What's New?
Developing Software

ScrumMaster James Schiel discusses what makes Scrum so unique. Mark S. Merkow and Lakshmikanth Raghavan are SQUARE about developing quality requirements. Donald J. Reifer answers the five basic questions about software maintenance and dispels many common misperceptions.


Also in this issue Colin J. Neill, Philip A. Laplante, and Joanna F. DeFranco manage unmanageable personalities. And, regular contributor Nancy Settle-Murphy, gives her top ten principles for smooth team operation.

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The Enterprise Tech Bible

A Nekkid Tech podcast with Greg Schulz

Quantitative Business Process Management
SPaMCAST 164 features an interview with Joe Raynus. He discusses his book Improving Business Process Performance: Gain Agility, Create Value and Achieve Success and explains a workable process to help an organization maintain clarity of purpose, bridge the gap between the strategic and tactical views, and apply structure to how it monitors its progress.

A Balanced Life
SPaMCAST 158 features an interview with Peter Taylor. He discusses his book The Lazy Project Manager and how to be an effective and effiecent project manager and still have a balanced life.

Kanban! Kanban!
SPaMCAST 148 features an interview with Mattias Skarin, who talks about kanban, effectiveness and software development philosophy. SPaMCAST 150 features Yuval Yeret discussing Kanban, Agile, life, the universe, and everything.

SPaMCAST 146 features an interview with Michael West. Mr. West wrote Real Process Improvement Using the CMMI. He discusses this book and how and why the CMMI can be a tool for process improvement.

SPaMCAST 136 features an interview with Dr. Ginger Levin and J. LeRoy Ward discussing their new book, Program Management Complexity: A Competency Model. We discussed program management, the impact of agile techniques and why competency is critical. A wonderful information packed interview!

SPaMCAST 132 features an interview with Bill Bentley discussing the book he co-authored Lean Six Sigma Secrets for the CIO. We covered the gamut of process improvement with emphasis on six sigma, lean and the combination of the two techniques.

SPaMCAST 128 features an interview with with Dave Garmus, Janet Russac and Royce Edwards discussing their book, Certified Function Point Specialist Examination Guide. If you are interested in functional metrics this interview is right down your alley.

SPaMCAST 126 interview with Phillip A. LaPlante discussing his book, Requirements Engineering for Software and Systems in specific and requirements in general. A real powerhouse discussion of requirements.

SPaMCAST 124 features Gerard Hill, author of The Complete Project Management Methodology and Toolkit. Mr. Hill shares a ton of good advice on instituting project management methodology in any organization.

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Contact John Wyzalek editor of IT Performance Improvement.


 

Focus On: Developing Software

Some Common Questions about Scrum

James Schiel

As Agile methods go, Scrum is unusual. It deliberately challenges the individual and the organization to become disciplined in their approach to software development. It is deliberately non-prescriptive, making it easy to understand its framework while simultaneously demanding a great deal of focus and involvement if you take it on. It does not talk about writing software, because the people who put the framework together knew that if you were to get your people working together first, those people would organize the best development practices for them and make it work because they were empowered to make those decisions. Even well-known and experienced Agilists still draw comparisons between Scrum teams and XP teams saying that XP teams are better because Scrum doesn't provide the development structure necessary to create and maintain high quality code and XP does. This article discusses some common issues about Scrum and answers common questions about when Scrum should be used and what options solve certain predictable problems.
More...

An Overview of System Quality Requirements Engineering (SQUARE)

Mark S. Merkow and Lakshmikanth Raghavan

System Quality Requirements Engineering (SQUARE) is a process model developed at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). SQUARE provides a means for eliciting, categorizing, and prioritizing security requirements for information technology systems and applications. The focus of the model is to build security and quality concepts into the early stages of the development life cycle. The model can also be used for documenting and analyzing the security and quality aspects of a development project.
More...

Maintenance: Who, Why, Where, When and How?

Donald J. Reifer

It is important to appreciate that a mix of experience and skills is needed for maintenance as newer people bring skills that are needed to deal with the newer technologies. Another misperception was that most of the maintenance work was out-sourced. While true for commercial projects, we found that government shops were in-sourcing maintenance work because they could do it cheaply. Based on such realities, the Table confirms that maintenance considerations should dominate during development because updating the software is often a harder job than generating it in the first place. Let us look at what some of these considerations should be prior to, during transition to and after turnover to maintenance.
More...

Also new this issue:

Human Antipatterns and Negative Personality Types

Colin J. Neill, Philip A. Laplante, and Joanna F. DeFranco

Why bother to study patterns of human behavior? And why are we bothering with it after proclaiming this book to be non-scholarly and entertaining? First, they can be used to understand what motivates people. Having understood their motivations, it becomes easier to seek win-win solutions or avoid causing problems. Understanding the motivations of each individual also helps a manager in organizing teams.
More...



Articles from Past Issues

Project Management

Understanding Leadership
by Jack Ferraro
What is project leadership and how do we achieve it? There is no simple answer, but the first step is to understand the various leadership theories and how they relate to project management.

Five Key Actions for Turning around Projects
by Ralph L. Kliem, PMP
There are five key actions for turning around projects in trouble, called the five Es: Energize, Envision, Explore, Evaluate, and Execute.

More PM Articles

Dealing with Change
by David Shirley

A Project's Journey through Colors
by Shankar K. Jha

Achieving the Power of Enterprise-Wide Project Management
by Dennis L. Bolles, PMP and Darrel G. Hubbard, PE

Tips for the End of a Project
by Jeff Oltmann

Metrics

Too Many Metrics and Not Enough Data
by Capers Jones
The software industry is unique in having more metric variants than any other engineering discipline in history, combined with an almost total lack of conversion rules from one metric to another.

A Framework for Measuring the Value of Software Development
by Michael D. Harris and Thomas M. Cagley,Jr.
The value of software development is an assessment, part objective and part subjective, of the user-perceived outputs from a process that converts inputs into a solution that the users (most often a business) experience.

Using Measurement to Identify Improved IT Performance
by David Garmus
Improved performance in software development can be achieved by investing in best software development practices. This article will discuss how one organization identified improvements in their performance.

IT Infrastructure

Backup and Recovery Best Practices
by Preston de Guise
Proposing activities and procedures as being best practices can be controversial, as there will always be exceptions to a rule, and there will always be sites and companies that need to perform backups a different way to what is proposed here. What remains true, though, is that following these guidelines is a good starting point in achieving a stable, optimum backup environment.

Service Level Agreements and IT Bill-Back
by Hubbert Smith
Based on the substantial body of available storage industry market information, it's easy to conclude that most (not all) business units are unaware of the expenses associated with storage.

More IT Articles

Enabling Efficient, Effective, and Productive Information Services Delivery
by Greg Schulz

Preventing Cloud Vendor Lock-in
by David E. Y. Sarna

Monitoring-as-a-Service
John W. Rittinghouse and James F. Ransome

Evaluating Cloud Servers and Solutions
by Greg Schulz

IT Management

Can You Handle the Truth of IT Today?
by Stephen J. Andriole
How honest are you about your ability to deal with the problems that have held business technology optimization back for decades? About people problems that we all know exist but seldom feel comfortable enough to talk about? I was having dinner with an industry colleague recently and after a couple of glasses of wine, we started to tell each other the truth (or at least versions of the truth that were much more accurate than the ones exchanged before the wine). I described the conversation to a friend who told me that I should have recorded it and published it anonymously for everyone to read. Well, here it is.

Risk Management as a Competitive Advantage
by J. LeRoy Ward
Assessing and responding to risks of outsourced projects directly impact an organization s financial and operational performance, making risk management expertise essential, for both buyers and sellers of outsourced projects.

A Value Stream Focus within an Enterprise
by Joseph Raynus
A value stream is all of the actions (both value added and non-value added) currently required to deliver a product or a service. It is the work activity and information flow occurring as raw material or information becomes a product/service that is delivered to a customer.

More Management Articles

When Reason, Logic, and Business Cases Fail
by Stephen J. Andriole

What Will You (Really) Be Doing in a Few Years?
by Stephen J. Andriole

Pay Very Close Attention to New Era Skills
by Stephen J. Andriole

From Business Logic to the Decision Model Structure
by Barbara von Halle and Larry Goldberg

What is the Decision Model?
by Barbara von Halle and Larry Goldberg

Enterprise Architecture: Reinventing the Wheel?
by Society for Information Management's Enterprise Architecture Working Group

Process and Productivity

What Does Lean Bring to the Table?
by Gerhard J. Plenert
Lean is a methodology that is focused on the elimination of "waste." Introducing Lean into an organization that likes to think of themselves as leading edge innovators and as the masters of efficiency and improvement, like Information Technology (IT), is often considered to be offensive and demeaning. There is often resentment by the implication that there may be "waste" in their IT process. That is why IT has become one of the last frontiers for the introduction of Lean tools.

Why Scrum?
by Kim H. Pries and Jon M. Quigley
The scrum approach focuses on the business needs of projects when developing products and services. It provides the same benefits with line management with only minor modifications to the tools.

More Articles on Process and Productivity

Policy: A Key Element in the Software Engineering Process
by Boyd L. Summers

Lean in IT: Process versus Practice
by Steven C. Bell and Michael A. Orzen

Achieving the Right Balance between Process Maturity and Performance
by Louis A. Poulin

Why Scrum?
by Kim H. Pries and Jon M. Quigley

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Blogs by ITPI Authors

 

Improving Your Own IT Performance
Articles by Nancy Settle-Murphy

Untangle your Virtual Team with 10 Most-Needed Norms
Precious few virtual teams have explicit team norms, even for aspects of teamwork where the absence of shared norms can really trip a team up. Excuses include: "When would we have time to talk this through?" "Everyone pretty much knows how we need to work." "We're too busy." And my favorite: "It's too late to go backwards." In this article, I provide 10 "best practices" norms that can do the most to save time, reduce frustration and boost productivity of virtual teams. These examples include specific actions that can support each one. For this piece, I touch on virtual meetings, decision-making, the use of email, shared documents and scheduling, areas for which a lack of explicit norms can cause especially thorny problems for virtual teams. More...

How Virtual Leaders Can Help Others Thrive in a World of Complexity
According to Yves Morieux of the Boston Consulting Group, author of a recent Harvard Business Review article, "Smart Rules: Six Ways to Get People to Solve Problems Without You," the number of procedures, layers, interface structures, and coordination bodies have ballooned to 50-350% over the past 15 years, in a recent study of 100 U.S. and European companies. So with all of this analysis, tracking, reporting and coordinating, how do leaders ever focus on the "real work" that needs to get done, including the essential work of guiding their teams? One way is to find ways to enable their employees to become more self-sufficient and resilient. Virtual managers have a different set of challenges, given that they can't be present (either in person or even virtually) every time a staff member has a question or problem. More...

Balance Innovation and Expediency for a Supercharged Team
What's getting lost in our single-minded quest for uber-efficiency is the relative luxury of idle thought, where we take the time to line our gray matter with the seeds of half-formed ideas which, with a little bit of nurturing, can spawn big innovations. To sustain competitive advantage, organizations have to innovate constantly. Easier said than done. That's because thinking creatively takes time and focus, two commodities that are in short supply. More...

When Your Team Is About To Implode, Watch for Signs and Act Fast!
This wasn't just any collapse. This was a whirling vortex, downward spiral, free-fall-at-a-thousand-miles-an-hour. The kind that you never want to open if you're a Boston Red Sox fan. Yes, baseball is only a game and the Red Sox are just an overpaid, underperforming group of players who ceaselessly inflict pain on their sports fans, 2004 and 2007 notwithstanding. Notice, that I did not refer to the 2011 Red Sox as a team. They were a collection of individuals who each seemed to play by his own set of rules and work toward his own goals. In trying to salvage something positive about my home team's shocking demise, I wanted to get a better grip on how and why talented, skilled players can suddenly stumble into oblivion. Here's a checklist of contributing factors, drawn from my client experiences, as well a little web searching. More...

How to Disengage Your Virtual Team in 10 Easy Steps
I'm in the midst of rolling out a new virtual leadership series for a client. We start every series by exploring the three building blocks of successful virtual team leadership (literally, the ABC's): Accelerating Trust, Building Social Capital and Creating a Level Playing Field. One major challenge comes up in every conversation: How to keep virtual team members engaged, enthusiastic, motivated and energized? Rather than writing a bunch of tips to help you engage virtual team members, I thought I'd flip it around and give you tips for disengaging your virtual team members. After all, we can all do with a little fun now and then! More...

Talk Trumps Text for Harnessing Hidden Know-How Coauthored with Kate Pugh
Let's say your team, which is scattered across several locations, has to produce a complex, time-consuming proposal, with little time to spare. The team scours the web for relevant content, and they discover that others in your organization have tackled similar proposals. How can they mine this hidden know-how, when they are running out of time, and don't know exactly what to ask, of whom, or how? More...

Overcoming Time and Distance to Stay Connected, Engaged, and Energized
In a world where what was blindly fast is now excruciatingly slow, what was private is now all-too-public, and where meaningful discussions have given way to a stream of 140-character exchanges, a feeling of disconnection has become rampant across the workplace. More...


About the Author

Nancy Settle-Murphy, Guided Insights founder and principal consultant, draws on an eclectic and varied combination of skills and expertise. She wears many hats, depending on the challenges she is helping clients to solve. She acts as meeting facilitator, virtual collaboration coach, change management leader, workshop designer, cross-cultural trainer, communications strategist and organizational development consultant.