Carl Rogers

On the road with Heroes... and the Sporting Analogy

2008-02-29T05:56:00Z

Yesterday we kicked off our launch of Release 2 of Process MeNTOR TeamGuide at Microsoft’s Heroes Happen {2008} road show in Sydney. At the event I was lucky enough to help Anthony Borton present a session on Visual Studio 2008 and Application Lifecycle Management.

During my presentation, I quickly flashed up the following graphic in order to get the crowd thinking beyond individual developer productivity:

Now, I love a good sporting analogy – particularly if it helps explain some of the fundamentals behind our approach to maximising team performance via Process MeNtOR. However, as with all metaphors they have their limitations....

Using the above metaphor, Process MeNtOR:

- Helps teams work more effectively together – fundamentally that is what we are about. Software development of any scale is about teams of people working together effectively – and Process MeNtOR facilitates this by providing a common language for the group. In the case of the above Dragon Boat crew, it is difficult to imagine management pulling a key team member out half way through a race and replacing them with someone else from another team. Yet that is what consistently happens with projects – hence the need to provide teams with structure to allow them to collaborate effectively even when key members change mid race.

- Establishes and maintains clarity of goals – one of Process MeNtOR’s strengths is the focus it brings to requirements and architecture early in the lifecycle, establishing a clear understanding of what needs to be delivered and why. With our Dragon Boat crew, it is unlikely that the finish line will be moved mid-race. But this is what we expect to happen throughout a project – particularly large projects. As the project progresses, the business domain typically changes or evolves and through interaction with the project team, key project stakeholders often learn more about their own business and the advantages that a technological innovation can deliver. These factors often result in a ‘changing of the finish line’. Our philosophy with Process MeNtOR is to recognise this phenomenon, anticipate it, and seek to support it in a controlled fashion to ensure the project delivers maximum benefit.

- Creates a shared understanding of roles – one of the enablers for effectively team performance is a shared understanding of who does what? and why? Here is the main problem with my sporting analogy - software projects, unlike Dragon Boats, have a much broader set of roles than a crew of rowers. Software projects will typically include Business Analysts, Architects, Project Managers, Designers, Developers, Testers and Change Managers – to name but a few. Process MeNtOR provides deep guidance for the optimum performance of all of these roles.

- Aligns individual effort – high performance teams achieve outstanding performance through the tight alignment of individual effort – ensuring that no unnecessary tasks are performed that detracts from the team goal. This, I imagine is relatively easy to achieve with a Dragon Boat crew of motivated individuals – experience has shown that it is somewhat more challenging to achieve in software teams. This is where the real strength of Process MeNtOR lies. The project roadmaps within Process MeNtOR provide the foundation for roles within a team to work effectively and efficiently together as team – making projects a more enjoyable place to be.

During the presentation, I also mentioned the APO (application platform otimisation) initiative that has been developed by Microsoft to help organisations understand where their current strengths and weaknesses are – and provides a framework to help them improve their capabilities.

When I asked the audience if they had heard of APO ... I got nothing.

So, for those that are interested, more information about APO is available at:

http://www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready/appplat/default.mspx?WT.svl=1

http://www.microsoft.com/click/usapo/default.mspx

At Object Consulting, we have found the APO initiative to be a useful way for us to explain the products, training and services that we provide around capability improvement.

A flyer that maps our products, training and services to the APO framework is available for download here.

Next stop on the Heroes Happen {2008} road show ... Melbourne, then Adelaide, Perth, Brisbane and Canberra.

Cheers,
Carl

PS – And yes, I couldn’t resist – I had to get my photo with the heroes...

TFS Adoption within EMEA – A Process Perspective

2008-02-29T03:34:00Z

During our recent visit to TechEd EMEA Developers 2007, we again took the opportunity to conduct a 'process survey' at our booth – with the lure of winning an Xbox 360 (which was won by Christian Rysgaard from Simcorp in Denmark).

Our goal with the survey was to try and understand:

the level of adoption of TFS within the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) market, and
how ‘process’ is viewed within the EMEA/Microsoft software development community.

After a hectic couple of months (summer holidays, Christmas, New Year, moving house, etc.) I have finally found the time to have a closer look at the survey results from the 198 entries and gleaned some interesting insights...

(Note: Results of a similar survey that we undertook at the Australian TechEd event in July 2007 are published here)

Challenges faced on Software Projects

We asked the respondents to select from a list the top 3 challenges their organisation typically faces on software projects.
Graph #1 shows the raw scores that we received:

(Note: some respondents voted for more than 3 challenges, and some identified less than 3)

Graph #2 shows the raw data from Graph#1 broken down into the votes for each challenge as a percentage of the total number of votes:

This raw information becomes much more interesting when we look at it from the perspective of the percentage of respondents (voters) that voted for each of the challenges – as shown in Graph #3:

The results show that overall:

Poor Requirements continues to be a major challenge for software projects.
Organisations continue to suffer from delayed delivery from software projects.
Software project particpants believe that their projects suffer from a lack of focus on testing and the absence of a formal methodology.
Choosing the right technology is seldom the problem.

I was interested to see if there are different perceptions between ‘small’ and ‘large’ organisations – Graph #4 shows the key areas of difference when we seperate the data based on the size of the respondent’s organisation:

I find these points of divergence to be quite interesting:

Respondents from larger organisations:

Perceive a ‘lack of testing’ and the ‘lack of a formal methodology’ to be less challenging than those respondents from smaller organisations. Probably indicating that larger organisations are typically more focussed on formalising the SDLC and include some degree of testing within the SDLC.
Struggle more with ‘poor communication’, ‘unclear/imprecise business objectives’ and the ‘lack of executive support’ than those respondents from smaller organisations. I find these results to be typical of the challenges faced by many larger organisations.

Respondents from smaller organisations:

Encounter real problems around the ‘lack of testing’ and the ‘lack of a formal methodology’ – but do not perceive ‘poor communication’ to be a problem. I have found these team dynamic issues to be relatively common in small organisations – particularly as they encounter the growing pains on the road to becoming a ‘large’ organisation.

I was also interested to see if there were any significant differences between ‘small’ and ‘large’ project teams – Graph #5 shows the key areas of difference when we seperate the data based on the typical size of the respondent’s project team:

Again, I find the following points of divergence quite interesting:

Lager project teams have a real challenge with ‘unclear/imprecise business objectives’ – which, I surmise, probably also contributes to the challenges of ‘poor project management’, ‘poor architecture’ and ‘bad choice of technology’.
Despite the significant challenge of ‘unclear/imprecise business objectives’ - ‘delayed delivery’ does not rate particularly high for larger project teams. I found this a little bit surprising as a lack of clarity around what the business really wants on large projects often translates directly into ‘poor requirements’, which ultimately leads to ‘delayed delivery’.

Adoption of Team Foundation Server (TFS)

As Process MeNtOR TeamGuide leverages and extends the process capabilities of Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS), we were interested to know how the adoption of TFS was progressing within the EMEA market.

Graph #6 shows that about 1 in 3 of respondents had adopted TFS:

Breaking down the TFS users by project size (Graph #7) reveals that TFS is predominantly being used within smaller teams (less than 10):

Slicing the TFS user data by Organisational Type (Graph #8) shows that, predictably, TFS adoption is more prominent within larger organisations:

We introduced a new question in this survey to try and determine which features of Team Foundation Server are being used – the overall results of this question are shown in Graph #9:

These results agree with our experience in working with many customers:

The initial point of adoption of TFS is around Source Control.
The more advanced features of TFS (particularly those around team collaboration, project reporting and management) are progressively adopted as the organisation grows in experience with TFS.

Drilling into these results, reveals that there are substantial differences in adoption of TFS features – based on the size of the organisation – as shown in Graph #10:

Although it is unwise to try and extrapolate too much from these results (based on the small number of TFS users within the survey respondents), I put forward the following hypothesis (based largely on personal experience):

Larger organisations typically have some existing approach to software process (which is not based on MSF) and struggle to get value from the ‘out of the box’ process templates provided by Microsoft in TFS - preferring to rely on ‘harder’ measures to enforce procedures such as ‘check in policies’.
Smaller organisations typically have little in the way of existing process assets and are therefore more willing to embrace the process templates provided with TFS – or to adopt other process templates available within broader the TFS community. Adopting such process templates enables these smaller organisations to derive more value in the reporting services enable via the process templates.

Software Development Processes

Graph #11 shows that within the respondents who have adopted TFS, there is a healthy regard for the value of software development processes:

We asked all of the respondents to identify what software development process they typically use. Graph #12 shows the diversity of process used within the Microsoft/EMEA development community – and the prevalence of ‘in-house’ methodologies:

Graph #13 shows that, when we look at the software development processes used within the TFS community, adoption of SCRUM and MSF is much more prevalent – probably due to the free availability of process templates and active user communities:

Finally, Graph #14 shows the diversity of roles using TFS who were present at TechED EMEA Developers:

Market Insights

The survey results are encouraging for us:

The major challenges faced by software delivery projects can be addressed by the successful adoption of our methodology, Process MeNtOR.
There is a solid base of Team Foundation Server (TFS) usage within the EMEA market– that we expect to grow significantly over the next few years. This represents a great market for our Process MeNtOR TeamGuide product which integrates our methodology into VSTS/TFS.

The challenge for us is encouraging organisations to move beyond ‘in-house’ methodologies and to leverage commercially available, best practice methodologies, like Process MeNtOR.

Cheers,

Carl

Christian takes home the Xbox!

2007-11-14T11:29:00Z

Congratulations to Christian Rysgaard from Simcorp in Denmark – Christian is the proud (and very surprised!) owner of a brand new Xbox 360 – courtesy of our process survey & competition giveaway.

We hope you enjoy many hours of gaming pleasure!

Once I get back to Australia, we will analyse the results of the process survey and publish the results here in my blog.

Cheers,

Carl

Unleashing the RAPTOR at TechED EMEA

2007-11-14T11:09:00Z

During the week of 5-11 November, the Process MeNtOR product team travelled to Barcelona to exhibit at Microsoft TechED EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa).

The team of Rob Biernat, Stephan Meyn and myself unleashed the RAPTOR on an unsuspecting European audience.

As per our press release:

Process MeNtOR RAPTOR is a process authoring and publishing capability that allows organisations to customise, via ‘click and drag functionality’, the existing Process MeNtOR content to suit the style and size of their organisation. The ease of use and speed of publishing with RAPTOR enables process authoring to be undertaken by non-technical staff that have a responsibility for process, such as Quality Managers and Project Managers. RAPTOR also allows organisation to ‘turn off’ access to sections of Process MeNtOR content that are not relevant for their organisation.

Once the process has been tailored with RAPTOR, Process MeNtOR TeamGuide (our plug-in for Visual Studio) enables this process to be injected directly into the developer’s every day workspace via a series of wizards that create content rich Work Items.

The combination of RAPTOR and TeamGuide ensure that ‘just enough process’ is provided to the developer to achieve their outcomes.

RAPTOR and TeamGuide generated a lot of interest during the event – both within the developer community and within Microsoft.

Thanks to everyone who came to visit our stand during the event – we hope you made it home safe and sound – see you next year!

Cheers,
Carl

Perspectives on the role of the Designer ...

2007-09-28T06:05:00Z

We were recently working with a client around improving the capability of Designers within his organisation. In the course of the engagement, the client posed the following questions:

Q1. What questions should the Designer ask at the early phases of the project to ensure success?

Q2. How does an organisation determine the right approach for a given project? – e.g. Agile/Waterfall/Mainframe, etc.

Q3. What are the skill set/competencies required of a World-class Designer?

Q4. What communication skills are required by Designers?

Q5. What estimating skills are required by Designers?

I have posted an edited version of the internal discussion train we ran for each of these questions - as they represent a diversity of opinion and insight.

I'd be interested to hear the opinions and views of others within the Design community - as they are good questions to ask ... and answer!

Cheers,

Carl

A little insight into our customers' process capability ...

2007-09-05T11:01:00Z

During the recent TechED Australia event on the Gold Coast, we ran a 'process survey' at our booth – with the lure of an Xbox 360 as a giveaway. Our goal with the survey was to try and understand more about ‘process’ within the Australian software development community.

After weeding out some multiple entries, the remaining 568 entries provided us with some interesting insights ...

Challenges faced on Software Projects:

We asked the respondents to select from the following list the top 3 challenges their organisation faced on software projects:

Delayed Delivery
Cost overruns
Poor Architecture
Poor Communication
Engagement with Users
Lack of Testing
Poor Requirements
Unclear/Imprecise Business Objectives
Poor Project Management
Lack of Executive Support
Bad Choice of Technology
Lack of a Formal Methodology

Graph #1 shows the raw votes from the respondents:

(Note some respondents voted for more than 3 challenges - and some didn't vote at all):

Graph #2 shows the raw data from Graph #1 broken down into the votes for each challenge as a percentage of the total number of votes:

What is more interesting than these 'raw scores' is, as per Graph #3 the percentage of voters (respondents) that voted for each of the challenges (thanks for the suggestion Ian!):

The results were not surprising:

Most organisations struggle to deliver software projects on time
Understanding what the business really wants - poor requirements and unclear of imprecise business objectives - continues to be one of the leading challenges for development teams
choosing the right technology is rarely the problem.

These results align reasonably well with what we encounter in our consulting business and are routinely reflected in many other, more rigorous research studies.

Looking deeper into these results with Graph #4 reveals that the same perceptions are held consistently across different sizes of organisation:

Graph #5 shows the same data as Graph #4 but this time as a percentage of voters (respondents) that voted for each of the challenges - categorised by the size of their organisaiton:

Graphs #4 & #5 appear to indicate that, based on organisation size, the olnly notable difference in the challenges faced is around testing – adequate testing appears to be more of a challenge for those in larger organisations.

However, when taking into account the Project Size, the responses show a bit more variation as per Graph #6 and Graph #7:

Graph #7 shows the same data as Graph #6, but this time as a percentage of voters (respondents) that voted for each of the challenges - categorised by the size of their project team size:

Graphs #6 & #7 indicate that for those involved with larger project team sizes (>25 staff), delayed delivery, cost overruns and architecture are much more of a perceived challenge.

Interestingly, for these larger project teams, requirements, communication, testing, project management and a formal methodology are perceived to be less of a challenge in contrast to smaller team sizes – possibly indicating a pro-active or organisational focus on these known high risk factors.

Adoption of Team Foundation Server

As Process MeNtOR TeamGuide leverages the process capabilities of Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) we were interested to know more about the adoption of TFS in the Australian market. Graph #8 shows that TFS has been adopted by about 1 in 4 respondents – so far...

In terms of project teams using TFS, Graph #9 shows that the bulk of the usage at the moment is on projects with 10 people or less:

Organisations that are using TFS are predominantly the larger organisations as shown in Graph #10:

Within the community of TFS users, Graph #11 shows that there is a positive attitude and awareness of the importance of process for software development – obviously a good sign for us given our product offering involves a software process!

Although process is regarded as important, Graphs #12 & 13 illustrates the diversity of process use/adoption within the TFS community and the large prevalence of ‘in-house’ development methodologies.

Drilling into this data a little further, Graph #14 reveals that when choosing a process (i.e. when a non-in-house process is in use) larger team sizes favour the commercially available processes (Process MeNtOR, and RUP) over the ‘open source’ processes such as MSF for Agile, SCRUM and XP:

What was also pleasing to see was the diversity of roles represented by our survey respondents within the organisations using TFS - as shown in Graph #15:

Survey Insights:

For us, these survey results are encouraging:

We understand the major challenges faced by software delivery projects – and our methodology effectively addresses these challenges.
There is a solid base of Team Foundation Server (TFS) usage within the Australian community – that we expect to grow significantly over the next few years.
Within the existing TFS community, there is a healthy regard for process.

The challenge for us, which we are actively addressing with our evolving range of products, is encouraging organisations to move beyond ‘in-house’ methodologies and leverage commercially available, best practice methodologies like Process MeNtOR via products like TeamGuide.

A successful trip to the beach ... especially for Dennis!

2007-09-05T06:09:00Z

Thank you to all of the folks that came and visited our booth at TechED Australia on the Gold Coast. We received a lot of positive feedback on Process MeNtOR TeamGuide – and a lot of good suggestions for our future releases.

Congratulations to Dennis Pho from QSR International in Doncaster, Melbourne – Dennis is the proud owner of a brand new Xbox 360 – courtesy of our process survey competition giveaway. We hope you enjoy many hours of gaming pleasure.

Next stop ... Barcelona!

Around the world with MeNtOR in ...19 Days

2007-07-11T13:19:00Z

A hectic schedule, a lot of miles, too much time spent in airports and not enough sleep. But as a friend of mine commented – ‘you learn a lot when you travel – particularly for business’.

The journey started with the successful launch of Release 1.2 of TeamGuide at TechEd in Orlando – see Peter’s blog for more details.

Our product team had a great week in Disney World and got to meet a lot of customers who were interested to see how we have extended the functionality of Visual Studio through our integration of Process MeNtOR.

We also got to meet the guys from TeamPrise and had a good crack at working out how to enable TeamGuide’s functionality within TeamPrise – Peter will probably announce more on that front soon.

Next stop, Detroit – for the Compuware Partner Summit where, amongst other highlights, Chris Sirosky unveiled the Optimal Delivery Management platform - an integrated platform that spans Compuware’s Application Delivery Management solutions.

Details of the new platform were not plentiful – but we hope to work with Compuware around developing a process integration with this platform – more to come on this I hope.

At the opening address to the Partner Summit, Bob Donald, spoke eloquently as part of the welcoming session to about 200 partner companies. Key messages from Bob’s presentation were:

The focus of IT needs to be on building new value for the business.
IT is “coming of age” and is now regarded as a real participant in the business that can drive value for the business.
The way IT is delivered has changed and will continue to change – multisource delivery by distributed suppliers, commoditisation of IT in terms of staff and solutions.
IT needs to be higher productivity, efficiency, agility and business alignment.
Everything in IT should be driven by business intent – alignment to the business.

Music to my ears! These are the same challenges that we have been addressing through the development of Process MeNtOR and its various integrations.

While at the Partner Summit, I also got the opportunity to present an overview of our integration of Process MeNtOR and Changepoint which received some healthy interest and discussion.

The summit concluded with some special guest presenters:

Daniel Burrus, Founder and CEO Burrus Research, gave an excellent, entertaining and thought provoking presentation around predictable technology trends.

Of the more interesting insights / comments that I managed to scribble down:

Within 4 years all VOIP phone calls will be recorded and stored as “corporate documents” in much the same way as email is today.
Advocated “decommoditising” services – wrapping a service within a service – provide unique offerings – don’t compete – differentiate.
Organisations need to change their mindsets to earn trust – not assume trust.
Every year, business will seek to do more and more with less and less.
We are transitioning from the Information Age to the Communication Age.

Stephanie Moore, VP Forrester Research, provided an excellent presentation on Trends With Outsourcing in the IT Industry, from which I garnered the following insights:

Outsourcing industry has been through big changes in the last 7/8 years.
There is a decoupling between the infrastructure and the services provided.
Focus has moved from simple cost cutting to value creation.
Current practice is to move to a “best of breed portfolio of service providers” rather than a single full service provider.
Niche players are important – e.g. a specialist security provider can do it cheaper than a generic outsourcer because they have done it all before.
You need to have good internal processes in order to use off shore – requirements and the BAs are important!
Labour supply in India is not the limiting factor – its India’s infrastructure: broadband, telephones, electricity, roads, housing, hotels, etc.
When tooling up for outsourcing – requirements becomes critical – requirements mistakes are hidden on internal projects but cannot be hidden easily on outsource projects.
Business processes have to change when outsourcing is engaged – it is just as much about organisational change management.
“Process improvements save more money than offshore outsourcing any day in any way you want to calculate it.”
Companies that are under pressure – savings are not as high as expected.

I will be sharing these insights with our customers in future as we work with them to evaluate global sourcing options and internal process improvement options.

Summit over, off for a whirlwind tour of Europe.

First stop, the UK to update some potential customers and partners with our progress on the TeamGuide, Changepoint integration and the future development roadmap for Process MeNtOR.

Next day, off to Dublin to visit the Compuware Optimal Trace Development Lab and join the Beta testing program for the next release of Optimal Trace. (We hope to include support for Optimal Trace in the next release of Process MeNtOR)

Next stop, a day trip to Amsterdam to meet with LogicaCMG and discuss mutual opportunities through the Compuware partner channel.

A weekend in Paris to catch-up with one of my best friends – and then home to recover.

You do learn a lot when you travel ... but its good to be home.

Is your organisation ready for a process-based transformation?

2007-05-11T13:13:00Z

A recent article in the Harvard Business Review caught my eye – the article, The Process Audit, was authored by Michael Hammer.

Hammer is probably best known for co-authoring the book Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution which sparked the ‘business reengineering’ boom of the 1990’s.

What struck me as interesting was that Hammer identifies a set of process ‘enablers’ and organisational ‘capabilities’ that are essential for sustained business processes performance - in any organisation and for any process.

From a software process improvement perspective, what intrigued me was that these enablers and capabilities also provide a very succinct checklist for assessing the ability of any organisation to successfully conduct – and sustain – an initiative aimed at improving software development.

As identified by Hammer:

“All change projects are tough to pull off, but process-based change is particularly difficult. Contrary to widespread assumptions, designing new business processes involves more than rearranging work flows – who does what tasks, in what locations, and in what sequence. To make new processes work, companies must redefine jobs more broadly, increase training to support those jobs and enable decision making by frontline personnel, and redirect reward systems to focus on processes as well as outcomes. As if that weren’t enough, enterprises also have to reshape organisational cultures to emphasize teamwork, personal accountability, and the customer’s importance; redefine roles and responsibilities so that managers oversee process instead of activities and develop people rather than supervise them; and realign information systems so they help cross-functional processes work smoothly rather than simply support departments.”

Process Enablers

Hammer asserts that, based on his research, there are five key enablers that are essential for any process to have the potential to deliver high performance. The enablers are mutually independent – if any are missing, the others will prove ineffective.

A process must have a well-specified design – otherwise, the people performing it won’t know what to do or when.
The people who execute the process, the performers, must have appropriate skills and knowledge – otherwise they won’t be able to implement the desing.
There has to be an owner, a senior executive who has responsibility and authority to ensure that the process delivers results – otherwise, it will fall between the cracks.
The company must align its infrastructure, such as information technologies and HR systems, to support the process – otherwise, they will impede its performance.
Finally, the company must develop the right metrics to assess the performance of the process over time – otherwise it won’t deliver the right results.

Organisational Capabilities

Hammer also asserts that an organisation needs a number of key capabilities to be in place to institutionalise the process enablers and sustain the performance of its processes. Hammer believes that executives may be able to force some enablers into place, even if these organisational capabilities aren’t present, but this will only achieve limited success and the performance of the processes won’t endure.

The stronger these organisational enablers are, the better the process performance:

Leadership - a company’s senior executives must be committed to the business process approach. Redesigning processes requires extensive organisational change that often provokes resistance down the line. This can sink efforts that don’t have the backing of senior executives.
Culture - only organisations whose cultures value customers, teamwork, personal accountability, and a willingness to change will find it possible to move forward with process-led change projects. Business processes, which cut across functions, must be operated by people with those values.
Process Expertise - businesses must have some people with skills in, and knowledge of, process redesign; this is not work for amateurs or improvisers.
Governance - enterprises must be sure to have ways of governing projects and change initiatives if they don’t want chaos and conflict to bog them down.

Although the article is aimed at enterprise-level process initiatives, from personal experience, I would recommend that any organisation contemplating a process change initiative – in particular a software process improvement initiative – consider and address the above enablers and capabilities as part of the initiative.

A simple matter of productivity

2007-05-07T12:10:00Z

Productivity – noun; a measure of efficiency of production which implies comparison of input in such terms as capital invested, wages paid, numbers employed, etc., with output.

Software development, when conducted on any significant scale, is a team-based endeavour – typically involving the core product or project team who build the software, and the extended team of stakeholders who shape the problem, fund the undertaking, receive the product into service or eventually use the software.

Building, aligning and managing these teams is not a trivial undertaking. Additionally, the ability to collaborate within the teams is crucial to any endeavour of scale.

As someone put to me over the weekend, the problem with many software teams is often not a lack of technical competence, it is simply that their productivity is low. Low in terms of quality of output, timeliness or cost of delivery, efficiency of work, size of team, etc., etc.

How do software teams boost productivity and ensure that they are competitive in a global sourcing market? My answer – focus on the process.

Focus on the essential requirements for a high productivity team:

Establish a common language so that ideas, issues and problems can be discussed quickly, efficiently and effectively.
Define roles and responsibilities – no one can do everything and all heroes tire eventually.
Define the way the work will be conducted to an appropriate level – building software is a complex undertaking and the diversity of people, experience and skills necessitates clarity to avoid costly duplication of effort, missed work and rework.
Make people accountable for the work – define what is required by the contributing roles, establish acceptable standards of quality and work towards defined goals.

All of these requirements are process related.

Productivity – simple in concept, but hard to deliver on without a foundation of process.

Time is a changing … in a synchronised world

2007-05-03T10:52:00Z

One of the fascinating things about working in IT is change.

Technologies mature, business processes speed up, communication mediums merge, and the world gets smaller.

For business, the ‘IT Project’ is the quintessential agent of change – and many organisations do ‘change’ badly. This is the area that is the focus of much of my time and energy – improving the ability of organisations to execute change.

But it is often the smaller, subtler examples of change that frequently catch my attention and cause me to pause. A recent article in the Australian IT provided such an example.

The article, Mobile devices give wristwatches the wind-up, describes how for many (principally the generations younger than mine) the wearing of a watch is becoming increasingly rare:

"In a survey last year, investment bank Piper Jaffray found that almost two-thirds of teens never wear a watch, and only about one in 10 wears one daily."

"Experian Simmons Research also discovered that, while Americans spent more than $US5.9 billion on watches in 2006, that figure was down 17 per cent compared with five years earlier."

The reason for this … the proliferation of time:

"Elliott, who is 27, is much more likely to get the time from the clock in her car, the one on her cable television box or mobile phone, or from the bottom right-hand of her computer at the University of Kentucky, where she works."

This is a behavioural trend that I have noticed but not realised its significance – my phone now automatically synchronises with the network provider – my PC and laptop similarly synchronise more accurately and regularly than my expensive (for 10 years ago!) analogue wristwatch.

Earth shattering development? No. But … if someone had told me when I bought that watch that wearing a such watch would become a thing of the past – would I have given them much credence?

As observed by James Hoopes, history and society professor from Babson College, Massachusetts:

"…we live in an increasingly synchronised world"

“Historically, the obsession with synchronisation took hold in the railroad era, when watches were often kept in a pocket”

“By World War I, watches began moving to the wrist for convenience. “

“In the age of globalisation, synchronisation has increased in scope.”

Software Awards by Consensus ...

2007-05-02T13:30:00Z

Congratulations to all of the winners of this year’s Consensus Software Awards!

As a member of the judging panel, I found it quite inspirational to see so many small Australian and New Zealand companies taking on the global market with innovative software products.

After reviewing all of the written submissions some weeks ago, and then sitting through a day of back to back presentations, it was great to see the winners formally recognised at last night’s gala dinner.

Good luck to you all! May you all cross that chasm!

Terry Insley and Julian Day - congratulations on a well run night and another successful event.

1447 – the number of the booth!

2007-04-26T11:41:00Z

Our 10' x 10' booth is booked – we’re off to Microsoft TechEd 2007 - June 4-8 in Orlando, Florida.

12,000 attendees, over 350 exhibitors – and us!

The challenge for us is how will we manage to be found by those that have an interest and a need for our solution, Process MeNtOR TeamGuide. A daunting challenge – one that will exercise our minds over the coming weeks!

If you find us in the Visual Studio Partners' area ... come and say G’day.

Beyond a destination for outsourcing ...

2007-04-26T11:24:00Z

Those within the information technology field are very aware of India – the name is synonymous with ‘outsourcing’ and ‘off-shoring’. Consequently, for many, ‘India’ is a threat.

But few of us, myself included, know much about India the nation and the challenges that confront it. I found a recent book extract from Planet India by Mira Kamdar quite revealing:

“India is the world’s youngest country: 50 per cent of its people are under the age of 25. By 2015, there will be 550 million teenagers in India. Long after the populations of Europe, the US and China have grown old, India will still be a youthful country, with no labour shortages and no lack of customers. Its IT and manufacturing industries are booming, and it has a leading role as a global services provider; meanwhile, its real economic engine, retail spending, is just beginning to warm up. Buoyed by strong economic growth and a new smorgasbord of consumer goods and entertainment options, India’s youth if filled with fresh confidence, fuelled by high expectations. Indians believe the future belongs to them.”

“Yet for all of India’s new-found optimism, an astonishing 40% of the world’s poor live there, including a third of the world’s malnourished children.”

“According to a report last year from the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, India has the world’s largest population of people with the disease – officially, more than 5.7 million cases. The actual number may be much higher; there are no reliable mechanisms for getting accurate numbers.”

“In addition to hunger, HIV/AIDS and mass unemployment, India is facing a severe water crisis. With 17% of the world’s population but only 4% of the world’s fresh water, these resources are already stretched beyond capacity. Plus global warming is shrinking glaciers in the Himalayas and may also be altering the rainfall patterns on which agriculture depends.”

“No matter which pressing problem the world contemplates – form global warming to pandemics to the energy crisis to yawning gaps between the rich and the poor – time is of the essence. And with its large population and rapid economic growth, India faces these challenges with much more urgency than industrialised countries. We must pay attention to where India is heading: we are all likely to end up there, sooner or later.”

Eloquently put ... and something to give us all pause to think about.

Pack your bags for Detroit!

2007-04-15T13:11:00Z

Some great news received during the week - we have been invited to present a whitepaper at the ‘Third Annual Global Compuware Partner Summit’ in Detroit during 5-7 June 2007.

The whitepaper, titled ‘The Art of Balance – and the Application Delivery Management Workbench’ showcases the integration of Process MeNtOR into Compuware’s Changepoint portfolio management tool which is currently under development by the Process MeNtOR product team.

This is a significant achievement in the business plan for Process MeNtOR in terms of gaining international recognition!