Your path to business agility
Last week saw me traveling, which means I had some time to do a little airplane reading. I had the July/August edition of the Harvard Business Review with me and read a few thought-provoking articles. The first is titled “The Execution Trap.” A lot of good thoughts but the main thread is that there should not...
Every product management job I have ever had, no matter the size of the company, I have wrestled with the question — “How do I determine the right innovation vs maintenance mix?” In most of my jobs, I have struggled with this question on a daily basis, constantly making sure that the “small” priority decisions...
Good IT Governance has numerous benefits for running an IT organization. A solid understanding and control of resources, work effort, and costs will drive better decisions. Having that information readily available, on-demand, will drive more timely decision making. There are many sources CIO’s and IT organizations look to for guidance and examples on governance models...
I regularly find myself reading the thoughts and opinions of experts on management and how I can be a better manager. I’m never actually surprised by what I read – I think most of it is obvious. At the same time it’s easy to agree with what you’ve read, but difficult to put it into...
Developers that work with an issue tracking system are torn between two extremes. They often would like to know everything that is happening on their project yet their main focus is on tasks assigned to them. In practice, neither an overly nosey or a hermit-like approach works well, as developers are either overwhelmed by the...
IT Governance often represents a new way of doing business: An IT Governance training strategy must incorporate change management. An initiative as impactful as an IT Governance Solution typically requires an organization to implement new roles, processes and automation. The changes can appear daunting for many employees whose first experience with the new techniques is...
In a blog post today on agilefocus.com, William Pietri outlines his approach to tracking experimental work through the value stream of a Lean Startup. Being a “Lean Startup” ourselves (though we don’t really think of ourselves as a “startup”…but close enough), I found this line of thought intriguing. So, I decided to take a crack at modeling...
70% of all IT projects fail Since the mid-1980s, the Standish Group has published the world’s largest study on IT projects – the Chaos Manifesto (formerly called the Chaos Report). Over the years they have examined over 70,000 projects, and what’s startling is the amount of IT-related projects that fail. In the latest poll for...
The new 2.0 release of the Atlassian Connector for Eclipse provides the latest and most complete access to Atlassian’s development and collaboration tools from within the Eclipse IDE. This provides developers with an integrated platform for managing issues, source code, builds, and code reviews. Combining the Atlassian Connector for Eclipse with Tasktop Pro delivers a...
Over the past year I’ve been working closely with those in the Tasktop and Mylyn community at large to define best practices for task-focused programming and collaboration. My goal has been to share what I’ve learned about how the leaders in task management use Tasktop and Mylyn to collaborate effectively. To this end, I’ve created...
