Dipping into Larman & Vodde’s “Scaling Lean & Agile Development” (I mentioned I was reading it a while back), I came across the Beyond Budgeting Round Table:
The BBRT is an international shared learning network of member organizations with a common interest in transforming their management models to enable sustained, superior performance. BBRT helps organizations learn from world-wide best practice studies and encourages them to share information, past successes and implementation experiences to move beyond command and control.
The BBRT promotes a set of principles that lead to more dynamic processes and front-line accountability. Organizations that follow this approach transform their management model in line with these principles, which are outlined in Beyond Budgeting: How Managers Can Break Free from the Annual Performance Trap, published by Harvard Business School Press.
The BBRT is at the heart of a new movement that is searching for ways to build lean, adaptive and ethical enterprises that can sustain superior competitive performance. Its aim is to spread the idea through a vibrant community.
In the software world, we are beginning to see how destructive BDUF is, so it is nice to see that the suits actually are thinking about how destructive the current practice of Big Yearly Budget Up Front is.
It has never failed to amaze me that as one approaches the end of a financial year, projects get put on hold or cancelled merely because their allocated-up-front-big-bang-style budget was out of whack with a changing reality while–at the exact same time–groups go around buying crazy stuff just to use up their other pots of cash “in case it gets taken away next year.”
There is a nice Learning Byte available (courtesy of Business Sculptors; hope I’m not breaking any copyright or “deep linking” rules…).
This goes a teeny, tiny way toward making me feel less cynical abut Agile (for large organisations, that is); who know, maybe it could be possible to get HR and Facilities Managment and the Unions (and…) on board ;-)
