Bob Williams

Software Release Management. It’s more than an IT thing.

November 3rd, 2011 | One comment | Tags: , , ,

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 >>

Bob Williams

Process: friend and foe

August 7th, 2010 | Leave a comment | Tags: , ,

In my reading this week I came across a blog post from Tom Peters entitled Strategy: War on Systems. Tom talks about “systems” within an organization and while they are developed with good intentions, they often become inhibitors to achieving the organizational mission. I talk about this very subject quite a bit on my blog also. In fact while reviewing my notes for blog post ideas I found this entry:

“Software Development lessons learned (process is both friend and foe) – Software development friend and foe”.

This thought matches exactly with Tom’s thought about war on systems. Your software development process has steps that exist to produce output and serve …Continue reading >>

Bob Williams

When does process remove your passion?

April 15th, 2010 | Leave a comment | Tags: ,

I’ve heard it said of teachers before that they lose their ability to do what they are passionate about because of all the paper work required for their job.  As organizations or groups mature typically the processes within each group will tend to expand. So my question is, when does following the process remove people from their passions and what they love to do (i.e. serve a customer, teach a student, write software code, advise patients, etc.)? I see people making decisions because that’s what the process says or they are looking to check-off on a process step. At some point they lose site of the real need they are …Continue reading >>

Bob Williams

Stories needed of business process improvement

March 3rd, 2010 | Leave a comment | Tags: ,

I was watching CNN this morning while doing time on the treadmill. A story came on about the warning from OSHA to Sea World that whales would eventually kill a person in the current environment unless they made some changes.  It made think about people within organizations that try to sound

Kai=Change, Zen=Good(for the better), Kaizen=Continuous Improvement

warnings and alerts about business process improvement topics. Everyone is quick to agree that business processes are always full of opportunity for improvement. Remember Kaizen and business process rengineering? I remember a time when the buzz word of ‘continuous improvement’ was common place in the industry. I’d see it at training sessions, webinars, …Continue reading >>