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Behaviorally Speaking Behaviorally Speaking - My 7 Predictions for the coming year
Behaviorally Speaking Behaviorally Speaking - My 7 Predictions for the coming year
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 Configuration Management (CM) has been a key aspect of any software development effort for a long time with its many essential key practices including Source Code and Release management as well as build engineering and change control. The scope of CM keeps growing and today many CM practitioners are knee deep in IT governance and controls along with data security and business continuity. CM is a key aspect of any successful offshore outsourcing effort as well. Even with all of these accomplishments 2008 will be a year in which CM's value is magnified and its impact amplified due to a number of important environmental and global events. The recent turmoil in the credit markets, key economic factors and the rapidly changing business and technology landscape are only the tip of the iceberg that must be understood in preparation for the year to come. The discipline of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) requires good technology, processes and people management, yet frameworks such as Agile are likely to be rendered irrelevant by the end of the year. Yes - I am predicting the death of Agility and I will explain why! There are a number of factors that will raise the stakes for CM experts and the organizations which they serve. Read on if you are ready to get prepared for a year of challenges and changes that will not only impact you, your company, but society as well. In 2008 1. Managing ALM on a global multicultural, multiethnic, and multilingual basis will evolve into a much more complex core competency for any IT or business manager. 2. IT governance and Control will become even more essential in the arsenal of any CM practitioner. It is no longer just about passing an audit. Now we have to really change the behavior of our team members. 3. Product Management will replace project management as a core competency 4. Technology and software development are becoming viewed as a commodity. Technology teams that do not perform can be replaced with their applications being refactored and reengineered with lightening speed and agility. 5. Workflow and process will become magnified in importance as management must know that all of the required tasks are being completed and on time to meet key delivery dates and commitments. 6. Agility will need to evolve or risk loosing relevancy in its current form. Best practices just won't be enough. Agile must mature into process methodologies that explain what each of the team members has to accomplish and by when. So much for being light-weight. 7. CM will evolve and become an even greater part of any organization's technology and business management backbone. Be prepared to report directly to the CTO. 1. Where are my developers? Offshoring and Outsourcing were required development practices in 2006 and 2007 for most large organizations. The economy of scale, lower costs and, in some cases, acceptable to high quality made delegating technical work to wherever it could most effectively be accomplished a basic discipline of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). But the challenges and stories of disaster also increased in 2007 which led to many projects - essential to the organization - being brought back onshore and under the watchful eye of senior management. That said, it is simply too sweet to develop a complex piece of software for less money - especially when you throw a lot of well trained and dedicated resources onto the project. The problem is that this means that managers must get personally and intimately involved with the work done by their offshore teams and that makes for some very interesting challenges. I have personally had projects where I voluntarily agreed to start my workday at midnight - answering my first phone call at 1am, my time, in a language other than English. My reasons for agreeing to this were simple. The best qualified staff were available starting at midnight - my time. I could get the project done in a third of the time, and for much less money, if I was flexible on when I slept. The only problem that I ran into was that I often had to forego sleep and still get into the office for critical meetings. The phone also rang at the wrong time (right when I was finally dozing off for my 2 hour nap) and my own sleep patterns were really messed up. At one point my dreams got particularly interesting as I had a vivid dream that my beloved German Shepherd had learned to speak English - clearly an unconscious wish that I could go back to just speaking English myself. The delight on my users face as I showed them the new system was well worth the trouble and I also noted that my schedule allowed me to have breakfast and dinner with my children more often than before - along with sneaking out in the middle of the day for my daughter's school play. On the other hand - I know that my CEO saw me looking droopy the other day and probably had no idea that I had been up all night and still came into the office for a 10 hour workday of critical meetings. The next day, I completely hit the wall and was finally useless. Along with the time challenges are cultural differences that must be understood and considered. Giving a colleague a correction or delivering bad news can be tough when your phone connection is not perfect and there are language challenges to consider. One practice that I have taken is to always send an email just as I am connecting via phone. This means that I am communicating verbally as well in writing at the same time. Using both modes helps to ensure that there are no misunderstandings. In one instance I had to say something that I knew might be taken badly. I found out and looked up the word for "brother" and then prefaced that in my email. In this specific situation, it had the desired effect of delivering a tough message that something was not done right and still maintaining a cordial relationship. Multicultural, ethnic and linguistic skills are becoming basic management competencies as managers must get personally involved in offshore outsourced work. So one change for 2008 is offshore outsourcing will require new and flexible management skills that will require you to know exactly what your offshore team is working on at any given time. That leads into IT governance and Control. IT Governance and Control Passing an audit is just not enough anymore. Many firms mistakenly focus on just meeting the letter of the audit and not enough on actually adopting the prescribed best practices. IT governance is about giving senior management visibility into the status of any project at a given time. With the economic turmoil of recent months expect more oversight and supervision especially when there is a lot of money at stake. Controls must make sense and should be engineered to help the team accomplish their goals more productively than before. One CEO said to me that he noticed that my work was different than an auditor in that I actually got the developers to alter their behavior (this was after we fixed a major problem which had previously caused the deploys to repeatedly fail). Making IT Governance and Control practical and useful will be a core competency in 2008. Product vs Project Product delivery framework will need to include business needs and requirements. This will be a broader focus than project management and a key practice in the coming year. You can be replaced Gone are the days when the technology guy/gal was able to enjoy his throne of knowledge and unlimited job security. Applications can be brought in-house and reengineered quickly and efficiently and senior management is not likely to be held hostage by an uncooperative technology team. Best to get onboard as a member of the team and think about how the entire organization can succeed and compete against the real enemy - your competitors! Workflow and process Imagine if every fireman or policeman who arrived to help you in an emergency handled things differently! You reasonably expect that emergency workers have well developed protocols and procedures to uniformly address any emergency. If you saw someone breaking into your car - you would certainly want any arriving police officer to arrest that person - with a repeatable and predictable criteria. Technology professionals need to get used to the idea that repeatable processes are required to get the job done successfully. While workflow and process were productivity tools in 2007 - expect them to be basic necessities in 2008. I expect to be reviewing a robust process workflow tool called Kovair - which offers a remarkable visual modeling interface to engineer your process workflow exactly the way that your team needs to manage their flow of work. The tool allows you to automate your existing processes and efficiently engineer and improve (process reengineering) your workflow to run your business according to your organizations' requirements. The economy and watchful eye of senior management will certainly make this an essential competency for any successful manager in the coming year. The death of Agility. The discipline of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) requires good technology, processes and people management, yet frameworks such as Agile are likely to be rendered irrelevant by the end of the year. One of my colleagues recently commented that he knew that I was against Agile methods which shocked me completely. I am not at all against Agile and in fact I believe them to be the best thing to happen to process improvement in a very long time. Agile methods such as SCRUM, XP, DSDM and TDD provide such awesome best practices that they are simply non-negotiable and must be in the arsenal of any successful developer. The problem is that you can be completely "Agile" and still have your staff completely clueless as to what they are supposed to deliver to you on Monday morning. Agile practices are great, but in many cases incomplete. We also need to get back to the basics of good old process consultation which is where all of these methodologies came from back in the beginning. (Watch my column and blog for more information on this.) Once you resort to RUP or other topologies to fill in the gaps, in Agile, you will find your process to be just as verbose as the CMMi, ITIL or any of the other "heavy" process frameworks. Expect Agile to grow up and mature into a complete framework that enhances productivity and tremendous successes. In the coming year expect Agile to harden into being "nimble" instead of it's current form. Oh and if you are writing a weapons system or my own life support system please do the documentation along with writing a working system. 7. It doesn't get better than being a CM'er today. I have always loved this work. CM is not just about developing systems. It is a passion for quality and getting it right each every time. The core competencies that we discuss in the CM Journal are exactly what you need to be successful in 2008 and for many years to come. Bob Aiello is the Editor-in-Chief for CM Crossroads and an Associate Director at a major financial services firm in NYC, where he has company wide responsibility for Software Configuration and Release Management best practices. Bob is on the Steering Committee of the NYC Software Process Improvement Network (CitySPIN), where he is also the chair of the CM SIG which meets in Midtown NYC. Mr. Aiello has a Masters in Industrial Psychology from NYU and a BS in Computer Science from Hofstra University. You may reach Mr. Aiello by email at raiello@acm.org
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... Bob See the comments on the Agile CM thread: http://www.cmcrossroads.com/option,com_smf/Itemid,177/topic,74622.0.html In short - I agree with some and disagree with other statements in this post! Robert |
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