Microsoft is the American technology company where Anderson worked during the period that produced the first virtual kanban system for knowledge work. His Microsoft work spans two significant contributions: the microsoft-xit-kanban-2004 kanban experiment and the development of MSF for CMMI Process Improvement.
XIT Sustaining Engineering (2004)
In October 2004, dragos-dumitriu, manager of Microsoft's XIT (Extended IT) Sustaining Engineering team, asked Anderson to help design a pull system for managing software support work. The resulting implementation — a WIP-limited virtual pull system run on Microsoft Product Studio for an offshore development team in India — was the first virtual kanban system for knowledge work. It predates the Corbis experiment by two years and established the empirical foundation for Anderson's later, more fully developed Kanban Method. The system drew on Goldratt's Drum-Buffer-Rope mechanism from Theory of Constraints; the subsequent conversations with don-reinertsen in winter 2005 reframed it in terms of queueing theory.
MSF for CMMI
Anderson also worked on Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) for CMMI Process Improvement — a process improvement framework that combined Microsoft's internal project management practices with the Capability Maturity Model Integration standard. This work placed Anderson at the intersection of formal process models and agile methods, and reflects the pre-kanban-era's concern with institutionalizing software engineering practices in large organizations.
Role in the intellectual biography
Microsoft is the institutional setting for the initial kanban experiment and for Anderson's pre-Kanban work in agile management and process improvement. The transition from Microsoft (where the first kanban experiment was conducted) to corbis (where the Kanban Method was fully developed) marks the key inflection point between experiment and method — between a promising pull system implementation and a systematic approach to organizational change.