InfoQ

Article

Executive summary - An Adaptive Performance Management System

Posted by Jim Highsmith on Aug 09, 2006 07:09 PM

Community
Agile
Topics
Delivering Value,
Leadership
Tags
Business/IT Alignment,
Management,
Budgets,
Performance Evaluation,
Value & Metrics

InfoQ.com offers readers a free pdf of the Executive Summary of Jim Highsmith's Cutter Executive Report: An Adaptive Performance Management System

RelatedVendorContent

Evaluation Guide: Is Your SCM Tool Ready for Agile?

Delivering a Breakthrough Java ™ Computing Experience

IBM Web 2.0 Developer eKit: Free Tutorials, Webcasts, Whitepapers

Fighter Jets and Agile Development at Lockheed Martin (Case study)

IBM software architect eKit: Grady Booch podcast, whitepapers, articles

Related Sponsor

VersionOne is recognized by Agile practitioners as the leader in Agile project management tools. Companies such as Adobe, BBC, CNN, Dow, HP, IBM, Sony and 3M have turned to VersionOne to help deliver greater value to their customers.

As the Agile emphasis on transparent reporting works its way through an organization, managers at various levels start to identify existing metrics that actually work against  the adaptability offered by Agile software development.  Not surprisingly, managers are starting to look for alternatives to traditional budgeting systems. 

Jim Highsmith quotes Jeremy Hope and Robin Fraser on the subject of traditional budgeting:

Budgets have ... been hijacked by a generation of financial engineers that have used them as remote control devices to "manage by the numbers." They have turned budgets into fixed performance contracts that force managers at all levels to commit to delivering specified financial outcomes, even though many of the variables underpinning those outcomes are beyond their control.
-- Beyond Budgeting: How Managers Can Break Free from the Annual Performance Trap
Highsmith identifies three measurement ideas critical to creating an adaptive organization:
  1. We must acknowledge that our performance measurement system impacts agility.
  2. We must alter our obsession with time to become an obsession for customer value.
  3. We must separate the project performance management system from the team performance management system.
In this Executive Report Summary, Highsmith goes on to outline a project performance management system, focusing on outcomes that generate customer value; and a team performance management system, providing informational metrics that teams can use to improve their ability to deliver.

The report includes a free 4-week trial of Cutter's Agile Project Management E-Mail Advisor, designed to help management take Agile from the project level to the enterprise level.

About the author

Jim Highsmith is Director of Cutter Consortium's Agile Project Management practice, and is considered a leader of the agile methodology movement. He consults with IT and product development organizations and software companies worldwide to help them adapt to the accelerated pace of development in increasingly complex, uncertain environments. Mr. Highsmith is the author of Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products; Agile Software Development Ecosystems; and Adaptive Software Development: A Collaborative Approach to Managing Complex Systems, which won the prestigious Jolt Award for Product Excellence. Mr. Highsmith is the recipient of the 2005 Stevens Award, in recognition of his work on adaptive software development and agile processes. He is coauthor of the Agile Manifesto and a founding member of the Agile Alliance. He can be reached at jhighsmith@cutter.com.

About Cutter Consortium Agile Project Management Practice

Cutter Consortium's Agile Project Management practice provides information and guidance to help organizations transition (or make the decision to transition) to agile methods. Led by Practice Director Jim Highsmith, Cutter's team of experts focuses on agile principles and traits -- delivering customer value, embracing change, reflection, adaptation, etc. -- to help you shorten your product development schedules, and increase the quality of your resultant products. Cutting edge ideas on collaboration, governance, and measurement/metrics are united with agile practices, such as iterative development, test-first design, project chartering, team collocation, onsite customers, sustainable work schedules, and others, to help your organization innovate and ultimately deliver high return-on-investment.

View more Agile Project Management Executive Report abstracts on the Cutter Consortium site.

No comments

Reply

Exclusive Content

Tapestry for Nonbelievers

A new article by I. Drobiazko and R. Zubairov introduces v. 5 of the Apache Tapestry component-oriented web framework. The tutorial shows how to create a component and covers IoC in Tapestry and Ajax.

Pete Lacey on REST and Web Services

In this interview, Burton Group consultant Pete Lacey talks to Stefan Tilkov about his disillusionment with SOAP, his opinion on REST, and addresses some of the perceived shortcomings REST vs. WS-*.

Business Natural Languages Development in Ruby

Jay Fields presents his concept of Business Natural Languages - a type of Domain Specific Languages geared towards being readable by domain experts.

Distributed Version Control Systems: A Not-So-Quick Guide Through

Adoption and interest for Distributed Version Control Systems is constantly rising. We will introduce the concept of DVCS and have a look at 3 actors in the area: git, Mercurial and Bazaar.

Segundo Velasquez and Agile as Seen Through the Customer's Eyes

Deborah Hartmann interviewed Segundo Velasquez about his experience as customer with an Agile team during the initial phase of software design of a product.

Fine Grained Versioning with ClickOnce

David Cooksey shows how to fine grained versioning to a ClickOnce deployment using an HttpHandler written with ASP.NET, making partial rollouts to a test audience much easier.

Implementing Manual Activities in Windows Workflow

Windows workflow (WF) is an excellent framework for implementing business processes, but lacks support for human activities. This article describes a completely generic approach for changing this.

Markus Voelter about Software Architecture Documentation

In this interview taken during OOPSLA 2007, Markus Voelter talks about the importance of documenting the software architecture, and gives some good and also bad examples on how it could be done.