Modus Cooperandi is pleased to announce the publication of the book Scrumban, Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development, by Corey Ladas. 

Expanding on the ideas found in Corey’s groundbreaking paper “Scrumban,” Scrumban the book provides insight into concepts, metrics, and day-to-day management techniques which make continuous improvement in software development an achievable outcome in the real world. The Scrumban methodology combines the best of agile and lean practices to define a framework which results in improved organization and increased efficiency in software development teams.

We are very excited about the publication of Scrumban — the first publication from Modus Cooperandi Press and the first book in the Modus Cooperandi Lean Series. An informal meet up with author Corey Ladas is planned for January in the Seattle area. Corey will also be attending conferences in Oregon, Florida and other states over the next few months, please watch the Modus Cooperandi blog for dates and times. We look forward to continuing the dialog with you.

Purchase Scrumban, Essays on Kanban Systems for Lean Software Development here.

Technorati Tags: Corey Ladas,Scrum-ban,scrumban,scrum,kanban,Modus Cooperandi

Modus Cooperandi has been applying the lessons of Lean, Agile, and Social Media to organizations. The underlying theme between all three is reducing friction in communication and advancing freer collaboration between colleagues.

As part of this work, we’ve identified 10 Social Media Principles to guide organizations when creating or altering their corporate culture.

These can be ranked in any order of importance, here is a list with Jim Benson and An Bui’s organizations and links to blog posts describing each of the principles. (We’re working on these over the next two weeks, so you’ll see them light up as time goes by.)

Jim’s Defintions | An’s Definitions

Technorati Tags: 10 social media principles,social media,jim benson,an bui,modus cooperandi

We’ve been busy.

In case you missed it, Corey Ladas’ Scrum-ban white paper, the same paper delivered at Agile 2008, is now available for download.

Jim Benson hit a follower milestone on everyone’s favorite microblogging app. Follow him on Twitter @ourfounder. He tweets about interesting things we’re doing here at Modus Cooperandi, shares pictures of food and collaborates with other interesting people.

Speaking of microblogging/microsharing, Six Apart bought Pownce, and the VentureBeat article that broke the story didn’t even get into Techmeme. Until it did. With these multiple social networks, Jim provides some thoughts about managing social network participation.

Seattle has many great coffee shops. Jim and I spent an afternoon in one such coffee shop, discussing in the importance of context. That conversation inspired me to write about the importance of context in community managers’ relationships with their constituents. Jim wrote about user interface design’s ability to provide contextual meaning. His discussion of Plurk, a microblogging application, provides a specific example.

We’ve also started a group blog with Ken Batali, covering the restaurant industry. We share our ideas about restaurant management and marketing. We’ve written about loyalty programs, Thierry Rautureau’s (and Jim Benson’s) thoughts on starting a new venture, and understanding one type of online conversation that restaurants could participate in.

As the year ends, we’re ramping up for 2009, building on the momentum of the things we’re doing, thinking, and wanting to accomplish.

Corey’s Scum-ban paper has received much notoriety since its delivery at Agile 2008.  You can download a PDF of it from Modus Cooperandi.

Download: Corey Ladas’s Scrum-Ban Whitepaper.

As Modus Cooperandi closes gets ready to enter its second year, we are preparing to launch a book and two new product offerings. To help with these launches we are happy to announce the addition of Thu An Bui to our team of associates.

An’s background in business analysis, law and social media makes her a perfect fit for Modus Cooperandi. An has a keen understanding of human communication, the tools of communication, and how businesses communicate internally and externally.

As we move forward into 2009, we are very excited to work with Thu An in our research, writing, consulting, and training.

Technorati Tags: Thu An Bui,Modus Cooperandi

This post is the first follow-up to Your Voice is Your Brand. The simple answer to the cost of responsiveness is what is the cost of non-responsiveness.

Here is a post from … well … me. I was really really annoyed at my Clearwire service and the lack of meaningful customer support. So I tweeted my frustration on Twitter.

Clearwire’s twitter person responded (sort of promptly) with the first message of “I’m sorry you feel that way, why is that?” I tweeted back that my service was highly variable and the modem needed to be by a window (so it sits in the middle of our office and not in the server room). And they replied with the “Can we help?” message.

I actually received better service from the Twitter person than other means.

What was the cost of no response? I would have cancelled my service and continued to tell people how awful it was. The cost of response – negligible from a $ perspective and a lot from a loss-of-sales perspective.

Clearwire also turned a situation where I was saying bad things about them to one where I am promoting them. This all done in the immediate and inexpensive world of Twitter.

There are many venues out there besides Twitter where people are discussing your company and your products? Are you gathering the free market research these companies are providing?

(I explore market research and microsharing applications on the TouchBase blog)

(Follow me on Twitter)

Technorati Tags: social media,clearwire

Businesses want to be in the social media world.  They see the value.  They understand that their customers are talking about them, about their products, about their market.  My clients also know that customers are talking about themselves: their dreams, hopes and desires.

All searchable.  All interpretable.  All right there for business to read and thoughtfully respond to.

Thoughtfully respond to?!!?

Yes, thoughtfully respond to.

And here’s the problem.

Businesses have historically been run by people who have enjoyed (really enjoyed) the distance that existed between them and their clients.  One of my colleagues recently mentioned that the upper management of her company felt they were in a battle with their customers.

So, thoughtful and immediate response is really difficult for traditional companies. 

The first thing that clients mention is the cost.  “Do you know how much it would cost to be responsive?!”

The second thing that comes back is what I call “The Traditional PR Fallback.”  They want to hire me to be their voice.

The third protest is, “How do I know if this works? It’s only a couple of people with no life who get on line and say these things!”

These are all perfectly reasonable responses. Each of these questions answers itself and is each indicative of a business world in transition.  I will cover each of these over the next few posts.

Karl Scotland has started amassing a great list of Kanban resources.  Take a look and help him with more links!

Years back, when I was championing Scrum at Microsoft, I was mortified by the idea of being pigeonholed as “the Scrum guy,” not least because that might give people the wrong idea about my endorsement.  What I was really trying to say was, as always, about conceptual frames.  I was doing my damnedest to help people to see the frame as well as its contents.

As it was then, so it is now.  I love my Lean blog, and I have a good deal more to say about the subject.  I intend to keep it on the front burner for quite some time yet.  I am completely delighted with the response that I’ve had from the software development community.  But I still bristle at the thought of being “the kanban guy,” because it is my nature to bristle at such things.

I actually look forward to some far off day when I can let it cool down and focus on other things.  Not the least reason for that is that I have interests that are relevant to design and management that are tangential to the topic of Lean.  Actually, some of them would probably be recieved as outright heretical by any Lean purist.  Fortunately, Jim and I are retooling the Modus Cooperandi website to provide more of a voice for those ideas.

One of those areas will be about the management of temporary, ad-hoc organizations of small, independent participants.  Lean seems to be historically oriented towards durable, persistent organizations - perhaps a more Japanese world view.  I have become more interested in the behavior of transient, situational organizations.  Some of the particular topics will be resource pool management, auctions, coordination games, and social media.  And yes, in our relentless pursuit of quality and economy, we will continue to put on our Lean frame from time to time in order to discover opportunities for improvement, because “you can take the man out of the flow, but you can’t take the flow out of the man!”

Social Media is a buzz word, there’s no getting around that.  Some people would like to toss out the lessons of social media, simply because they don’t like the buzz word or social media’s frivolous image.  This would be highly rash, social media has a vast array of lessons to teach business and, in fact, business has been using social media for years.

If you are a software company, your bug tracking system (like BugZilla) is an excellent example a social media application.  If you are in sales, Salesforce would also be one.

So let’s demystify the whole "social media" world by saying that social media is any object you can imbue with value and then exchange with one or many people.

In general, social media applications (those programs that exchange social media) have four traits:

• Community – most social applications allow users to congregate in groups or form affiliations.
• Collaboration – social media usually allows people to collaborate to create a product.
• Communication – social media also greatly reduces transaction costs in communication via direct or instant messaging  or microsharing.
• Permanence – this is very important. Social Media is permanent. Things written on social media stay around forever. This is great for building a large library of artifacts that can later be easily searched for and retrieved.

We employ social media tools and concepts in the service of better management.  Reduced friction for communication, shared storage, reduced transaction costs for dissemination, documented decision making, real-time status updates for team members and streamlined work flows are but a handful of potential applications with immediate business value we have worked with.