Bertrand Duperrin's Library tagged iterations → View Popular, Search in Google

Feb

2012

Taming complexity: the service-oriented company

www.dachisgroup.com/...y-the-service-oriented-company

- Preview

complexity service agility organization coupling composability autonomy servicecontract iterations programming casestudies wholefoodmarket

Since the 1950s, technologists have adopted new approaches that allow them to better address complexity and ongoing change. One, called agile development, is a different way of doing work. The other, called service orientation, is more focused on how bits of work are connected to other bits. Both of these approaches emphasize continuous learning, adaptation, and distributed control, rather than planning, prediction and central control. They are specifically designed for managing work in fast-changing, complex, uncertain environments.
16 more annotation(s)...
- Agile is about small teams that deliver real, working software at all times, get meaningful feedback from users as early as possible, and improve the product over time in iterative development cycles.
- Object orientation allowed programmers to design software as a system of interacting objects instead of a list of instructions.
- The next phase in programming’s evolution, service orientation, emerged to solve this problem. It delivered a way for software objects to interconnect with each other over the internet, at a massive scale.
- Software services are very similar to software objects. They are modular functional units that can operate independently and interact with other services using an agreed-upon set of common standards. The big move forward comes from the way that they interact with the larger world
- The power of a service-oriented architecture is that each service can learn, adapt and coevolve without wreaking havoc on the overall system, just like species coevolve in a biological community.
- Service contracts.
  
  A service contract is a simple description of the service, including what the service provider needs from customers, what it will do for them, and any rules about how the service provider and customer will interact. Like any business contract, it represents an agreement.
- A service contract specifies what the provider will do, but it doesn’t specify how the work will be done.
- This is important because it allows the service to independently evolve and improve its operations without affecting customers or other services. A service can be as complex as it likes internally, so long as it provides a simple contract describing what it does and how it will interact with its customers.
- The reason to hide complexity is that it makes a service easier to understand and use. Since customers see only the things they can act on, make decisions about or buy, they can make better, faster choices.
- Composability.
  
  Most services are combinations of other services.
- Loose coupling.
  
  Loose coupling simply means that services agree to use a set of common set of rules about how to connect. So as long as a service follows the rules, it can update, change or modify itself without having to worry about the impact on other services in the system.
- But there can be good reasons for tight coupling. Things that are designed to work closely together can deliver better performance, more efficiently.
- Agile and service-oriented approaches are designed for complex, uncertain, fast-changing environments. They are proven methods for organizing systems and work. And the same approaches that solved complex software problems can also work in business.
- Most businesses today are not designed with agility in mind. Their systems are tightly coupled, because their growth has been driven by a desire for efficiency rather than flexibility.
- Many business systems are tightly coupled, like trains on a track, in order to maximize control and efficiency. But what the business environment requires today is not efficiency but flexibility
- So we sit in these business meetings, setting goals and making our strategic plans, arguing about which way the rails should be pointing, when what we really need is to get off the train altogether and embrace a completely different system and approach.

Nov

2010

Pulling for the Long Term

"The time horizon: "Pull" does not mean thinking only about the short-term Many of the people we have talked to about our book have the misconception that pull is driven by a short-term mindset. After all, one of the key drivers of the move from push to pull platforms is the increasing difficulty in forecasting and predicting demand and the consequent challenges this presents"

blogs.hbr.org/...pulling-for-the-long-term.html

- Preview

pull push longterm indicators strategy iterations iterativethinking

The paradox we cited at the outset can be resolved: the long-term view is not a detailed forecast but a high-level direction, a trajectory and a set of challenging goals, which help to focus and guide near-term efforts.
he key for pull is to iterate rapidly back and forth between two horizons — long-term direction and short-term (6-12 month) action
1 more annotation(s)...
- This type of iterative thinking can create a powerful form of productive friction. Conflicts arise as we repeatedly test our actions and findings against two time horizons; the process of resolving these conflicts can lead to new insights about our quests. In the corporate context, we call this as a FAST strategy (Focus, Accelerate, Strengthen and Tie it together),

Sep

2008

Favoriser l'apprentissage

Devenir une entreprise apprenante a fait le succès de Toyota et du courant Lean. Le Lean Software Development reprend le principe et place au coeur de cette stratégie deux outils incontournables: Itération (Tool 3) et Feedback (Tool 4). Sur ces deux outils vont alors s'appuyer d'autres préconisations comme la synchronisation, les alternatives de conception, la communication sur les contraintes et l'émergence de la solution.
En somme : on apprend par la pratique (et donc) on apprend aussi de ses erreurs... Au fond, c'est tellement vrai !

www.qualitystreet.fr/?2008/09/11/152-favoriser-l-apprentissage

- Preview

agilemethods iterations learningorganisation learning feedback