waste ‘talk’. OK, another quick Japanese lesson: SHIMA GUNI KONJO or ‘island country mentality’ is the preponderance in thought that can be summed up like this: “…oh no, all we have is this small island!”. One of the number of aspects, predicatably, is the following concern: “…resources are limited here on our island so we must be wise in our usage“. And Japan has known for +2000 years that they’re an island, so you can see how such a perspective could inform (or create) a culture. However, it wasn’t until I stumbled upon the book ‘Natural Capitalism‘ , in Chapter 7, that I saw that this wasn’t just a subconscious cultural aberration but that this ‘conservation of everything’ perspective had been codified in a Japanese company’s SOP’s!

And it was the precursor to ‘agile’.

First off, I like the idea of agile. But just because a company (or a team or group within the company) calls themselves ‘agile’ doesn’t mean they are. A company doesn’t just suddenly become agile because an outspoken someone in the company sends an email around to everyone with a link to the agile manifesto (this example is from direct experience, folks…). There’s got to be a camaraderie there within in that working group–it isn’t just a salary or fear of deadline (or worse, just plain fear!) that’s ‘fueling’ the employees. In addition, it takes an ‘executive branch’ that is fluid enough, funded enough, ‘friendly’ enough (READ: has enough faith in their employees) to believe in the approach and let go of ‘’some o’ the strings'’. I’ve seen the term agile bandied about in other offices, but the personnel and product that came out wasn’t really representative of, um…agility.

So, now, I thank my lucky stars because I see ‘agile’ here in my office: it is alive and well.

Team members come in daily and say: ‘ok, are we scrumming now’, ‘was the scrum meeting at 3 o’clock?’ , etc. They use that word, and they know what it means, but they mean it. The comaraderie is apparent. And we’re excited about talking to users to get their feedback, and pivoting towards the next iteration and future release. And the joy that people put into the RMX Direct product is obvious. It’s not the Seven Dwarves singing ‘whistle while you work’, but it is remarkably close. And it’s working.

And we’re also trying to not feature-bloat the product…

An excerpt from the aforementioned post:

The 360: Part of lean programming is delivering only features customers want right now. Do you see companies outsourcing this process with their partner programs and platform strategies? …

Poppendieck: The concept of creating an environment where customers are not depending totally on you but on a whole rash of partners is a very solid strategy, and one that’s been around for a long time. That’s what Microsoft used to get its stuff on the market. Apple and Microsoft used to compete exactly on that. The people who don’t do that, over time it doesn’t work.

Now, it’s a difficult trick, but the feedback is that RMX Direct is balanced between easy to use and powerful–that’s coming from our forum and emails. And our ‘rash of partners’–well they are you: the advertising networks looking for inventory in one place and you: web publishers looking for a better place to conduct your ad space trading.

Back in the 90’s, the agile approach may have been considered ‘radical’ or at least risky in US-style software production. Well, I’ll go out on a limb here and say that in 06′–and you want to be competitive–it’s mandatory.

Kudos to those entrepreneurs who have paused, taken a breath, then jumped in to a new way of running their business–they are now also reaping the benefits of being early adopters in this methodological paradigm shift.

And if you’re curious to see what quality can come from such a process, go and sign-up for a beta invite to RMX Direct…

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 4:04 am and is filed under Direct Media Exchange. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.