David Anderson
posted the first part of a series looking at the "organizational structure for larger scale agile organizations." For background, David brings a lot of the theory to the new MSF process and Team Server. David points out there are 6 product units with over 450 people working on Team Server and he's relating his experiences. I can't wait for the next post.
David is the author of the
Agile Management for Software Engineering book that I discussed
last week.
The notion of managing projects where you have interdependencies is extremely difficult. I believe that covering risk management and critical path to making the needed software available to other groups in a timely fashion is impossible without a Lean/TOC approach. Attempt that with more traditional SDLCs and you are guaranteed to be late and over budget. - there's no way to defeat
Parkison's Law in these cases.
While I've disagreed with David's point in his book around the identification of the constraint, the book is top-notch and looks at Agile development methods with a fundamentally different approach than other SDLCs.