Pols Consulting

Here are some tips I picked up this week from a friend. He has just started at a new company. His new company has lots of projects without any clear indication of their business value. So he got them to draw a matrix like this (an evil 2×2 consultancy as it’s known in the trade):

He then asked everyone to place their project in the appropriate box!

This really helped people think about the business value. Just trying to justify the position in the box, makes you think about the value of the project. We’re not just doing projects for doing them sake (hopefully).

It was surprising how many high-risk, low value projects appeared on the grid! You can now ask “Why are we doing these?”, followed by, “Shouldn’t we be investing our energy elsewhere?”

The best bit of advice came at the end. I asked him, “But won’t they simply do the chart to humour you, and then return to their old ways?”

“Don’t be silly, I’ll just keep giving people more work until they stop working on non-important stuff!”

Still, I thought it was an interesting technique that was worth sharing.

Chris Matts and I are working on an article that looks at why IT management have a tendency to play to loose and not play to win. They tend to measure the wrong things and see IT as a cost and not a revenue generating opportunity.

The more I think about this, the more examples I see.

A friend just told me about a Bank who has told its IT contractors they must take 3 weeks (unpaid) holiday over Christmas. Apparently, this will save them £3 million pounds! This is staggering. Surely the revenue generated by these Contractors exceeds their cost?

Do you have any interesting example you would like to share? Please send me an email (andy@pols.co.uk).

ComputerWeekly.com have an interesting article (European banking giant adopts agile development methodology)

It’s full of mixed messages!

On the one hand it talks about Fred Tingey positive experience of using Extreme Programming (XP) at BNP Paribas.

And then, it switches tack with an apparent “Security Expert” taking the view that agile is far too risky:

…this type of development exposes users to unnecessary risks as it is difficult to build security into the software development lifecycle.

This is a strange thing to say as security is a feature (not a lifcycle issue) and delivering features is what XP is really good at. I have never had any problems adding security to an application that has been developed in an Agile way.

The wonderfully ironic twist is that Fred Tingey won the Risk Manager Of The Year award for using Agile (sadly not mentioned in the article)!

Oh well. The key part is that Fred Tingey is is winning awards for using Agile and that the banking community is starting to recognize the benefit of agile techniques. Well done Fred.

Chris Matts and I have just had our paper, The Five Business Value Commandments, published in the latest Cutter ~ Agile Software Development Advisory Service (available free if you register).

In this Executive Update, we introduce our top five guidelines for helping projects deliver business value. These guidelines allow the project manager to focus on delivering business value when he or she is under pressure to deliver intermediate work products or software. In addition, they show where effort should be expended on a project to derive the most benefit.

Chris Matts (the other half of the Agile Business Coach has just published a new paper on the joys of negative feedback: Encouraging the “Right Stuff”  (PDF format)

Martin Fowler has blogged the idea of a Strangler Application based the work Chris Stevenson and I presented in our An Agile Approach to A Lagacy System paper.

Here are some interesting comments about our approach:

… Much of my career has involved rewrites of critical systems. You would think such a thing as easy - just make the new one do what the old one did. Yet they are always much more complex than they seem, and overflowing with risk. The big cut-over date looms, the pressure is on. While new features (there are always new features) are liked, old stuff has to remain. Even old bugs often need to be added to the rewritten system.

An alternative route is to gradually create a new system around the edges of the old, letting it grow slowly over several years until the old system is strangled.

The most important reason to consider a strangler application over a cut-over rewrite is reduced risk. A strangler can give value steadily and the frequent releases allow you to monitor its progress more carefully…

Andy Hunt had an interesting blog entry referencing an New York Times article on outsourcing.

The article describes how you can only outsource projects which are easily managed at a distance. While obvious, lots of people need to read it! They predict development will move back to the USA, when companies realise that’s its faster and cheaper to develop software locally.

Bladelogic’s chief technology officer, Vijay Manwani, born and educated in India, predicts that once the “hype cycle” about Indian outsourcing runs its course, projects will come back to the United States “when people find that their productivity goals have not been met.”

Innovative business processes result from “an understanding of the business that happens when people get into a room and talk to each other,” Mr. Pradhan said. “That is very difficult to outsource.”

I hope more people start publishing stories like this…

Sadly you have to register (it’s free) to be able read it.

I’m particularly fond of this definition of Agile Software from the Menlo Institute.

It really focuses your mind as a developer. How many of us can put our hand on our heart and say we are agile if this was the only definition?

Before you can build a team that rocks, you must first become agile. If you don’t already know what an Agile team is, let me help:

An Agile software development team can add features in any order and can release a working version of the product at any iteration.

Chris Matts and I have been playing around with the concepts of using business value to help focus development teams on what is important to the business. It’s still draft, put out for peer review. We hope to publish it somewhere interesting soon!

BusinessValueDrivenDevelopment (PDF)