Articles

Interview with Michael Azoff from Ovum about How To Create the Agile Enterprise

Large enterprises face three challenges: to innovate and act as a start-up, to use a budgeting process that keeps the organization’s strategy in touch with changing market conditions, and to transform the whole IT department to agile. Principal analyst Michael Azoff explains Ovum’s view on creating an agile enterprise.

The Real Question is Why?

The Agile movement has driven a revolutionary change in the way we build and deliver software solutions. In the past few years Agile frameworks have become mainstream. Agile has solved the problems of the 90's and early 2000's. Now a new kind of problem is emerging that needs an equally elegant solution, how do we build the right solution? Do we know Why we are building it?

Net-Map - A Toolkit to Understand and Visualise Stakeholder Influence

Net-Map is a tool developed by Eva Schiffer that allows you through interviews to visualise and analyse how different people and groups influence a particular situation. It is of interest to Agile teams as it can help you understand who your stakeholders are, how they are connected and the level of influence they have. InfoQ recently caught up with Eva and asked her a few questions.

Communicate Business Value to Your Stakeholders

Often project leaders—even Agile project leaders—talk about their projects in terms of features. Yes, and what do features really mean for stakeholders? Features are what your system or process can do. Benefits are why people care. And benefits equal business value. Learn why and how to communicate benefits rather than features—and what it will mean for you, your team and your organization.

Feature Injection: three steps to success

Often Customers provide half baked solutions with no linkage to value. An Agile team needs examples linked to the Business Value they provide. Feature Injection is a process that takes a half baked solution identifies the Business Value it provides and then produces a set of examples driven from that value.

Interview and Book Excerpt: CMMI for Services

CMMI for Services(CMMI-SVC)is a process improvement framework developed by the SEI for service providers. InfoQ spoke to Eileen Forrester, co-author of CMMI for Services: Guidelines for Superior Service and manager of CMMI-SVC. In this interview we cover adoption practices for CMMI-SVC and its relationship with CMMI-DEV, ITIL and Agile accompanied by relevant excerpts from the book.

How ALM Drives Business/IT Alignment, Competitive Advantage

ALM and Business Processes

Going Live: The Role of Development and Operations in Preparing and Deploying Software Packages

A discussion of how Development, Operations and others can collaborate to prepare a good deployment package. minimizing the potential for error, improving clarity, and allowing for customization.

Agile Finance: Story Point Cost

This article ties a rather abstract and developer centered concept (story points) to the real world of business (spreadsheets and ledgers). Making this connection is essential for management.

SOA Strategy and Spline Tactics

In this article, Michael Poulin discusses agility-to-market changes that IT can gain using a strategy oriented onto the services. Using concepts of service-orientation as the major construct of the technical product portfolio, accompanied by a techniques he calls Spline Tactics, he examines how businesses can achieve strategic agility.

Using ITIL V3 as a Foundation for SOA Governance

Those familiar with only ITIL V2 often scoff at the thought that ITIL could serve as a governance framework for SOA. Based on their perspective, they would be correct since V2 focused more heavily on operational processes rather than service lifecycle. With ITIL V3, the focus of the framework shifted toward what can only be accurately described as service-orientation.