Larman’s Laws | Glossary

Definition :

 After decades of observation and organizational consulting, here are Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior. These are observations rather than laws to follow.

  1. Organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and first-level manager and “specialist” positions & power structures.
  2. As a corollary to (1), any change initiative will be reduced to redefining or overloading the new terminology to mean basically the same as status quo.
  3. As a corollary to (1), any change initiative will be derided as “purist,” “theoretical,” “revolutionary,” “religion” and “needing pragmatic customization for local concerns” — which deflects from addressing weaknesses and manager/specialist status quo.
  4. Culture follows structure.

or, “culture/behavior/mindset follows system & organizational design” i.e., if you want to really change culture, you have to start with changing structure, because culture does not really change otherwise, and that’s why deep systems of thought such as organizational learning are not very sticky or impactful by themselves, and why systems such as Scrum (that have a strong focus on structural change at the start) tend to more quickly impact culture.

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Further Reading:

Book: Large – Scale Scrum by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde. Click here to get such more insights

 

staged release strategy | Glossary

Definition :

 System development decisions often have deep strategic, business, and cost implications. If not planned correctly ramifications of incorrect decisions may be felt long after the decisions have been made. On the periphery of system development one very important aspect addressing this issue may often be under emphasized or overlooked all together. This is the implementation, execution, and management of an effective software release strategy. This becomes exponentially important when building a custom application because of the many challenges facing development teams:

  • Managing development activities
  • Managing integration of new development into the existing application
  • Managing application dependencies
  • Managing new feature/function requests
  • Managing compliance with departmental/federal regulations, mandates, and processes
  • Managing security requirements (vulnerability assessment testing [VA]

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Further Reading:

Lean Agile Software Development by Alan Salloway, Guy Beaver and James R. Trott.