Previously: Timing The new year approaches, and most IT groups aspire to start out with a completed IT Budget, derived from a well thought out set of short-term Objectives, that align with an IT Strategy - that itself aligns with the overall Corporate Strategy. If your timing is a bit off, and you haven't established these connections with the process yet - where do we begin? In my last post, I talked about Timing: get in the conversation early, take…
In some companies, IT struggles to find a voice amid the other functional areas of the business - Finance, Operations, Sales and Marketing, even Human Resources. "Business Alignment", a regular item on lists of Top 5 IT Concerns each year, pops up because (I believe) it's difficult to glibly draw a line connecting IT systems and projects to the changing priorities of most organizations. I will admit to a small amount of cynicism here - part of the problem is…
A rather rigorous, Financial-sounding title for a high-concept line of thought ... Thanks to Jeff Atwood at Coding Horror, for calling my attention to this article by Martin Fowler on Technical Debt: Technical Debt is a wonderful metaphor developed by Ward Cunningham to help us think about this problem. In this metaphor, doing things the quick and dirty way sets us up with a technical debt, which is similar to a financial debt. Like a financial debt, the technical debt incurs…
Got a simple request from one of the folks in Operations; we're sending out Excel spreadsheets for some quick data gathering, might we do a little basic input validation before they send in garbage that needs to be scrubbed? This person is very sharp, knows a decent bit about what is possible, and this is definitely not something that is worth a major project engagement; "throwaway technology", a particular fave of mine. His request was simple - just want to…
The start of a new year gives me a rare chance to measure my knowledge capture output over time. I maintain electronic journals for the various projects I am driving, business units and functional areas I support, and people I work with. This results in a hundred or so separate MS Word documents, with generally the same format - still, it would be quite tedious to take a word count each week to check my output. However, at the beginning…
It's been a while since I've led a requirements session for an interactive application - but no worries, I found it's like riding a bike. After a few minutes the old habits come back, and iterative ideas and cascading creativity starts to flow. What has changed, however, is the application platform, the office environment, and the various knowledge capture tools at our disposal. So, in the spirit of knowledge retention and sharing, here's a brain dump of ideas that I…
Last time, I wrote about checklists, and showed the example of the B-17 preflight. Simple, fits on a single page, and hits all the critical steps, in just the right amount of detail. Plenty of processes in the IT department are made That Much Better if they are accompanied by detailed, effective Process Documentation. Of course, that's all motherhood and apple pie - everyone agrees that the existing checklists are great. But how do you get started? I mean, assuming…
Why I think that every techie should go through the experience of building up a desktop workstation from the ground level. Maybe it's because I date back to the days of the PC XT, when computer support duties regularly had us tearing down cases, changing jumper settings and plugging in individual chips for memory expansions. Mainstream p0wnership of the desktop's guts may also be a dying art form (notwithstanding) - in the days of ubiquitous WiFi, shrinking notebooks, Blackberries and…
