Glen Alleman in his post How Long Should Tasks Be gets to the heart of an important issue. When planning, how long can you wait before you know that you are late. In principle, it works like this – you don’t know you are late until you fail to complete a task on schedule. How late…
Estimation Purposes Beyond The Customer
In my last post about Estimation Purposes – I spent a little time talking about the reason that our customer might want to estimate, and how estimation informs our conversation with the customer. But the reason for estimation goes beyond the customer, and into our own management and leadership. Listening to the #NoEstimates conversations that…
What They Want…
How do we get Enterprise IT to align with our customer? The questions we ask our customer are indicative of our assumptions. Those assumptions are correlated to our relationship with our customer, and our understanding of that customer’s pain points or frustrations with IT. But how do we get past assumptions, and how do we…
Communication Patterns
In interacting with a software team recently, I realized that communication is often not the strongest suit that developers play. Here are some patterns that I observed that I find harmful to effective software delivery: 1) Communicate via status – When developers are using tools to manage tasks, defects, or other work packages, they often…
A Buck Stop
Caution: Rant Ahead! E-mail chains. Ken sends a note to Carole, his boss: “I need to know what systems our teams use for client servicing activities, can you help”? Nothing wrong with asking for information. Unless you’re asking people who don’t have a reason to know about what you’re asking. Carole forwards the note to…
IT Patterns and Practices
In my prior post ( ITStrategyInternals ) I explained a little about patterns and practices. Patterns and Practices within IT go hand in hand, in that we have an established solution, and a body of knowledge and expertise around that solution. I think that we sometimes think that by selecting a tool, we have defined…
IT Internal Strategy
So in prior posts about IT Strategy (The Goal of IT, Enterprise Application Value) I have talked about IT’s “Outward Facing Strategy”. So this post will be more about what are we doing to help ourselves deliver against our outward facing strategy. At the top level of our Internal IT Strategy is our values: What…
Estimation Information
A recent exercise at the job around improving the accuracy of estimate for software delivery projects caused me to have a minor epiphany! When doing agile software delivery, we generally get value from having more information sooner. But this plays differently in managing the backlog. We have been working on writing basic stories for all…
Enterprise Application Value
This is a continuation of the last post, The Goal of IT where I tried to separate out how IT as a business function contributes to the goal of a company. Most of my experience is in Enterprise IT – that is IT is a function of a larger business enterprise, not specifically creating IT…
The Goal of IT
I recently re-read a book called “The Goal” by Eliyahu Goldratt. I had read it years ago, and at the time it had resonated deeply in my mind. Sometimes it is beneficial to review concepts that resonate. For years, I have been working in the application development domain within IT. Most of my views on…