READER JON TERRY WRITES:

You had a post recently about entrepreneurship in Chattanooga that encouraged me to write you. I’m with a small start-up company in Nashville (which also has a pretty decent entrepreneurial scene!). Our company sells a product that should be dear to your heart. There’s a huge shift in the IT world away from multi-year, centrally planned projects towards self-organizing teams iteratively developing small incremental deliverables in close collaboration with customers. This movement goes by a number of names: Lean, Agile, Scrum, Lean Startup.

In conjunction with cloud-computing, Lean-Agile is revolutionizing IT, shifting power from larger companies to small and (within large companies) from middle management down to line staff. To my mind, it’s all very much in the spirit of your book “An Army of David’s”. LeanKit is an online tool that allows these Lean-Agile teams to easily collaborate from anywhere in the world by modeling their project workflows as sticky-notes on a virtual whiteboard. In fact, while we built it for IT, LeanKit has also been used by construction companies, law firms, universities, sales people and elementary school teachers. Apparently they were all looking for a simpler, more democratic approach to project management, too. :-)

If people are interested in learning more about Lean-Agile, they can check out these Amazon reading lists. And, of course, we’d be thrilled if they would check us out at www.LeanKit.com!

Very interesting.