Of course there has been loads of hype about agile in the software development community. Lots of folks have now been certified as Scrum Masters. I have been involved in agile transformation since 2004/5 when I had a proprietary methodology forced on me from above. Said methodology was brought by a “Management Science” consultant, who…
Vision, Strategy, Policy
Sometimes it seems like we get “hung up” on moving forward with some initiative, because we cannot separate vision from strategy, and strategy from policy. I want to posit some definitions of these terms that might help us to keep making progress. One of the reasons that we conflate these is that they all have…
Premature Plan Optimization
In PlanningSequencingElaboration , I shared my realization that sequencing is less a simplification of scheduling, than scheduling is an optimization of the plan around a time constraint. Here are some typical variables and constraints that a project plan must contemplate: 1) Cost – can we complete the necessary work and deliver the expected value at…
A Recipe For Dissatisfaction
When scope has little why because it is so obvious then the who doing the how don't get it, how will match the what and not the why – a recipe for dissatisfaction.
Decision as Attribute
Business process documentation often reflects decisions that are made during the process that affect subsequent steps in the process. Somtimes the decision can affect the necessity of a step or the outcome of a step. When decisions are made during the process that affect subsequent steps, the result of that decision becomes a data element…
Undocumented, Unrecognized Process
Following a twitter conversation recently, Matthias Weimann posted a quote from Clay Shirkry about process: “Process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity” – Clay Shirky and it started. Scott Ambler – one of my favorite Tech authors replied: There is always a process being followed. Your process may or may not be documented, or…
Impact of Design
Design is the great time to assess the impact of a software change. I want to talk about three aspects of impact that we should consider: Business Impact: Any material change to the business process that is not specified in the requirements should be considered impact. This could be beneficial or detrimental, or value neutral…
Fallacy of the PMO
In UnitsOfWork, I talked about how teams who stay formed through a series of projects become better at converting units of value to units of work consistently. While re-reading this post, I realize that a great fallacy of the PMO is that it is not the project manager who is responsible for this process, but…
Design Decisions
Software design is all about decisions. What language or platform is best suited to solve the problem? What pattern(s) will we adopt? What components need to be built? What layers are required and what will each layer be responsible for? In a “good” software design, decisions are made efficiently. That means that we make decisions…
Behavioral Taxonomy
When developing requirements for a business process in which there are valid process variants, one usually describes the process variants as a behavior. When modeling these variants, it is useful to consider each aspect of a process that has variants, and isolate unique behaviors based on some decision framework. Both the distinct list of behaviors…