Monthly Archives: March 2010

Autonomy, not Empowerment

 Jim Highsmith | Mar 24, 2010  2 Responses
Mar 242010
 
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I’ve never really liked the word empowerment, it’s just an acronym for delegation. The dictionary defines delegation as—authorizing subordinates to make certain decisions, and  empowerment as—give or delegate power or authority. Many people, myself included, have used the word empowerment to mean something more than delegation, but that extra meaning has been fuzzy. Empowerment has been used in conjunction with self-organizing teams, but often been carried too far, as trying to delegate far more authority to agile teams than was prudent. Similarly, as projects grew from a single team to multiple teams, certain decisions had to be made by specialty teams. So were these teams empowered, or not? Were they “empowered” or “pseudo-powered.” Empowerment also …

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 Agile Project Management  Tagged with: , , ,

The Future Is Actively Creating the Next CIO Now

 Robert Charette | Mar 23, 2010  3 Responses
Mar 232010
 
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The current period of financial distress has again placed CIOs under the spotlight, and they are being asked the same question that their predecessors from the early 1990s were asked: “What value is our company getting for its IT investments?” In a bit more déjà vu, the alignment of IT with the needs of the business remains the number one priority of CIOs, CEOs, and BoDs (according to “IT Transformation: Creating a Strategy for Success” published in Economist, August 2008). Why is it, CEOs and BoDs are asking their CIOs, that after 20 years you still can’t solve this problem? To top off this historical symmetry, this is a period — like the early 1990s — …

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 Business-IT Strategies, General  Tagged with: , ,

Quantifying the Start Afresh Option

 Israel Gat | Mar 22, 2010  4 Responses
Mar 222010
 
Quantifying the Start Afresh Option

Source code analysis techniques have progressed to the point that answers to numerous tricky questions about software investment dilemmas can now be answered through quantifying technical debt.  Consider, for example, the following scenario: You are a venture capitalist. One of your portfolio companies has been working for a few years now on a promising software application. Various surprises with respect to schedule and functionality have been sprung on you along the way. The company asks for additional $2M to complete development and bring a 500K lines of code to market. Using technical debt quantification techniques you find the technical debt amounts to $1M. You are not at all comfortable “paying back” the technical debt in addition …

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 Agile Project Management, Benchmarking+Surveys, General, IT Management  Tagged with: , , , ,

Agility in 90 Seconds

 Jim Highsmith | Mar 18, 2010  1 Response
Mar 182010
 
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In the early part of the decade Nicholas Cage starred in the movie “Gone in 60 Seconds,” something about stealing cars very rapidly. In the mid-1980’s colleague Ken Orr wrote “The 1-Minute Methodology,” that uncovered the secret to speed—disconnect input from output. If you can steal a car in 60 seconds or execute a methodology in a minute, why not learn to be agile in 90 seconds? I get tired of articles like “The 3 things you must know to be agile,” or “Five easy steps to agile implementation,” or “The secrets of agility unleashed,” or “Agile Mastery in Minutes.” Software development is hard. Agile may be a better way to approach software development, but …

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 Agile Project Management, Collaboration+Teams  Tagged with: , ,

Agile Roots–A Personal History

 Jim Highsmith | Mar 9, 2010  No Responses
Mar 092010
 
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Every agilist brings his or her history to the community—agile didn’t spring from the primordial soup in 2001. While we may argue against historical practices, waterfall for example, we owe something to earlier pioneers. So while I can’t speak for other agilists, I can give a snapshot of who influenced my thinking over the years.. First, I would argue that agilists were influenced more by practical than academic literature (see Craig Larman’s Agile & Iterative Development for some historical perspectives). Writers who influenced me go back to the early work of Tom DeMarco, Jerry Weinberg, Ken Orr, Jean Dominique Warnier, Larry Constantine, Steve McMenamin, Ed Yourdon, and others during the early “methodology” period from about …

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 Agile Project Management, Innovation  Tagged with: , ,

Drowning in Data? Strategic Analytics Throws a Lifeline

 Curt Hall | Mar 9, 2010  7 Responses
Mar 092010
 
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Data warehousing, BI, and analytics, in general, are undergoing profound changes resulting from the always-on business environment that is redefining organizational requirements pertaining to how data is collected, processed, and used. So much data is generated so quickly that it has sparked the advent of new — or, if you’re in an argumentative mood, at least revised — data management and data analysis technologies and practices, which are beginning to garner increasing attention by organizations seeking to take advantage of their huge data assets. I frequently talk to people whose organizations are drowning in data. Web data acquired from personalization, advertising, marketing, and other CRM activities is swamping many organizations. Contact and call center interactions …

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 Business Intelligence  Tagged with: , , , ,

A Shift in the Notion of “Portfolio Management” Opens Oppty for IT

 Bob Benson | Mar 5, 2010  8 Responses
Mar 052010
 
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For many years,Tom Bugnitz and I have been recommending that IT organizations think of themselves as a service business, with five fundamental service portfolios. The Application Portfolio (e.g., providing the applications and support to business units) The Project Portfolio The Infrastructure Services Portfolio (e.g., e-mail, network attach, remote access) The User Services Portfolio (e.g., help desk, PC repair) The Management Services Portfolio (e.g., providing procurement, planning support to business units) We also recommend that IT organizations do their budgeting in portfolio terms — that they should identify the service provided and the costs associated with them. (Over and over again we’ve written in Cutter Business-IT Strategies E-Mail Advisors, “If you don’t know cost, you don’t …

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 Business Technology Trends, Business-IT Strategies  Tagged with: ,

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