With all the talk about certifications like CMM over the past couple of years, Mary Poppendieck's article titled "Toward a New Definition of Maturity" really hits the mark. She discusses the potential faults of decomposing large tasks into separate, compartmentalized sub-tasks. As with the waterfall process, "optimization of the parts has a tendency to sub-optimize the whole."
Tying these pieces back to Lean Software Development and the earlier post I wrote on push- vs. pull-based development has been a lot of fun. I've had some great conversations on the topic and one in particular with John Maher at Synchrono around project organization - what it means to the entire dev process and how multiple, interrelated projects can be managed as a single comprehensive plan to avoid churning (can you say Sql2k5/Whidbey?). I could put out several blog entries on that email alone. I'll be posting more shortly.
Everyone has given me a lot to think about... thank you!