By Dave Kearney, Susan Larson Bouwer, and Anjan Chatterjee

Suppose you’re thinking of opening a restaurant. You’ll need to make a lot of smart decisions so that your establishment will achieve success. These choices include location, pricing, and cuisine-all of them will have a significant impact on your ability to succeed. To help with these decisions, you might first look at the community in which you’re thinking of locating your restaurant. Who lives in the neighborhood? What can they afford? And what kinds of food might they like to eat?

Both Lean Continuous Improvement and Agile Project Management provide benefits to your new enterprise and help your new restaurant thrive. To start, let’s look at Lean. Lean is a way to organize operations to maximize the flow of value to customers while minimizing waste. By using Lean, your staff can identify specific areas for improvement by observing where and how people do the actual work. With a Lean mindset, you rely on those who do the job to determine the best improvement course. Through this collaborative process, your cross-functional team can introduce changes and evaluate them against pre-determined improvement metrics. …

By Michael Marmor, Dave Kearney, and Anjan Chatterjee

When you hire a team to create software for you, the amount of effort put into initial planning is often what determines the project’s ultimate success or failure. An essential yet often overlooked part of that planning is the methodology chosen to manage the project itself. As a formal discipline, project management has been around for generations. But radical new techniques for managing projects-especially software projects-have been evolving at breakneck speed for the last two decades. …

By Dave Kearney

Black and Brown people have an unconscionable number of barriers between them and high paying jobs. In past articles, I’ve talked about many of the hurdles people of color face to attain the skills and education necessary for a good job. And major studies have shown that, even with the required skills, terrible biases exist in recruitment and selection processes.

By Dave Kearney

Most of us don’t venture into places we don’t belong. We’re uncomfortable in situations where we aren’t accepted as we are, and we tend to seek out others who look, act, and think as we do. We shouldn’t be surprised that women and persons of color don’t seek careers where few people look like them.

By Dave Kearney

As we’ve discussed in previous articles, our educational system is facing plenty of challenges — but one that doesn’t get enough attention is literacy and its connection to long-term educational success. Research shows that kids who are not reading by the end of third grade are four times more likely to drop out of high school. In fact, kids who struggle to read by the third grade account for 88% of those who fail to finish high school.

By Dave Kearney, Keith Worfolk, and Anjan Chatterjee

Mark Zuckerberg has said, “If things aren’t breaking, you’re not moving fast enough. People learn by making mistakes.” In some regards, this is a guiding principle for agile solution development and DevOps processes. But moving fast while innovating has its downside as well: it can inadvertently allow outside forces to break or steal your “stuff” — your data, your intellectual property, your applications, or your other assets. Out in the Internet’s wilds, nefarious operators are continually hoping companies make quick decisions that leave open doors for a host of possible entrances. …

By Dave Kearney and Zach Wasilew

Imagine you need to travel from New York to Los Angeles. (Forget Covid-19 for a moment and remember how things used to be.) You probably think you’re a credit card transaction away from putting your butt on a plane — maybe even a direct flight to your destination. No problem, right?