Bob Williams

Is your backlog a graveyard?

October 29th, 2011 | Leave a comment | Tags: , ,

If your backlog is not a graveyard then you may be short of ideas. In my 20+ years of software, I’ve always had a backlog for software development. The list is full of ideas, customer requests, and defects. It fills faster than the team can implement and some items become aged and never resolved. I’ve come to realize that if I don’t have a list with aged items it’s probably because I don’t  have an open channel of incoming ideas and I’m no listening to my customers.

I used to stress over an overflowing backlog and it was a source of frustration. As I matured a bit with software development …Continue reading >>

Bob Williams

What manufacturing can teach IT and finance

October 4th, 2011 | Leave a comment | Tags: ,

Manufacturing is about consistent output.

Steady manufacturing is about consistent output at regular intervals. The Ford Motor Company is the classic case study for an assembly line process and mass production.  Think about the big idea for what Henry Ford accomplished. The assembly line reduced the labor hours required to produce a vehicle and increased the number of vehicles that could be produced in a given time period. The assembly line started a consistent output of units. It was incremental output, one car at a time.

The analysis of manufacturing involves incremental costs and margins.

If you studied business or economics in school you’ll remember that the marginal cost of …Continue reading >>

Bob Williams

Where operations, projects, and innovation collide and divide

September 27th, 2011 | Leave a comment | Tags: , , ,

To build it or to maintain it. That is the question. It’s a classic question in organizational design. The answer of course is you have to do both. I’m not talking about the decision of a product nearing the end of its life cycle where you decide between adding additional features or putting it in maintenance mode. Rather, this is about allocation of people and teams within an eCommerce organization to maintenance or operational activities versus allocation to projects.

I’ve seen terms like “run the business”, “keep the lights on”, and “operations”.   Those terms refer to activities that an organization does to maintain service to existing customers or to maintain …Continue reading >>

Bob Williams

How the waterfall method effects the PMO

June 12th, 2011 | Leave a comment | Tags: , ,

I’ve used the term “Big Bang Software Development” to describe a process where all of the software project scope is delivered at the same time. Traditionally it’s been called the waterfall model.  Industry experts have compared the waterfall model to newer agile methodologies for how they differ in the approach to deliver software.  But what about the impact these two different approaches have on a portfolio of project work?

Project Managers and Project Management Offices are impacted as well.

Project Management Offices (PMOs) and Portfolio Managers look for balance, priority, and results from the breadth of work they manage. The challenge they have is balancing multiple concurrent projects and maintaining a …Continue reading >>

Bob Williams

Urgency is a two-face

May 21st, 2011 | Leave a comment | Tags: , , , ,

What’s the goal of your organization? Do this. Ask executives in your business what the goal of the business is. Is it to make market leading products and services? Is it to make and serve customers? Or is it really to make money?

Eliyahu M. Goldratt writes in his book “The Goal” that the goal of the organization “is to increase net profit, while simultaneously increasing both ROI and cash flow, and that’s the equivalent of saying the goal is to make money.”

The business may be about making a particular product or service. But the root goal is to supply money to its stakeholders and employees.

Is there an …Continue reading >>

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