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Managing globally distributed CM (e.g. tools, people, project issues)
Volume 6 - Number 4 - April 2008
Managing globally distributed CM is one of the areas where Configuration Management really shows its value. Using CM to support the global environment must include best practices in terms of tools, people, and project management, which can make the difference between success and failure for any  organization. As usual our CM Crossroads Editors have stepped up to the plate to help us all focus on the critical issues that must be understood to effectively manage globally distributed CM. This is a topic that is near and dear to my heart so I will take the lead in inviting you to read my column, Behaviorally Speaking, in which I discuss understanding the people and process issues involved with supporting globally distributed environments. Joe Farah comes out swinging with the Next Generation of CM and Austin Hastings discusses Culture & Geography in Dimensions of SCM Challenge #3.
This month I begin a new column focusing on IT Governance and Compliance with additional related columns from Randy Wagner who talks about transparency and Accountability and Mario Moreira who discusses bringing business value to IT Governance.
We'll also examine an excellent process automation tool from a company called Kovair. If you need an automated workflow solution then please do take a look at my review of this product. Globally Distributed CM presents some interesting challenges, including managing IT Governance and Compliance. CM Crossroads is the place to find the information that you need to learn how to steer your CM battleship through all the challenges ahead!
Bob Aiello
Editor-in-Chief
CM Journal
| Featured Articles in This Edition |
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Is Your Development Going Global?
In today's increasingly complex corporate environment, the
need to geographically distribute software development has become almost the
norm. This distribution can be based on several patterns including Multiple
Offices, Working from Home and Subcontract Organizations. Each of these shares
some common SCM problems as well as has some unique problem areas.
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Managing Globally Distributed CM
Most corporations today must think in terms of managing a global enterprise. That brings a whole range of issues from IT Governance to tools, people and project issues. The people issues are probably the most complex and potentially provide the greatest risk to the organization itself. How can corporations today address all the complexities of managing a global organization and what exactly does CM have to do with all this? The answer of course is that CM is the glue that holds the whole model t...
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CM: THE NEXT GENERATION of Globally Distributed CM
There's no doubt about it. The easiest way to do software development
is at a single site. Technology has not changed that. However,
technology has made it a lot easier to do distributed development, even
when the sites are distributed half way around the world. Net
meetings, mirror sites, Mega-bit global web access, collaborative
software for reviewing documents and code - these all make it a lot
easier. What about the CM part of it? Why is it not quite as easy to
do globally? Well,...
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 | Dimensions of SCM Challenge #3
Culture & Geography
Part of managing software development is dealing with the challenges that arise. Delivering software requires overcoming the challenges, or at least mitigating the attendant risks during the development activity. Generally, organizations work with a constant level of challenge. When one challenge is overcome, the organization will take on a new challenge. For example, when a project releases software that overcomes a technical challenge, it might then schedule a new r...
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 | Transparency and Accountability
Spare the rod; spoil the child. It's an old statement that conveys the notion
of accountability in raising a well-mannered kid. The concept of accountability is just as true
for the software development process.
Making the process and activities transparent to senior management means
we can do more than just present work progression. We can also filter problem areas up the chain
as well to help improve the lifecycle. In this article, we'll look at ways that
encourage process improvemen...
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 | IT Governance and Compliance
CM adds a great deal of value to any application lifecycle. But there is probably no other area that is so quickly growing as the need for solid Configuration Management to support IT Governance and Compliance. This is due, in no small part, to the Sarbanes-Oxley (section 404) laws as well as the renewed focus on corporate governance in the wake of the credit market crisis. CM practitioners have a responsibility to lend their skills to corporate citizenship by supporting the best practices that ...
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 | Bringing Business Value to IT Governance
For some
organizations, IT Governance is just another set of standards that is stated
yet with few (or no) compliance expectations, little actual verification
occurring, few or no metrics to indicate compliance, and even less use of the
results by senior management to run their organization. As written
in my recent article, "Framework for Implementing and Evaluating Standards",
without true support for standards, including practices, policy, verification,
metrics, and managements commitm...
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 | Kovair - the next generation in automated workflow tools
Kovair raises the bar for application lifecycle management solutions and sets the stage for enhancing productivity through their Kovair Global Lifecycle. Automating existing workflows is the only way to really ensure that you have repeatable processes that have complete visibility to all of the stakeholders involved. But that assumes that you already know the exact details of every step in your desired workflow. What if the automated workflow tool that you chose also helped you analyze your proc...
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 | Learning from Concurrent, Parallel, and Distributed Systems Design
This month we do a bit of a "context switch", from the world of parallel development, to the world of concurrent, parallel, and distributed systems design (and back again). The purpose is to see if any of the same patterns of concurrent, parallel, and distributed processing apply to the case of concurrent, parallel, and distributed development.
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Whitepaper SpotlightStay up to date with Configuration Management and Application Lifecycle
Management technology products and services by browsing our featured white
papers below:
See all the Featured Whitepapers>>
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Tool Spotlight
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CollabNet
CollabNet Subversion is an enterprise-ready distribution of Subversion® that includes, in one package,...
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AccuRev
AccuRev is a best-of-breed, process-centric software configuration
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