Colin Jones - Connecting Agile Processes to Business Strategy

Agile tooling is always a hot topic within product development teams with differing views around effectiveness.

There's a balance to strike between encouraging people to work together and communicate directly and the convenience of data collection plus asynchronous communication often needed by distributed teams and wider stakeholders.

Toyota use the word "jidoka" meaning automation with a human touch to describe machine automation that can make simple judgements and stop when quality problems arise. They strive for the right kind of automation. The parallels are not exactly the same but a similarity in approach may be appropriate and the impact tooling has on feedback loops for instance.

Colin Jones is an architect who has been pondering these problems and here, in true agile style, seeks feedback on some of his collaboration tooling ideas.