I recently came across this blog, and to sum it up (its rather long); there are a lot of things wrong with what we'll call Formal Agile.  Basically, Formal Agile is, for lack of better term, ritualistic in its various approaches: task cards, sprints, pair programming, XP, test-first development, etc... And here we were thinking that the point of agility was to loosen constraints in a way that still kept us on target.  And contrary to conventional wisdom, its not Waterfall or Agile; there are other options. 

Anyway that blogs author stumbled across a development approach that Google uses; I happened to use it while subcontracting for another small company, and it's fantastic.  It's called the task queue.  But you can't quite do it the way Google does, because the rest of us have realities like clients, deadlines, and a market capitalization somewhere under $200 Billion.

The basic idea is that you take projects functional decomposition/project plan/whatever and drop all those tasks (and new ones as they become defined) into your bug tracking tool.  So now we have electronic task cards with a stupid tool to update now? 

Almost, but in a way that lets people pace themselves.  Realities are that we can't do 'sprints' of work every week, week after week, and have high quality, not too mention happy employees; there is no faster, better, cheaper.  

 The basic idea is so simple, I wish I could take credit for it.  You make sure people are assigned to several tasks at a time there scheduled to be due in the next couple weeks. What you are really doing here is letting people pace themselves AND allowing them to switch gears if they get stuck or iritated with one of their tasks.  As tasks get completed and the current set marked off, new work, targeted for several weeks out, needs to assigned.

So to sum it up in a phrase... Everybody should have more than one thing they can be working on at any given time, and a couple weeks to do those things.

Oh yeah, for the CMMi types... can you think of a more painless way of having access to all kinds of metrics?