Jeff Windman posted a nice little article on TechCrunch IT about Lean, Agile, Rally and Toyota.  Please join the deep and skeptical discussion.

Running the Product Council for Rally ALM has been an interesting learning experience.   Any time you take a group of VPs and directors from a rapidly growing business, put them together in one room, and ask them what your product should do, you're setting yourself up for a challenging and possibly contentious conversation.  Each person has a different set of responsibilities and motivations.

At Rally, Evan  (VP of Services) wants to make sure we're building the features that our coaches can use to help customers be successful with Agile.  Don (Sales) wants to make sure we have a competitive product that solves the problems that prospects care about.  Marc (Support)would like us to build features that solve problems existing customers struggle with.  Dan (Partners) wants to support partners who are building integrated solutions.  Mark (Integrations) needs API capabilities to support his team.

It's critical to get input from each of these different groups, but often there is no correlation between their requests.  Marc's existing users might all be clamoring for the ability to re-arrange a particular screen, but Don's prospective users are so thrilled to have the screen at all that they don't notice it could be improved.

Without good facilitation, it's easy for a group like this to get mired in conflict and disagreement.   I've found that if I don't spend enough time preparing for the meeting, it's really easy to have conflict erupt during the meeting and derail the process. 

Over many releases with this group, I've learned six things that seem to make a big difference for this group.

Just wanted to say that I'm looking forward to participating in next Wednesday's webinar, "Making Agile Work For Your Bottom Line." For those who don't know me, I'm a Forrester Research analyst with a special interest in Agile (and other development practices).

The Agile Commons is a pretty impressive site, by the way. Many dabble in Web 2.0, but not everyone can build an active community. Nice work.

Right now, we are all working through our 2009 budget process with the unknowns of the economic recession staring us in the face. This budgeting cycle holds more unknowns than we've seen in awhile, so it's making everyone cautious about finding the right moves that will cut costs in the short term without damaging our businesses.

Unfortunately, layoffs may be part of the solution to achieving short-term savings, especially for firms hit hard by the recession. In short, layoffs suck. These highly personal actions are sad, and I am sure you and your staff may need some time to grieve the losses. But prior to cuts, there is a bigger issue to consider while managing belt tightening -– your long-term vision and direction. Put simply, it is imperative to refresh your 2009 vision before the cutbacks, or you risk destroying the morale of the whole team, losing key personnel, and dropping market share.

As you look to make cost-saving cuts, the first question is, how are you going behave?

1. Take the easy way out and cut in a way that fixes the short-term at the risk of harming your long-term prospects. "Across the board" cuts fit this behavior.
2. Rise to the occasion and cut in ways that meet short-term needs and advance your long-term goals.

On Nov. 9, Rahm Emanuel, the new chief of staff for President-elect Barack Obama said, "Rule one: Never allow a crisis to go to waste… They are opportunities to do big things." Clearly Mr. Emanuel is reacting by rising to the occasion –- scenario number 2.

The trick to taking advantage of this crisis is to resist the pressure to simply cut without a long-term plan that everyone understands. When you do not have long-term goals, short-term fixes always lead to unintended consequences that are typically worse than the original problem. Said another way: While we sometimes get some of the intended consequences, we always get all of the unintended consequences.

A key goal of every IT department is to reduce the time and effort needed to deliver value to the business. To accomplish this, the best long-term trend we have in IT beyond Moore's law and the power of the Internet is the improvement of IT agility. Increasing IT agility is important because it provides a value innovation and delivery method that harnesses these fundamental advances in infrastructure.

Tom Poppendieck, a leader in the Lean IT movement, recently said, "You can't cut costs by focusing on cutting costs. You've got to focus on the changes that will lower your costs over the long run."

If you are exploring the adoption of agile software development practices and you're prepared to rise to the occasion, this recession and the resulting belt-tightening gives you an opportunity. You have the opportunity to rally your company around a vision that will not just cut costs, but improve morale and help you grow your business in the next economic spring.

Read the full article on TechTarget.