Managing gang of chaotic software developers is complex

Running a software development company is sometimes simple and sometimes complicated. Most often it is really complex and from time to time - very chaotic. Basing on the Cynefin framework (deriving from Complex Adaptive Systems Theory) one can get some guidelines on how to aid decision making and not get lost in the process.

Cynefin is a sense-making framework that describes complex systems (like projects or companies), situations in these systems and aids decision making. It was presented in ‘99 by Dave Snowden and has recently started to get recognition in agile community as it can be used to explain concepts of agility in a broader context. To make it worse (and more geeky) - Cynefin is pronounced in a very unintuitive way.

During the talk I’ll present a few ideas that are rooted in agile concepts (inspection & adaption, collaboration, empowered team, etc.), that have been playtested in a real company and can be reused on any level of an organization (from a project team level up to the whole company as we did).