One very important property in Kanban is called “make process policies explicit”. This includes well defined interfaces to upstream as well as downstream partners. Kanban tries to define these interfaces on a very abstract level, because Kanban is a change management approach that wants to integrate with several possible project management approaches without making assumptions about them.

Not everyone is a fan of the self directed self organizing team. It flies in the face of traditional project management, and often conflicts with the traditional organization model. The benefits of self directed teams however are too big to ignore and now we have scientific proof as to why.

Inspired by the Gang of Four patterns for object oriented software development, Michael Duell proposes in this article some patterns for dysfunctional project management behavior. He classifies them in the cremational, destructural and misbehavioral patterns categories.

The article “Familiar Metric Management – Small is Beautiful Once Again” (PDF) by Lawrence H. Putnam and Ware Myers discusses the fact that in software development projects, small teams are more efficient than larger one. They provides metrics showing that the concept of using small teams in software development is a really beautiful idea. The data was provided by 491 medium-sized projects between 35,000 and 95,000 working on new or modified source lines of code. This data shows that productivity of small project teams is higher and suggests that you …

In this article, Christophe Le Coent discusses shared responsibilities and clear accountability in software development projects. He proposes a RACI+F matrix where the letters have the following meaning: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed, Facilitate. This allows to create RACI+F matrix for the Scrum project activities for each Scrum roles. This matrix can helped your team align their thoughts and educate and guide people across the organization.

Teams are not mentioned in the definition of Kanban. In his blog post, Yuval Yeret discusses the impact on team structure when an organization is trying to adopt Kanban. He proposes a categorization of teams modes and an evolutionary approach on how to use them when you adopt Kanban, starting with on-demand teams to move to initiative/project team.

Carl Erickson shares in this blog post a study done on 564 information systems projects that seems to indicate that smaller teams are more efficient than larger teams. Small teams were defined with less than 5 people and large teams with more than 20 people. To complete projects of 100,000 equivalent source lines of code the large teams just barely (by a week or so) beat the small teams. It presents also more interesting data about this study. Communication costs and defect rate are the causes that should explain higher …

User-centric application development takes the experience of the user as the primary concern. This includes the visual nature of the application, the flow through an application, the way in which the user interacts with the application and the way it responds. It’s both the user interface and the process flows that the user goes through. A key aspect is that data structure must not be required to realize this experience.

This video discusses issues and solutions for team collaboration in an interdisciplinary context.

The article “Moneyball for software engineering” explains how metrics-driven decisions can build better software teams. The basic idea is that organizations can use statistical data to build more competitive teams. Most of us work in software project teams, but we rarely use metrics to identify strengths and weaknesses, set and track goals, or evaluate strategies.