May 2009 Archives

This was a great session by John Rymer and Dave West.  They provided some interesting stats:
•    80-90% of IT spend is on software maintenance
•    Business are demanding innovation
•    Time to market is more critical now than ever before.

These three stats should be staring you right in the face - How can you be more innovative in shorter time frames than ever when 80-90% of your budget is spent on maintenance? 

A key message from this session is that software bloat is the biggest issue.  They pointed to five causes for software bloat:

1.    The sheer number of features we attempt to add to an application
2.    Specification and protocol stacks continue to grow
3.    Vendor consolidation leads to large suites which you have to purchase entirely
4.    Middleware continues to get more and more complex
5.    Traditional development processes lead to overly complex applications

Of course the key message is that lean software is the antidote to software bloat.  Agile methods can help us to focus on only the high priority features resulting in leaner software.  The key challenge is how to get your business to support an Agile approach and come to terms with the notion that, in many cases, it is more cost effective to not automate processes that seldom occur - they are better handled manually keeping your applications lean and focused on the key business processes.
 
Feel free to share examples where your business has embraced Agile and successfully de-prioritized application functionality as too low to implement.
  

Last week, I attended Forrester's IT Forum in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.  In looking back over my notes I wanted to share some of the highlights.  The first keynote started off with the resounding words:  "Never Waste a Good Crisis".  Bobby Cameron, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester  expanded on this notion it appeared that the main point is that during a crisis change tends to be accelerated which should allow those savvy IT organizations to address these key challenges:

•    How do I get leaner and reduce IT waste?
•    How do I protect and promote innovation?
•    How do I reshape my own role?
•    How do I measure and communicate value?

As I listened to the discussion and many of the sessions to follow, I learned that many of the analysts and attendees were becoming aligned with the idea that an Agile approach to application development will help on many of these fronts.  First, it will help IT get leaner and reduce waste by only delivering what the business needs while helping IT with business communication or alignment.  It was also pointed out that if organizations really embrace Agile and let teams be self directed, we should even break down some of the inefficiencies of big, inflexible architecture and allow teams to select the development tools, application stacks, etc to get their jobs done quickly with minimal cost / waste.  What a novel idea!

Bobby also discussed the importance of IT leaders really paying attention to IT Value.  The key point is that value is always perceived.  Some people see value in driving a Mercedes while others see it as a waste of money.  Thus for IT professionals we must make sure that the business sees value in what we deliver.  Thus, we must become more agile and deliver on business objectives in a way that facilitates communication and measures business value - the last key challenge in the list above.  As we all know, an Agile application development approach will dramatically lead to this outcome. 

I found it interesting that Forrester's analysis is showing that many traditional IT roles are being moved into the business - some of the examples given were project management and business analysis roles.  

I am interested to hear if any of you are shifting some roles out of IT and into the business.

Michael Krigsman recently asked the questions "Do CEO's *really* care about IT?"  and reviewed a panel discussion by CEO's from tech companies talking about the issues of Business-IT alignment. He says, after listening to that discussion "it appears little progress has made been in addressing this issue."

I would love to have heard the discussion between CEO's of non-tech companies to see if their views differed - my guess is if they were honest they would agree with Champy that "CEOs don't pay attention to technology unless something breaks down."

Having said that, I have met many progressive CEO's who realize that their business can grow and thrive as a direct result of their investment in IT. 

On the issue of Business-IT alignment, this is one of the fundamental reasons why we have championed Agile as a methodology for application development. It's not just the latest trend in IT, but at its very core is about solving the issue of non-alignment and its down-sides with which we are all familiar. Agile requires massive cultural change from both Business and IT - but if embraced, we have seen HUGE changes in the value delivered by IT, the on-going relationship between Business and IT, and most importantly - tangible and repeatable value delivered to aid competitiveness and growth of businesses. The presentations by customers and partners on their Agile case studies (at our recent customer conference in Lisbon) is a testament to this potential for success.

So - yes, I second Michael's call for CEO's to publicly proclaim Business-IT integration as a strategic priority - especially if they want to stay ahead of the curve!

How well aligned is your IT with the business and is IT on your CEO's radar?

During last week's Agile-in-a-Day workshop in the Netherlands, I participated in an interesting discussion with the group of 25+ current and future Agile practitioners - on the impact of Agile methodologies on well established corporate processes and culture.

In particular, on the question of moving Corporate IT to Agile and how that means changing the traditional way that IT projects get approved and funded.  The group felt that breaking the traditional cycle of detailed requirements documents, mandatory project deliverables and change requests would impact the entire project approval/funding and management processes - and yes, successful transition to an Agile model would require corporate IT to educate their business owners and stakeholders on the Agile approach.  However, the workshop participants all agreed that making this change would definitely be a challenge.
 
One of the strategies we discussed was shifting the focus of the procurement process from detailed requirements to defining the amount of functionality to be delivered.  We shared the OutSystems' approach of using user stories and patterns to set a high level scope of functionality to be delivered and made the case that function points could be used as the measure of functionality - since this would allow the delivery team the necessary freedom to adjust the requirements during the project while still meeting a target deliverable.

This seems to be a recurring theme that I'm hearing from IT teams who want to embrace Agile. If you have faced this challenge and succeeded (or failed) - what do you think of the above approach and how does your IT team get its Agile projects approved and funded?

If you are wondering what NextStep'09 was all about, the following highlight reel from our 2009 event shows all our Agile conference attendees in action - from keynotes to sessions, partner pavilion and opening reception.

If you attended the event this year - OutSystems customers, partners, special guests and employees are all in here - check it out and see if you can find yourself!