The Eight Core Components of a Sustainable Digital Business
Can Digital Transformation drive your Sustainability programs? In this article, we provide a simple eight-part framework for understanding your Sustainable Digital Business.
“Lean” meets “Demand Management” in IT – Managing the Constraints
It has been a few months since I've posted, but I haven't been idle - two significant projects (aside from working very hard at the full-time job), only one of which I can talk a bit about at this time. Tomorrow (Thursday, 16 Feb 2012) , I am presenting at a conference on IT Portfolio Management in Rosemont, IL - a case study on how we use ideas from Lean Manufacturing and Demand Forecasting to solve a fairly common problem…
Market Driven Data Quality (Data Darwinism)
A contrarian idea to improve data quality; let "market forces" like peer pressure, earn-in, and competitive prioritization encourage data owners to do their own quality monitoring.
Leading Innovation: Inspiration, Art, Science, and Execution
Four required competencies for leading innovation - defined, and put in context with examples.
If I Told You a Fractal Solution, Could You Change the CEO’s Mind?
As the new year approaches, debates over the "value" of IT and business projects intensify; it's not holiday stress, but the excitement of the approaching New [fiscal] Year. Lately, I'm hearing more about the struggle to quantify business value, especially when selecting those few projects that will "make the cut". We will definitely iterate on our scoring framework, adding a cost / benefit template to facilitate more apples-to-apples comparisons between projects (yes, don't scoff - it is possible - more…
PMO Nirvana is a Conversation, not a Schedule
We continue to iterate on our PMO processes - managing too few resources and too many project requests, an environment I have consistently seen in every IT group I have ever worked with. Our latest discussion concerned the concept of FIFO work on projects ... ... when presented with five things to do, I will only [emphasis added] work on them in the order received. This is an exceedingly poor assumption for your personal run-rules, and a short-sighted objective for…
Three Business-Case Arguments for Agile, & The Moose On The Table
Another conversation at the start of the new year - this time in our PMO, concerning project prioritization and resource assignments. Many organizations follow a "parallel" model, launching multiple projects at any one time and working concurrently to move things forward. To be fair, this often occurs because we start work on one or two things, only to have additional worthy business requirements pop-up as time goes by. Unfortunately, we don't stop the first project or delay the second; most…
How to Cheat at the PMO Prioritization Game
Many will say their Project Management Office (PMO) has been established to promote "Best Practices for Project Management" - better work product, alignment with business strategic direction, etc. That may be partially true, but let's inject a little reality here ... many PMOs were created to help solve what I call the Dirt Bag problem - you can't fit 10 lbs of "dirt" in a 5 lb bag. I'm talking about the project prioritization process; I have 100 different project…
You can run but you can’t hide
I sent out notes to folks talking about my new situation, and some came back with interesting comments. Here's one from W, a brilliant guy with Big-6 background and plenty of business acumen. However, he (like me) is a coder at heart, and really wants to focus on the technology (not like me). More power to him - but his eMail had a telling statement ... ... this is my 5th month at [BigCo] and all is going well so…
Pendulum swings – Santayana says …
I saw Stewart's article on customized software in ComputerWorld this week, and googled (Googled?) a bit more and found a pair of good posts from Scavo (Keller/AMR started it all), speaking of an apparent trend back to favoring custom-built software in business today. A few thoughts ... A classic blunder made by many corporate IT groups is to buy into the idea that custom software is easy. It's certainly fun - much easier to develop a brand new piece of…