So yesterday I attended the PDC Pre-Conference session on "Agile Perspectives, Industry and Microsoft". The morning was pretty interesting, although it covered much material that I've already seen elsewhere. It was still good to see it presented in a slightly different way (Mary Poppindieck's focus is Lean Development, which is rooted in Lean Manufacturing techniques).
The afternoon had some high and low points. Gregori first talked about how Agile was used at Microsoft. The P&P team is pretty hard-core, while the product teams are still pretty hit-and-miss, although small feature teams are coming around more and more each month.
Mary then did a value-chain analysis, which is an interesting idea, and I've no doubt has much value in a consultative context, but it didn't really work for me as a learning session.
The best stuff came at the end of the day, when they tackled 4 difficult questions related to agile adoption:
- How to scale it to larger projects.
- How to deal with distributed teams.
- [something else I can't remember, so it was probably not all that interesting]
- Agile Contracts
This last one was especially interesting to me. The gist was that there are many inherent problems with Fixed-Bid and Time & Materials billing models, and that a preferred contract type is what they called "Target Cost Contracts". I'll delve into this topic deeper in a later blog posting.
So then in the evening I ventured out on the Metro (subway) to get from my hotel (which is at Universal Studios) back to downtown to meet up with a bunch of SharePoint folks at the Biltmore for drinks (SharePint). Got to meet SP Devs from around the world including some MVP's. Thanks to Andrew Connell for putting that together. Also, on talking with Andrew it looks like he's already going to have to back out of the April SPIN meeting due to a schedule conflict, but is searching for an "off-month" to reschedule.