Innovation Tools: Enablers or Derailers? 4 Easy Steps to Keeping It on the Rails

“Innovate or Die.” It’s the current battle cry for businesses trying to get or stay ahead of the competition and remain viable in the market. But how do you avoid innovation for innovation’s sake, and instead drive measurable business results through innovation tools and processes? Birds of a Feather Innovation Leaders Workshop I learned the...

Project Management in IT: How Risky is Your Project?

It would seem that in the age of fast-paced technological improvements and facilitated decision-making, projects within IT should become more manageable and carry less risk. After all, today CIOs and project managers have numerous tools at their finger tipsto make project management more efficient and productive.However, many teams still struggle with proper resource management, budget...

IT Governance in the Public Sector: Make the Jump to the Cloud

Embracing the benefits of the Cloud for IT organizations, many companies have decided to transition from old-fashioned on-premise solutions to innovative cloud-based applications. The difference has been quite dramatic as many of those who switched have managed to achieve greater efficiency, gain more visibility as well as decrease the overall total cost of ownership. However,...

How Portfolio Management Can Maximize CIO Contribution to Shareholder Value

ZDNet recently ran a piece entitled, “5 Reasons the CIO Can Be a Corporate Sustainability Hero.” Interesting and true, but I felt like they buried the lead as journalists like to say. Sustainability is crucial to this story, but far more powerful when considered in conjunction with the CIO’s impact on his or her company’s...

What the heck are logical models?

Have you ever committed to the repository and got mail afterwards “Hey, this isn’t compiling!”? Likely you committed only some of the changes you made leaving out files required for a successful build. Let’s take a look at a simple example: In this model we have a class element Some Class in my.ecore which extends...

Portfolio Perspectives: Getting the PPM Picture

Welcome to Portfolio Perspectives! I’m excited to present this new blog which will offer insights, thought leadership and points of view on portfolio management and its growing impact across the enterprise. In today’s business climate of perpetual change, the discipline of portfolio management is more critical than ever to help you make timely, informed business...

Put a Spike In It

Spikes in Agile Software Development environments are used to investigate a concept and/or create a simple prototype. Basically, a spike is a quick (typically less than a sprint of effort) exploration by coding of an area in which the development team lacks confidence. The spike is concluded when you learn what you needed to learn....

Eclipse Mylyn 3.6 lights up Indigo, puts an end to faceless builds

Yesterday’s Eclipse Indigo release delivered a year’s worth of improvements on what has become the de facto IDE platform for Java and beyond. The Java package has seen major additions, including the WindowBuilder tool that originated from Instantiations and the m2e plug-in that eases Maven-based builds. EGit 1.0 is an essential tool for the growing...

About WIP Limits and Card Size

One of the new features just released in Planview AgilePlace Kanban is the ability to specify WIP Limits by Card “Size”, instead of the number of Cards in a lane. Earlier this week, after announcing this feature, I got a couple of “Really?” emails like this one, from Arne Roock: Chris, just saw your new features. Most of them...