Separating Strategic from Utility IT

For many years, IT has struggled to come to grips with the nature and importance of software development. Is IT a utility, like sewage pipes, or a strategic enabler that makes a company competitive?  Martin Fowler recently blogged about this, analyzing the different characteristics, risks, amount of IT that falls into each category, and the problem of confusing the two.

Agile IT Governance

Well-governed companies consistently out-perform poorly governed ones.  The same is true of IT.  IT needs real-time governance if it's going to be effective partners to lean businesses.  Watch this webinar series by Ross Pettit, David Leigh-Fellows and Jane Robarts to learn how you can create a real-time governance capability that anticipates challenges, makes timely course corrections, and seizes opportunities to maximize the business impact of IT investments. 

• Real Time Metrics Webinar
• Real Time Governance Webinar
• Agile PMO Blog Series 

Restructuring IT

Like a Detroit automaker, IT departments are heading for industrial ruin. Organizing for scale instead of results has stifled innovation and made success an option rather than an expectation.  By using proven practices through restructure, your IT department can be a resilient, responsive, professional business capability that creates business impact.  Take a look at this webinar and accompanying blog series by Ross Pettit, originally broadcast on cio.com, that will show what you can do to avert an industrial catastrophe, what the future holds, and the ROI of restructuring.  Also, have a look at this deck by Richard Durnall that covers the injection of Lean thinking in IT organization and structure. 

• Restructuring IT Webinar
• Restructuring IT Blog Series
• The IT Division. Refactored.

   Access the Agile Executive discussion forums

Budget and Financial Impact of Agile

Agile teams are better aligned with corporate financial priorities.  They enable greater capitalization, consume less cash, provide better cash management, better yield protection, and reduce exposure to "black swan" events.  But leaned out IT isn't without risks, as it brings with it unique liquidity and solvency threats to IT.  Learn how these can be mitigated with new IT organization and practices in this webinar and blog by Ross Pettit. 

• View the webinar
• Mitigating Corporate Financial Risks of Lean IT

Toward Enterprise Agile Scalability

Corporate capitalization guidelines for intangible assets, specifically SOP 98-1, are aligned with traditional practices for sofware development.  They are also vague in some key areas.  In this webinar by Pat Reed, learn how to reconcile Agile development with SOP 98-1, increasing the capitalized portion of an IT project, while strengthening corporate capitalization compliance.  View the webinar.

  Access the Agile Budget and Finance discussion forums 

Aligning IT Delivery with Business Needs

To be better aligned with Business, IT needs to be more responsive in how it delivers business solutions. But  “responsiveness,” is often mistaken with “reactiveness” and can become synonymous with chaos and confusion. Using two typical IT organizations as examples, Greg Reiser and Ross Pettit present a framework to develop your roadmap to prepare for the nuance of change, monitor the progress and success of IT restructure.  Watch the video.

Getting to a Hire Level

For all the emphasis put on process, tools, technology and training, there is no substitute for having good people.  IT is fundamentally a people business.  Just about every aspect of solution development - analyzing, programming, testing, debugging and management - is a process of creative problem solving, not repetitive task execution.  So it's critical that we attract and retain the right people.  Achieving that requires a commitment to excellence, a passion for each hiring decision, and a good set of tools to help you separate the wheat from the chaff.  Take a look at these articles by Kevin Breidenbach:

• Getting to a Hire Level, Part I
• Getting to a Hire Level, Part II
• There's No Substitute for Having the Right People

Agile Made us Better, but We Signed Up for Great

IT departments are often underwhelmed after going “Agile,” even after having made considerable effort on change.  This is because they’ve fought only half the battle: they got some of the practices, but not the behaviours. Hold your teams to the expectation that they will not just perform to a set of practices, but behave in such a way that they maintain the highest state of readiness for whatever comes.  Achieve that, and your IT organization will be more resilient to threat and better able to capitalize on opportunity.  Take a look at these resources from Ross Pettit:

• Agile Transition Executive Briefing video
• Executive Summary blog
• Agile Made us Better, but We Signed Up for Great webinar

Access the Agile Transition Discussion Forums

The ThoughtWorks Offshore Portal features a full range of resources for organizations undergoing the shift to distributed Agile development.

Can you hear me now? Good . . . A Two-Part Webinar Series

This two-part webinar series by Mark Rickmeier is designed to address the concerns and risks that come with communication on a distributed project. The goal of this series is to provide immediate support and detailed suggestions to project teams struggling to work in a distributed environment.