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November 11th, 2011 | | Tags: change, crazyI sat the in the office of a colleague not long ago and made a comment about how I thought a particular company procedure was too bureaucratic. We’ve all been there. Maybe you haven’t voiced it out-loud, but you’ve surely thought it. My point was that it wasn’t necessary to go through all this “stuff” to get to real objective of the process. It was a case where checking a box on a to-do list had become greater than what you were trying to achieve.
But what came next was one of those life stopping moments. My colleague said “What? Do you think you can change it?”. It was said …Continue reading >>
This is about IT and Business alignment. I’m fortunate enough to have worked in two different functional areas of a business: IT and Marketing. I can say with 100% confidence that business owners and stakeholders of software releases should be more concerned and involved in the IT release management process. The typical release process covers areas such as requirements specification, feature prioritization, business case modeling, and go-live deployment communication. It’s a set of tasks intended to oversee the requirements, development, testing, and deployment of software releases. Sounds very IT, but it should be a shared business process.
Release management is about adding value. Release Management is also about how IT …Continue reading >>
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 >>
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 >>
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 >>
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