2009-10-15T14:52:07-04:00 Mary 9 Poppendieck image/jpeg popp.jpg 2184 2009-10-15T14:52:07-04:00 Author 2009-10-15T20:51:38-04:00 Mary Poppendieck /system/pictures/9/thumb/popp.jpg?1255632727 7 2009-12-21T09:31:15-05:00 3 6 Cost Center Disease 3 9 10 2010-03-08T09:51:32-05:00 Agile Ballroom E <p>Many companies have struggled mightily to avoid Big Company Disease, only to succumb in the end. We&#8217;ve discovered a similar disease, which we call Cost Center Disease, which has proven to be equally difficult to avoid. Cost Center Disease afflicts IT departments, government organizations, even consulting firms &#150; anywhere the value created by one organization is realized by another organization and the governance system substitutes an artificial target for providing real value. This talk will cover the causes, symptoms, and treatment of Cost Center Disease.</p> <p>Mary Poppendieck started her career as a process control programmer, moved on to manage the IT department of a manufacturing plant, and then ended up in product development, where she was both a product champion and department manager.</p> <p>Mary considered retirement 1998, but instead found herself managing a government software project where she first encountered the word “waterfall.” When Mary compared her experience in successful software and product development to the prevailing opinions about how to manage software projects, she decided the time had come for a new paradigm. She wrote the award-winning book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit in 2003 to explain how the lean principles from manufacturing offer a better approach to software development.</p> <p>Over the past six years, Mary has found retirement elusive as she lectures and teaches classes with her husband Tom. Based on their on-going learning, they wrote Leading Lean Software Development: Results are Not the Point in 2009.</p>