Effective June 12, 2010 Accept Corporation will be in new offices in Santa Clara, California, on Freedom Circle Drive. Everyone is excited about the new office space, and we have been busy packing up for our move.

Just to recap: we have a new office address, new phone numbers, a new URL, and a new twitter handle. Whew!

In my past two posts in the Scaling Agile series, I've written about the triangle of traps and the challenges of developing complex systems when scaling Agile development. Today I would like to focus on the impact and challenges at the team level when developers and product owners are forced to operate in dispersed and distributed environments – a situation that could impose serious dependencies and may have an impact on other teams.

Three points of impact

Developing complex systems stretches the agile methodology with these challenges:

How can agile be adapted to handle these challenges?

• Multiple teams are required, they are distributed, and team members are often not collocated
• There are dependencies across teams requiring tight coordination in order to deliver working versions of the system at the end of each sprint
• The scope of platform/architecture work is too big to be part of a functional team effort
• The backlog for entire system is too big to be managed at the sprint level

A look at two aspects of Agile fail points that organizations face with distributed teams and complex systems.

One of the best practices I communicate in my client work is Whole Product Launch (WPL). I help companies define success by brainstorming on what it looks like, appears to be, customer satisfaction, etc. i.e. What needs to happen before customers get value not what needs to happen before we release the software.

A couple of weeks ago, Dave West, Forrester Sr. Analyst hosted a webinar with us, entitled, "How Agile Value Management (AVM) can remove risk earlier in your agile process". Dave spoke about the benefits of removing risk earlier in your agile process, and streamlining key life cycle friction points between your product teams, analysts, engineering, manufacturing, and customers.

As is usually the case, we received more questions than Dave was able to respond to during the duration of the webinar. Dave has very graciously responded to your unanswered questions, which I've included below.

I recently did a webinar with Roy Wildeman, Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, on how you can minimize risk in product innovation by addressing gaps in your new product development processes. If you make it to the end of the post, you'll see how I make the connection to square dancing.

Tips for Managing Ideas like Other Company Assets

You wouldn't let an employee leave the company with their laptop or PDA, so why allow them to go without having collected critical IP – ideas they conceived while employed thinking about how to make your company's products better.

Here are five tips for better management of your idea assets: