Software Development Productivity
Scott Bellware has an interesting series of posts where he discusses how to get back to productive development teams. As usual in his writing (IMO), in a rather verbose way he brings up quite a few good points. Please go ahead and read them. He links from the first entry to the next so you can follow the flow.
I agree with the analysis that unnatural organizational structures kill productivity, motivation and leadership. And I believe this is one of the reasons why even big companies turn to so-called "boutique development shops" (shameless plug there): by being small and very cohesive, these shops offer creativity and productivity levels that "mere big" ISVs can only dream of.
And it's not always only a matter of design principles, I'd add. Sometimes you need a specific area of expertise which you're better off outsourcing (i.e. Visual Studio extensibility, hardcore WCF, framework/runtime libraries, WPF/Silverlight/Blend UEX, etc.). Small shops of highly specialized professionals can save you tons of money and time. But your own dev team will certainly benefit from applying sound design principles for what matters most to your business: the business rules and logic....