You can reduce coordination costs by empowering team members to self-organize. Command and Control type management in which people meet in order to assign tasks to individuals in advance is wasteful. It is better to let team members self assign tasks. Self-organization generally reduces the coordination costs on a project. However, it requires information in order to work. Techniques within Kanban provide coordination information that enables self-organization and reduces coordination costs.
This is a nice little book on Kanban for IT Projects, be it support, maintenance or development. The great thing about Kanban is that it is so far from being prescriptive, it allows for gradual implementation and adoption.
The other great thing about this tool invented by Taichi Ohno, is that it allows to make the flow of work visible and actionnable : people adopt easily, engage and then self-organize.
Last takeaway from this book that applies to Enterprise Social Software : making information accessible allows teams to self organize which reduces coordination costs. This was worth les Citations du Dimanche.
#hypertextual 