Cutter IT Trends
Business Technology Trends and Impacts Advisory Service
Agile Software Development & Program Management Advisory Service
Sourcing and Vendor Relationships
If Agile Were to go Mainstream If agile methods are to go mainstream, it might be when their popularity and legitimacy reach a tipping point. An example that this could be happening is a recent New York Times article called “Google Gets Ready to Rumble With Microsoft” (16 December 2007), which Cutter colleague Ken Orr wrote about in a Cutter Trends Advisor titled “Velocity Matters: Google, Microsoft, and Hyper-Agility, Part 1” (20 December 2007). The articles are about Google going after Microsoft’s customer base using something called its “cloud” computing framework. But Ken’s interpretation of the Google-Microsoft confrontation emphasizes the time-to-market advantages that Google’s software development lifecycle has over Microsoft’s. Google is apparently practicing a more agile, iterative-style approach (sometimes quarterly) to releasing software, while Microsoft is more tied to the big-bang, multiyear cycle for its products…
Easy as Implementing a Package (Part 2) In Part 1 of this article series (see “Easy As Implementing a Package … Part 1,” 1 March 2007), I described the productivity characteristics of large IT package implementations, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. I took on this subject in response to an article by my fellow Cutter colleague Steve Andriole (see “Sourcing Today and Tomorrow,” 15 February 2007), who said that many CIOs and CTOs are often extremely frustrated by cost and schedule overruns in projects like this. In worst-case scenarios, some have even lost their jobs. There are several reasons why companies struggle greatly with project estimation when it comes to implementing packages, both large and small. Here are a few…
Easy as Implementing a Package (Part 1) Last weekend I had a conversation with an uncle who recently retired from his accounting job at a large university. His family was financially secure, the children were grown (with his first grandchild on the way), and he was healthy after going through a medical scare years ago. It was time to call it quits, start to restore the antique motorcycle his wife had given him for Father’s Day last year, and get ready to bounce his new granddaughter on his lap. But before it was official, his employer asked him to reconsider, for one more project: deployment of an enterprise (ERP) application across all the colleges of the university. “There was no way I was ever going to stick around for that,” he told me…
Worrying About the Wrong Things Mad cow disease, bird flu, airplane accidents, E. coli outbreaks, and shark attacks. I don’t often get the chance to read Time magazine, but a cover story entitled, “Things That We Often Worry About (But Really Shouldn’t)” caught my eye this week at an airport magazine stand. I was on my way to brief a CEO and his board of directors, and a topic for discussion was the things that people worry about when outsourcing…
Is the World Not Flat? Last week, a client of mine who is a senior VP of software development told me, “My CFO declared that fully one-third of our work should be in India within the next two years.” For me, it wasn’t that the directive was about outsourcing to India that was shocking. What caught my attention was that the mandate was coming from the head of finance, the CFO. The top bean counter was the one directing this decision, not the head of engineering…
Agile Methods Systems Theory and “Mind Blending” In a recent Cutter Business Trends E-Mail Advisor entitled “Complexity’s Rising Tide” (1 December 2005), I talked about modern systems and software development being primarily about the “blending of minds” among IT professionals. I consider this idea at the heart of successful innovation in a tech-driven world, where the paramount challenge is to successfully build more complex systems under increasingly tight deadlines. Many are looking to agile methods as a way to accelerate their cycle time given the pressures that they’re facing…
Complexity’s Rising Tide Recently, I had the privilege of being a guest keynote speaker at symposiums for two of the world’s largest financial services companies, where I spoke about the people dynamics and success/failure trends of deadline-intensive projects — something near and dear to all our hearts. Between the two events (one held in Chicago and the other in Boston), there were about 700 technology professionals in the audiences. It was an exciting time. Something struck me that both organizations had in common, which was touched upon in the opening remarks by senior executives who introduced me to their audiences. The paramount challenge before them — more often than not — stemmed from being a global company with geographically dispersed teams, dealing with the rising complexity of technology projects, while under higher pressure of ever-tighter deadlines. This macro-challenge is one for the ages..
Measurement Shock, Self-Loathing, and Organizational Learning Last week while playing tennis, my friend Holly sent her forehand sailing high into an adjacent court. “Aargh,” she cried. Then, with a casual grin, she said, “That’s what I love about this game — it gives you plenty of chances to practice self-loathing.” She reminded me of Lucy from the “Peanuts” comics. Curiously, the same idea might apply to companies that benchmark their IT performance. I recently had the privilege of helping guide two companies through this process. They wanted to baseline their time-to-market and quality on about a dozen of their recently completed software projects. We compared their cycle time and defect levels against a worldwide database of over 7,000 projects. When we plotted their data on graphs against projects in their specific industry, they experienced what I call measurement shock. It sparked a significant case of self-loathing…
What Is Agile Decision Making? Imagine facing a tight deadline in a competitive market, and having to design and build an ambitious amount of functionality with a set team. What if it took you or your team weeks to come up with a reliable project estimate? What if, at the same time, an ambitious deadline and an impatient boss were haunting you for a fast answer…
I Wouldn’t Be So Late If I Weren’t In Such A Hurry! Are you deadline-driven in your organization? Suppose you’re a manager overseeing critical IT projects in your company, and your boss said to you, “We have to make our deadlines, or kill our kids.” This is a real quote, and while it sounds like sick humor to most of us, the message is loud and clear: your family life had better not interfere with work when it comes to making the company’s deadlines…
The “Anti-Productivity” Argument ”If you want higher quality, build less stuff.” That, in essence, is what Cutter Business Technology Council Fellow Tom DeMarco once said about a daring strategy for quality improvement: reduce quantity. Tom went on, “Whatever it is that your organization makes, make less of it. Make less, and choose much more carefully what you make.” The good news is, Tom’s advice is something that can be done immediately to reduce defects. Talk about being agile! Quality is inversely proportional to quantity — simple as that…
Gender Trends and Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) just named Yale University Provost Susan Hockfield as its newest president — the first woman ever to hold that position in 140 years. This is momentous in two ways. In one bold stroke, MIT has signaled its direction in two areas critical to the university: helping resolve past issues of gender discrimination and, with Dr. Hockfield’s expertise in brain science, accelerating initiatives to blend research in life sciences with MIT’s expertise in traditional sciences and engineering. At first glance, the appointment of a female as a university president may not seem exceptional…
Corporate Alzheimer’s and Deadline Management Lately, I’ve been paying attention to my memory or, perhaps, lack of it. I’ve noticed that, among other things, lapses are often related to the number of parallel tasks going on in my head. The more tasks I have to think about, the more I forget. So I try to focus on only a few things at a time; better to do a few things well than a lot of things poorly. So it goes with companies…
Overcoming Organizational Inertia Last week I had a one-on-one meeting with the CIO of one of my clients, a major financial services firm. During our conversation, Ron asked for advice about transforming his organization. By this time, I’d been working with Ron’s team for about six months, and the team had made remarkable progress. As expected, there were strong pockets of performance. In other areas, their practices weren’t achieving the results they wanted. For example, one major initiative was about six months late and overran its budget by about US $10 million. While there were several reasons for this, a poor estimate was most of the problem…
When IT Isn’t Strategic Every other week I fly from Albany, New York, to a major banking client in the Midwest of the US. This client is in the midst of a multimillion-dollar project designed to “bet the company” on an entirely new way of doing business. It’s absolutely strategic. The company is going after new markets in a way that will apply major pressure on its competitors when the project is eventually deployed. Arriving at the airport on my last trip, I walked past the long lines for an airline that I used to fly and checked in at Continental Airlines using a self-service kiosk. I slipped my Discover Card through the scanner, tapped through about four or five screens, and got my boarding pass in exactly 32 seconds. Darn — last time it took only 26 seconds…
Outsourcing & Mangement Agility, Part 2 In Part 1, I discussed how agile IT executives can tackle the tough demands for fast and effective decision making when it comes to outsourcing. This entails skillful use of two important disciplines — the command of software productivity measurement combined with modern negotiation practices. In Part 2, I address some of the “how tos” with regard to the myriad of complex issues in IT applications outsourcing, including offshore labor rates, balanced scorecards, negotiation leverage from productivity baselines, and a new discipline emerging today: alliance relationship management — as well as the roles that software measurement and negotiation play…
Outsourcing & Management Agility, Part 1 Because of the broad range of outsourcing scenarios, I see IT executives under tremendous pressure to make the right decisions, fast. Talk about needing to be agile! Imagine having to make multimillion-dollar or billion-dollar decisions, and being “fat and slow.” Who doesn’t want to be “agile”? It becomes especially hard when considering outsourcing options for IT applications, including package implementation, maintenance, and new development. The design intensiveness of this kind of work makes it even harder to make correct decisions…
Defending the Paradigm (or Designing the Future) Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe, Kepler, and Newton. It took these five scientists from five countries a span of more than 150 years to break the commonly held worldview that claimed the sun and all the celestial bodies revolved in circular orbits around the earth at the center. This geocentric (earth-centered) model was formulated by the Greek philosopher Ptolemy around A.D. 140…
Now That The Upturn Is Here… After the long winter of recession, the economy finally seems to be growing again — companies are shedding their cautious outlook and as a result, IT departments are investing in capital equipment and services. That’s my sense as I head to the airport for yet another client meeting — my fourth city in two weeks… Click here to read the whole article
Faster Knob Twiddling Every year in October, I head to Camden, Maine, USA, where the POP!Tech conference (http://www.poptech.org) is held at the beautifully restored Camden Opera House. One reviewer described it by saying, “Pop!Tech isn’t exactly a technology conference. It’s more about life and technology’s impact on it; about ethical decisionmaking in the Information Age, and how technology and humanity continuously change each other.” Nicely put…
Self-Actualization Trends in the Digital World A million downloads in three days. That’s how many people grabbed a copy of Apple’s iTunes for Windows software right after it was released. I confess, I’m one of those million. But when iTunes first came out, it wasn’t a big deal to me. I’d already played with other music jukeboxes on the PC, and while the idea was a cute novelty, it hadn’t stuck. My idea of music wasn’t about listening to pop songs on a tinny set of built-in laptop speakers. But I got intrigued when my friend (I’ll call him “Digital-Doc”) showed me his new shiny iPod. “10,000 songs in your pocket, just like the ad in Wired magazine,” he said…
Long-Term Outsourcing Relationships and the Agile Executive Overburdened IT organizations are seeking outsourcing relationships to gain agility; they view it as a way to access staff skills and capabilities that might take more time to grow organically from within. Sometimes these skills are seen to be available at low cost as well, as suggested by the wave of offshore outsourcing to providers in countries like India. Agile executives go a step further, seeking out high-performance relationships…
Using Metrics to Evaluate Vendor Bids and Proposals Using objective metrics puts IT executives in an excellent position to succeed when outsourcing IT projects. At the project level, the executive managing the request for proposal (RFP) process can use metrics to empower negotiations by: -Requiring core metrics for past projects in the RFP data requirements package and assessing both historic and implied productivity -Generating an independent “should cost” estimate and risk assessment -Benchmarking supplier cost and schedule estimates -Implementing “in-flight radar” tracking of supplier-built projects -Maintaining a knowledge database of suppliers’ historic projects…
Shopping for Risk Mitigation ”Trends in Risk Management.” That was one of the topics of a lively discussion following Cutter Business Technology Council Fellows Tim Lister and Tom DeMarco’s keynote on risk management at the sellout Cutter Summit 2003 conference. It highlighted how increasingly important risk management has become in corporate IT organizations. Why? Because of the increasing proliferation of software and IT in modern society and the increasingly high stakes that are involved in today’s projects…
A Global Digital Nervous System That’s the essence of the ideas described by Peter Russell, a Cambridge University physicist, computer scientist, and futurist, in his book The Global Brain Awakens. I read Russell’s work whenever I’m interested in reawakening my perspective on global trends. Many in the business world seeking out “the next big thing” see “it” — whatever it is — in the larger context of what some describe as a rapidly emerging, global digital nervous system. This makes ideas articulated by people like Russell highly relevant to information technology professionals…
Offshore Outsourcing: A Tale of Two Bids The phone rang, and on the other end was a longtime client of mine. “Hi Michael, it’s Rob. I’ve got a project that I need help with — we’re thinking of offshoring a major rewrite of one of our applications. The existing app is about half a million lines of code written in Smalltalk, and we want to reengineer it in Java and IBM WebSphere. We’re issuing the RFP and want to evaluate bids from two suppliers this month. We think they can do it cheaper than we can inhouse, since the labor rates in India are so low. Plus, we need it fast. Can you help us evaluate the bids?” ”Sure,” I replied. “When are you looking to make a decision?” ”In about two weeks,” said Rob. Egads! Two weeks was a short fuse…
After the Perfect Storm, Part 2 I’ve been buying stocks again. Not a lot, mind you — the “Honey I Shrunk the Kids’ College Funds and Retirement Accounts” film turned out to be a horror flick that left me skittish, like most investors. But the few shekels that I have in money market funds have slowly begun to make their way into some carefully selected stocks and mutual funds. Hey, baby, the small investor is back…
After the Perfect Storm, Part 1 There is a saying, “When one door closes, another opens, but all too often, there is a long hallway in between.” When I heard this from Rick Jarow, professor at Vassar College and author of Creating the Work You Love, I realized that many IT professionals have been roaming these proverbial hallways for a long time. What coping strategies can IT people employ during this long walk…
Sizing Up Your IT Project Recently, fellow Cutter Senior Consultant David Herron and I were privileged to be the featured speakers at a chapter meeting of the New York City SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network, http://www.nycspin.org). It was billed as a CNN Crossfire debate, and the topic of the session was “Why Size Matters.” (Luckily, the e-mail announcement didn’t include that in the subject line, otherwise the message undoubtedly would have been blocked by SPAM filters.) In this case, we were talking about software size metrics…
Risk Management and Project Radar A marvelous book is on my desk, Waltzing with Bears, Managing Risk on Software Projects by Cutter Fellows Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister. The back of the book reads: “Greater risk brings greater reward, especially in software development. A company that runs away from risk will soon find itself lagging behind its more adventurous competition. By ignoring the threat of negative outcomes — in the name of positive thinking or a can-do attitude — software managers drive their organizations into the ground…”
Managing Stakeholder Conflict In the mid- to late 1990s, time pressure on software projects accelerated dramatically under the “Internet speed” mantra. It seemed that our industry was hell-bent on bending reality with regard to time, and chants to “build it faster” were the norm. With the current economic slowdown, the other shoe has dropped and then some…
Software Estimation Roulette In a recent survey by Cutter Consortium of more than 100 software development organizations of varied sizes, the most common method of software estimation was — drum roll please — “gut feel.” People would pick a number for cost and schedule estimates based on rough judgment of experienced developers nearly 50% of the time…
Dialing for Dollars A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to work with an IT management team at a large Fortune 100 company. Worldwide, the company has more than 1,500 IT professionals across three continents doing applications development and maintenance (ADM). One of its charters in the next few months is to decide whether there are areas that might benefit from outsourcing or whether the work should be kept inhouse…
Creating an Upturn – The IT Phoenix Rises From the Ashes. At a recent IT conference, a colleague of mine who helps companies negotiate large-scale outsourcing deals posed a question to the audience. He mused, “Have we squeezed all the productivity there is to squeeze out of IT?” That’s a good question…
Continuous Partial Attention It’s been said that the great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov had 10 typewriters in his basement for the multitude of writing projectsthat he engaged himself with. It’s also been reported that the average person can effectively handle only about four concurrent tasks atonce, with the maximum being about seven. Clearly, Isaac Asimov was a rare exception in humankind…
When Not to Kill an IT Project Recently, one of my clients and I were discussing a project that his team had deployed some time ago. It was a real success story in risk management. The team had skillfully managed the deadline and the scope, using project simulations of where things were heading, and delivered within two weeks of their 90% probability date. In contrast, he also described another project that ultimately led to his leaving the company in disgust. Management and marketing had committed to an insane date. Quarterly revenue was the motivation — if they made the perceived time-to-market, it could open a money pipeline for that product and ultimately help the company meet Wall Street expectations for that quarter. What happened…
Outsourcing Part 1- What the Numbers Say Does outsourcing work? This October 2004 Executive Update by Michael Mah seeks to answer that question by examining results from a recent Cutter Consortium survey of 140 companies that have made outsourcing a part of their IT strategy…
Outsourcing Part 2 – Getting Started, Getting Results In Outsourcing, Part 1 – What the Numbers Say, we looked at the results of a Cutter survey on the real numbers produced by outsourcing, and some reasons behind their decisions. Given these numbers, it’s important that organizations have realistic expectations of what they can achieve in an outsourcing arrangement…
Outsourcing Part 3 – Managing the Relationship After the Honeymoon, after the contract is signed, both parties in an outsourcing arrangement enter a transition-in phase, where the outsourcer assumes responsibility for the various aspects of IT. In the case of a staff transition from the client to an outsourcing provider, a certain percentage of the client organization is retained for governance and oversight…
IT Relationship Management Join Michael Mah and Doug Stone as they explore the four early warning signs of a breakdown in IT relationship management. Though a critical part of an effective IT strategy, the skills needed to recognize and repair breakdowns are often not part of a manager’s training.
Cutter IT Journal – Outsourcing Learn about this most critical aspect of IT management from the experts – Michael Mah, Howard Rubin, Norm Hammok and others exlore many aspects – positive and less so – and so should you if your organization is considering outsourcing…
Cutter Sourcing Advisory Service – Metrics Negotiation Outsourcing Service Levels Companies outsource for many reasons in today’s competitive economy, some for a marketplace edge in speed and agility, others to cut costs, still others to access core IT competencies for an alliance partner. Join Michael Mah as he explores the many facets of this critical subject…
