How to prevent IT department overload. Not long ago, IT consultant Mark A.
Gilmore was called in to help an IT department that was struggling with project overload. "They'd gotten this kind of attitude -- the executive vice president calls it 'Burger King Syndrome,'" he recalls. "Their approach was, 'You can have it your way.'" The business executives believed IT could supply whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it. Salespeople had gotten into the habit of asking the development team to create applications within a week to fulfill promises they'd made to customers. In the meantime, basic technology improvements weren't getting done.
"You can't operate that way because it creates chaos," he says. Unfortunately, this very situation has become the norm in many IT departments. An improving economy is probably to blame for the added strain. "Over the years, there had been pretty steady improvement, with backlogs going down and developer productivity going up," Handler says. Adapting Lean Canvas for Portfolio Management. The lean project canvas is designed to bring rigor to the process of prioritizing a portfolio of projects, while keeping it lean and agile Problem: Many organizations lack a rigorous way to prioritize and manage their portfolio of projects.
Casino software development. We can’t reliably predict which ideas will work and which won’t so we’ve got to experiment to find out.
Big bets fail big A feature specification or description is a solution hypothesis. When we build a feature and delay validating it with customers we’re making a bet that it’s “right”. What if we’re wrong? Building feature upon feature this way ups the ante until we find ourselves betting the budget on a big-bang release. Capital investments in IT projects are big bets made on the merits of business cases built on assumptions. More control doesn’t reduce the bet There are some big assumptions being made in this approach, for example: The requirements define the right solution.All requirements must be delivered before any value can be realized (all or nothing).If all requirements are delivered, the value will be realized.
Conventional governance and management practices attempt to optimize productivity. The Single Best Idea In Management In The World: Nokia, Apple and Salesforce at TEDxOSLO. Roadmaps - itkanban - itkanban. Roadmaps are documents or visualisations that present a shared view and forecast for potential future development and implementation.
Roadmaps have multiple benefits but their most significant contribution is that they allow for communication and provide a means to steer an entire development organisation or community towards a common objective. The Great Repeatable Model. Many companies believe that constant reinvention is the key to remaining competitive in today’s ever-changing market.
But Chris Zook and James Allen, the leaders of Bain & Company’s global strategy practice and authors of the new book, Repeatability: Build Enduring Businesses for a World of Constant Change, argue that companies should look first at what they are doing right. Their multiyear study of hundreds of organizations has led them to the belief that the best-performing companies maintain a simple, repeatable business model. In the following excerpt from their book, Zook and Allen cite three successes that represent their model of repeatability — India’s tiffin tin, Ikea’s Billy bookcase and Nike’s swoosh.
Johanna Rothman Presents: What's the Number One Project in Your Project Portfolio? Strategic Roadmaps – itkanban. The Strategic roadmap is an adaptive planning and forecasting technique employed by the IT Kanban Framework to provide a forward view of business and technical initiatives intended for development and implementation.
Strategic roadmaps provide a medium- to long-term view regarding the potential value that will be delivered through a programme of work or a programme of work associated work-streams. Maintaining a strategic roadmap allows all involved in the development process to share the same mental model of how events may unfold over time.
This allows teams, programme leadership and other stakeholders to work together, and ensures that work iterating through development and implementation is aligned to achieve overall strategic benefits. Planning the Portfolio. What's Done Is Done: Releases. Rally Presents: The Lean Startup, Interview with Bestselling Author Eric Ries. Mastering the Unpredictable. As we consider how to integrate long-term thinking into project management, one thing we really need to remember is the project manager as an individual.
Lately our focus has shifted to ... Posted in: People, Planet, Profits & Projects. Project Portfolio Kanban: First Changes. By Pawel Brodzinski on January 30, 2012 Those of you who remember my Kanban Story probably remember how important experimentation mindset was for me since the beginning of my journey with the method. On project portfolio level the only difference was that I was well aware that such attitude is crucial even before I started doing anything at all. In other words I planned to adopt such attitude. With this kind of approach you should expect changes in the process and, as a result, changes on Kanban board as well. Project Portfolio Kanban. By Pawel Brodzinski on November 30, 2011 The Kanban Story was the idea which came to my mind soon after we I started playing with Kanban with my team back then in early 2009.
I thought that sort of live journal of our Kanban adventure can be an interesting thing to read. Geoffrey Moore: Your Role in Escape Velocity: Free Your Organization from the Pull of the Past.