Posts tagged Development

Rejuvenate the old Software Development using Agile Management & Six sigma

                                                                                                   *V V Narendra Kumar

                                                                                                                K.Kiran Kumar

                                                                                                                                K.Ravi

                                                        Abstract

For some time, management thinkers (and thinking managers) have been stressing the urgent need for radical new approaches to the corporation. In this paradigm, the bottom line cedes its pre-eminence to the top: the corporation concentrates on developing new revenue streams from new products and services, while optimising income from existing lines through innovative marketing and rapid exploitation of changing customer needs and tastes. The new kind of corporation is, above all, ‘agile’.

 The dictionary defines ‘agile’ as ‘nimble or active: quick-moving and supple’. For decades, the big business has been compared to a supertanker, which can only be turned at lugubrious speed. Top managers fret about the lack of creativity and innovation beneath them, below the supertanker’s decks, but their own decision-making processes and command structures stultify efforts – even ones which they themselves have promoted – to develop the new and rejuvenate the old.

 The Concept of Agile Management

The new changeability is demanded in every major area of corporate strategy and tactics. Like it or not, every corporation belongs in a web (or webs), an eco-system of alliances, partnerships, sub-systems, processes, lines of business, collaborators, etc., none of which is guaranteed any permanence. Hierarchy, dominant market share, vertical integration and economies of scale were the traditional means of mastering the complexities of large organizations – for ever. Today, all four pillars have been undermined.

 Hierarchy has very little place in an organization which depends on free-thinking, self-managing innovators at all levels. Formerly impregnable market shares have been undermined by aggressive newcomers in many markets. Vertical integration makes no sense when specialist, horizontal component suppliers can achieve economies of technology and scale far greater than those of vertical generalists.  Read more...