Major projects often require half-day or all-day meetings to get everyone in sync and plan the high-level steps needed to finish the effort. You could find yourself leading such a meeting and you might dread it. It doesn’t have to be painful. You might actually enjoy it. The grunts and sighs usually begin early in […]
Category: Business
Being Agile Means Changing Corporate DNA
Successful companies have well-defined business models. They know what works and what doesn’t. They have a formula for generating revenue and controlling expenses. It’s all good — until the business model needs to change. Why would a successful company want to change its business model? New product competition, disruptive technologies, lower-cost competitors, marketplace demands, rising […]
Guest Post: BYOD: How Employees and Employers Benefit
The BYOD movement is growing among businesses in the U.S. and globally. The ability of employees to bring their personal devices to work has many benefits that employers (and employees) new to the movement need to recognize and weigh before implementing BYOD in their organizations. Some of the key benefits common to bring-your-own-device programs are […]
You Can’t Reuse or Recycle Wasted Time
At times, seemingly inexplicable situations are simple to understand once you wrap your head around them. For example, I’m often astonished at how long simple software changes take from the time the change is proposed by the business to the time it’s deployed. Here’s a scenario I see a lot at company after company. Hard […]
Every Failed Project Offers Lessons Learned – Healthcare.gov
The Healthcare.gov fiasco has received more than its fair share of attention and criticism. By now, everyone knows that the rollout failed — catastrophically. It gives everyone involved in any aspect of software development a bad rap. For that reason, we should draw a few lessons from this debacle and try to avoid getting ourselves […]
Your IT Department Has Outlived Its Usefulness
It’s time to blow up the Information Technology (IT) department as we know it. It has outlived its usefulness and over-stayed its welcome. It just doesn’t work any more. Say goodbye. The proponents of agile development, devops and Scrum, myself included, are getting no where fast. It’s not the fault of IT departments per se. […]
Lessons Learned from Blackberry’s Decline and Fall
Enterprise-scale companies invest a lot of time and money in preserving and protecting what works — or more correctly, what they believe works. It’s this preserve-and-protect mentality that makes switching software development approaches so difficult. After having invested so much in training, documentation and tools for software development, these companies are understandably reluctant to make […]
Microsoft Needs a New Beginning
Steve Ballmer has decided to retire from Microsoft — I’m sure it wasn’t voluntary. Many investors have long sought his resignation because Microsoft’s stock performance has lagged for a long time. In the last five years, Microsoft’s stock price is up about 25% while Apple’s is up 183% — 25% vs 183%. It’s long past […]
With Agile Software Development, Your Mileage Will Vary
Different types of organizations have different goals and priorities when developing software. That’s one of the major reasons why software developers disagree on development approaches and techniques. In this post, I’ll examine a few types of companies and how agile development techniques might apply to them. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to software development. The approach […]
Priority Matters and What the Business Needs Matters More
There’s a lot of discussion around the issue of priorities for business requirements. For agile development teams, the priorities of user epics and stories are a hot topic. Most experts will tell us that user stories must be prioritized and delivered in priority order. Sadly, that doesn’t always work out as intended and here’s why. […]
The Difference Between Incremental and Continuous Improvement
Most large enterprises claim to engage in continuous improvement but they are really improving incrementally. Their efforts often include annual reorganizations whereby vice presidents are shuffled around and new procedures are put in place. In my experience, little if any value derives from such organizational tinkering. Another form of incremental improvement results from conducting “project […]
If I Can’t See and Touch the Software, It Doesn’t Exist
Here’s a situation I see quite often. The software development team is rapidly adding features and functions to an application. It makes no difference if the app is completely new or being enhanced. The team is making rapid progress. Yet, the Product Owner is reluctant to show the incomplete app to the business stakeholders and […]
Software Projects Can Be Like Combat and Scope Is the DMZ
Change of scope. I’m sure you’ve heard that phrase before. In some companies, it’s ubiquitous. In fact, some project managers love scope changes because they offer opportunities to adjust the schedule. The sinister sister of scope changes is “scope creep”. What is scope creep? It’s a risk faced by projects that try to lock down […]
7 Common Sources of Risk Cause Many Projects to Crash
In my last post, I offered a simple way of grouping project risks using just 4 categories. You’ll never be able to completely eliminate risk but you can manage it. If you think your project has everything under control and faces no risks, look again. You missed something. To help you think about risk items, […]
10 Steps to Avoid Selecting the Wrong Business Software (Part 2)
This is the second part of this two-part blog entry discussing how to select commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software. It’s often better to buy than build – if you go about it the right way. Part 1 of this article is available here. 6. Use spreadsheet comparisons wisely Too many companies prepare elegant spreadsheets showing long lists […]
10 Steps to Avoid Selecting the Wrong Business Software (Part 1)
This blog usually covers topics dealing with building enterprise software systems. I’m going to diverge a bit this time and discuss how to select commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) software. Companies spend millions on COTS software and much of it is wasted. (I’ll post part 2 of this blog entry in a few days.) Buying an enterprise-scale software […]
Arguments About the Value of IT Are All Wrong
There are endless arguments around whether IT is a support function or a strategic office. Neither side can win the arguments because they’re both wrong. IT occupies a middle ground that’s unique in the enterprise and can’t be classified like other departments. What is Information Technology? What does an IT department do? Would you believe […]
10 Common Mistakes Account for Many Project Failures
There are many more ways to fail than ways to succeed. (Anything that can go wrong, probably will, right?) Yet most software project failures are attributable to a small set of common mistakes. Avoid these and your chances of success increase dramatically. Here’s a short list of common, but often overlooked, project mistakes. Review this […]
Governance Can Suck the Life Out of Software Development Teams
Large enterprises like to centralize governance across all departments. Most large IT departments follow the leader and adopt centralized control mechanisms internally. They often establish governance entities such as program management offices, whose mission is to enforce conformance. There are good reasons for it. By approaching major projects in a uniform fashion, everything from status […]
Software Bugs Won’t Just Go Away. We Need to Fix Them!
Software bugs, all of us despise them. You might prefer to call them by their politically correct name — defects. I still despise them. Yet many companies seem to ignore them. Are they hoping no one will notice? Do they expect bugs to scamper away on their own? Maybe they believe customers will be able […]