Welcome to Gear Stream!
Many of you have waited patiently in recent weeks to see our site go live, so we’re excited to finally be up and running. As is always the case with a new site, we are a work in progress, so please email us your suggestions and comments, we know that feedback is the heartbeat of an Agile attitude, and we need all the feedback we can get.
Many of you in the Agile community already know me, however many of you don’t, so let me take a moment to share my vision and ambition for Gear Stream. Myself and our entire team here at Gear Stream believes that the Lean & Agile community is poised to drive real transformation in large Enterprise companies that are “software intensive”. We believe this transformation opportunity will require us to extend the tent to those who today remain largely on the outside. It is our mission here at Gear Stream to connect the broader Enterprise stakeholder community in ways that can be demonstrated to drive radical improvements to things like cycle-time (from Ideation to Release / Operations), Quality, Unit Cost, Opportunity Capture and more. We are not satisfied at Gear Stream to merely build Agile Development Teams, we must also connect and support Agile teams with the kind of systemic change that requires the involvement and support of leadership in key roles within large companies. This means the CIO, PMO, Heads of R&D and Product Marketing and Finance must all take responsibility for shaping and supporting a new collaboration and lifecycle model.
We also believe that for those U.S. based companies who are committed to an Agile lifecycle that the current crop of outsourcing partners (particularly those in Asia and Eastern Europe) are not only a poor fit, they actually pose a real threat to the kind of real transformation companies so desperately need. Before you leap to conclusions, we are neither protectionists nor naive about the global economy. There are plenty of good reasons to continue relying on partners in these regions and we will continue to train and teach these offshore partners all we can about how to do Agile well. One thing however we know with absolute certainty from our decade long experience helping companies “do Agile” with offshore providers, TIME ZONES MATTER…. and they matter big time. We’ll have much to say about this here at our Transformation Blog as well as the articles and frameworks we publish here at our site, so stay tuned.
In closing out this first blog post, let me encourage you to stay connected here at GearStream.com In the coming weeks and months we will use this site to publish a number of complete Agile & Lean Courses for Agile Teams as well as several strategic Transformation Frameworks for helping those in governance roles like CIO, PMO, VP R&D and Product Marketing. Most of the materials we will be publishing will be made available COMPLETELY FREE to those working in companies looking to accelerate and promote Agile mastery. Be sure to register so that you receive the alerts when these new offerings are available for download.
