Improving Performance in Troubled Times through Distance Learning
This article maps out several important steps to creating a successful multifaceted distance learning program. Our starting premise: Simply throwing a slide presentation onto a website, while it may be fast and inexpensive, almost never achieves the intended results. Instead, it's a thoughtfully-created program that encompasses a variety of learning activities that can cultivate skills and accelerate time to practical application.
Predicting the ROI of Change
Process Simulation Modeling (PSIM) can provide real business value to organizations that are trying to change processes. When companies use the appropriate software simulation, designed for their industry to evaluate process performance, these organizations can improve their operations and achieve higher levels of process maturity with the integration of CMMI. This article explains how Process Simulation Modeling (PSIM) can help you zero-in on the changes that will deliver a positive ROI.
Managing the IT Procurement Process
This chapter from IS Management Handbook, Eighth Edition presents a model of the IT procurement process that was developed by the SIM Working Group to provide a framework for studying IT procurement.
Organizational Communications Audit as Foundation of Successful Campaign
This article outlines the steps for a comprehensive communications audit that can help organizations focus time, energy and resources on the communications methods and tools most likely to reach and engage employees during times of change. Such an audit may also be used for other types of communications campaigns as well.
The Key Success Factors in Aligning IT with Business
Because business needs help set IT's priorities, how IT departments align their solutions with business objectives hinge on a number of success factors. At the end of the day, most of the work rest on the shoulders of CIOs, being the key figures that understand the business side of things and have the ability to translate business needs into technology solutions.
Accelerate On-the-Job Learning with Virtual Peer Roundtables
If you're like many of our clients and colleagues, you work some distance away from your key colleagues. This may mean that you rarely get the chance to brainstorm ideas, share lessons learned, or explore difficult issues with your peers. With technology as an enabler, virtual roundtables can be an effective way to exchange ideas and pick up new tips and tools. To succeed, they need a thoughtful structure, and agreed-upon ground rules and operating norms. In this article, Penny Pullan and Nancy Settle-Murhpy map out some practical steps you can take to assemble a virtual roundtable of peers. You can use these guidelines to set up other kinds of virtual roundtables too, perhaps with clients, partners or industry experts. They use examples from a mastermind group for leaders of virtual teams.
Project Management Tools
Here's an overview of some of the quantitative tools you can use to manage your projects better.
ERP for IT
In trying to align IT with business goals, organizations often find that IT landscapes consisting of processes, information, technology and people have taken on a life of their own and are not easily managed. Because of this, CIOs find it nearly impossible to answer important questions. This article introduces IT planning, which supports effective and consistent decision-making about how IT should be deployed and managed. IT planning’s reason for being is to facilitate decision-making. In particular, it provides support for effective decisions and ensures that decision-making is performed in a consistent way suggesting a framework, methodology or process.
Using Scrum for Project Management
Scrum is an agile software approach to getting project tasks done. This approach hyper focuses upon software development and testing task execution. This same approach can be easily adapted to general project management. The scrum approach is an evolutionary approach to project management with few down-sides and a substantial payoff.
Program Management: For Wonders Great and Small
Program management's power lies in its ability to deliver success not only in the short term but in the long term. While it helps to make the quarterly objectives, more importantly it guides long-term viability. To realize these benefits of program management, an organization does not have to be tasked with building another Wonder of the World like the pyramids. The truth is that organizations of any size can productively apply program management.
Organize Critical Team Documents to Save Time and Waste
Regardless of the size of your team, chances are you routinely squander time trying to find critical documents that you know exist somewhere, editing a document for hours only to find that you've been working on an old version, or trying to piece together elements of several documents that use different structures or formats. So why don't more teams take the time to set up a consistent system right up front for documenting and organizing shared work products? The answer: It takes making tough trade-offs, a good deal of discipline and a lot of time. This article provides several useful tips for improving results, in far less time, through better organization of documents, messages and schedules, for both teams and individuals.
Which Kind of System? The Make, Buy, or Rent Decision
This article illustrates the three main system options for organizations seeking to upgrade their systems and the pros and cons of each. Having made the decision to upgrade its systems, the next step that an organization needs to take involves the classic "make or buy" question: Is the organization going to build its own system from scratch or purchase a "mature" system that tens, hundreds, or even thousands of organizations currently use? Note that the traditional make or buy decision has been complicated somewhat in recent years by the advent of SaaS. Vendors like Workday and salesforce.com provide a third option for organizations that want to "rent" software."
Ranking Risks: Rare to Certain, Negligible to Catastrophic
Risks your project or business are exposed to may be worth reviewing now more than ever to see which ones need more attention than others. This article presents a risk matrix, which is a risk assessment tool that exposes aspects of risks that could be subjected to some form of ranking. A risk matrix shows you and other decision makers a clearer view of what the risk is, what is involved, and what amount of time can be afforded given the severity and probability of the risk event. It can help you visualize, in an organized manner, the risks you face in quantitative and qualitative terms and plan and make a more informed decision when the situation arises.
Coalescing a New Team: Creating Ties That Bind
Maybe you've inherited new team members from another group within your company as a result of recent reorganization. Or perhaps your company has merged with another, giving you a whole new group to manage. Whatever the reason, you need to pull a new team together, including people who have been working together all along and those who are just coming on board. What actions can you, as a team leader, take to create an environment of collaboration and trust in the short-term and in the long-run? What can team members do to get connected as quickly as possible to other team members? This article provides some practical tips for finding the right "glue" to bring a new team together, even when working from afar.
CMMI and Agile: Opposites Attract
The myths surrounding the compatibility of CMMI and Agile have recently been debunked by SEI. Despite the perception that CMMI best practices and Agile development methods are at odds with each other, new research suggests just the opposite train of thought. In fact, CMMI and Agile champions can benefit from using both methods within organizations - with the potential to dramatically improve business performance. This article explains how these seemingly opposing strategies can be paired to foster dramatic improvements in business performance.
Six Management Practices That Don't Cut It in a Virtual World
Do you think that just because you're a successful manager of traditional teams that you'll automatically be a hotshot manager in the virtual world? Maybe not. In fact, it's often those managers who assume their leadership skills are eminently transportable to a virtual team are those who struggle the most. Why? They haven't taken the time to understand how vastly different virtual team dynamics can be for both leaders and team members, and thus, are less likely to find ways to accommodate those differences. In this article Nancy Settle-Murphy explores some of the "traditional" management tenets that are most likely to backfire in a virtual world, and offer some alternatives that will yield better results when leading teams who work remotely.
Traditional or Milestone Consulting: Which is Best?
Many organizations may recognize the need for consultants but remain unsure about how to use them. This article compares two of the different consulting alternatives--traditional and milestone--and the pros and cons of each.
How BPM Can Benefit Quality Programs
In Business Process Management Systems: Strategy and Implementation, James Chang discusses business management practices and the technology that enables them, with a focus on strategy and implementation. He analyzes the history of process management practices and demonstrates that BPM practices are a synthesis of radical change and continuous change practices. It provides an integrated view on how various management practices merge into BPM and describes the many technologies that converge to form a Business Process Management System (BPMS), illustrating its standards and service-oriented architecture. The excerpt looks at how BPM can benefit quality programs.
Drive Out Distractions and Reclaim Your Time
This article explores ways that anyone can gain back valuable working time each day by changing habits and behaviors. Some may find some of these recommendations too extreme, especially those who are hard-wired to multitask constantly. Make one or two changes at first, if you must. If you're part of an ongoing team, choose one change you can all agree to. Once you've discovered how much more time you now have to get work done, take another step.
Pairing CMMI and Six Sigma for Optimal Results
This article discusses how Six Sigma and CMMI can work together to bring about effective change within your organization by following these fool-proof strategies for accelerating process improvement.
The Beginning of the End: Defining Project Closure
When undertaking a software development project, an effectively designed closure plan serves as an outline of required tasks that must be carried out appropriately in order to result in successful project delivery. Adequate preparation is one significant element to ensuring a smooth transition to implementation. The closure plan must be considered at the outset of the project, as the client outlines its specific software requirements. With a detailed description of the desired end result communicated and understood, you can establish the expected capabilities and deliverables of the software. But as you enter the final stages of the project project, what can you do to ensure that the program is completely suitable and fully primed for implementation? This article explains how to establish a clear finish line for your project.
Process Improvement Requires a Focus on Productivity
Over 20 years in the software industry, Dr. Adam Kolawa has seen process improvement initiatives come and go, as well as countless attempts to find a silver bullet tool that delivers quality with the click of a button. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet. There have been some good ideas in theory, but few real successes in practice. He thinks the problem we have is that we are pushing these process improvement initiatives without really considering how they affect productivity. We take for granted that quality increases productivity, but that's not the case. If you want to introduce a quality initiative into the organization, you need to figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't disrupt or slow down the normal workflow. Otherwise, there's little chance of it resulting in a sustainable quality process.
Which Life Cycle Is Best for Your Project?
Which life cycle will work best for your project? This is an important strategic question because making the wrong choice could lead to disastrous results of catastrophic proportions: delayed deliveries, unhappy clients, project overruns, and canceled projects. During the 80’s and early 90’s, the waterfall method was the defacto model in project delivery. With the rapid pace in software development and popular use of the Internet, many companies started shifting to more flexible life cycles such as the iterative, incremental, spiral, and agile. These new life cycle methods provide more flexibility and support fast-paced development, giving companies the edge in delivering “the first” in the industry. To date, there are dozens of life cycle methods available to choose from, each having its own advantages and disadvantages. This article discusses some of the more popular life cycles.
Top Ten IT Strategies During the Downturn
IT executives were stretching their budgets even before the current weak economic conditions. Median IT spending per user in 2008 fell more than 6%, according to Computer Economics. This is consistent with the fact that IT managers are supporting an increasing number of users without corresponding increases in IT spending. This article discusses how can you do more with less in IT and lays out strategies should you employ in this time of economic uncertainty.
Forego Face-to-Face and Make Virtual Meetings an Everyday Reality
Bringing people together for face-to-face meetings can be costly. If your organization is one of the many calling a halt to most face-to-face meetings these days, you're probably wondering how you can achieve your goals in different ways. This article explores a few of the options your organization can consider when meeting face-to-face simply is not possible or practical especially in light of today's increasingly tough economic times.
Is Software Development Risk Costing You Money?
Poor software project management often means missed deadlines, cost overruns or even outright failure of the project. How can your company avoid this industry-wide problem? In this article you'll learn best practices for successfully completing software projects.
Spotlight on Software Quality Improvement: Three Strategies for Success
Standards in software development are essential to efforts toward improving communication between customer and contractor, reducing software costs throughout the entire life cycle, and improving overall software quality. Organizations have a number of viable choices to consider when it comes to applying software quality process improvement methodologies. Chart the right course for your organization by uncovering the bottom-line value offered by three proven strategies: the V-Model, ISO9000, and Six Sigma.
The Keys to Intergenerational Harmony
With multiple generations working side by side for several years now, much has been written about the key differences that affect the ability of multigenerational teams to collaborate successfully. Most of what's been written has come from those of us who are considerably older (and more experienced) than our Gen X and Gen Y counterparts. For this article, the author sought the perspectives of some of our Gen X and Gen Y colleagues. After all, for all of the wisdom we older generations think we have to offer, the Gen X and Y folks of the world have a lot to teach us, too. Here are observations and advice culled from their recent interviews with our younger counterparts.
