Requirement Definition for Distributed Teams a white paper by Blueprint Software Systems
Description:
Join Blueprint's product team as they discuss how global organizations can leverage empowered business analysts to ensure clear articulation of business requirements.
Learn how requirements visualization enables teams with different native languages and different cultural backgrounds to replace document-based BRD's with "Interactive Movie Simulations" to visualize project requirements.
Use the following link to access the on-demand Webinar: http://www.blueprintsys.com/webinar.php
The document discusses how the field of technical communication is evolving and being absorbed by other fields like user experience (UX) and content strategy. It argues that technical communicators need to expand their skills to include UX and content strategy in order to remain employable. University programs are updating their curriculums to reflect these changes. While some professional organizations for technical communicators have experienced declining membership as the field broadens, local UX chapters and conferences are growing rapidly. Technical communication jobs are decreasing as companies hire more people with UX and content strategy skills.
Good Practices in Government Resource Planning Vendor SpecializationFreeBalance
The document discusses key considerations for effective specialization in government resource planning (GRP). It notes that traditional approaches to GRP implementation increase risk, and software manufacturers should adopt a customer-intimate solution focus to better enable public financial management reform. This involves directly linking product development, support, and implementation services to smoothly address customer needs and problems. Holistic methods are also needed to provide reform roadmaps tailored to each country context.
Today’s IT investments require bottom-line, quantifiable truths and Unified communications (UC) is no exception. This whitepaper covers best practice tips on building a comprehensive business case for UC systems
The document discusses key aspects of communication including the communication process, perception, communication networks, and skills for effective communication. It covers the encoding and decoding of messages, factors that can interfere with communication like biases and stereotypes, and the importance of selecting the right communication medium based on its information richness. Managers need strong communication skills as both senders and receivers of messages to ensure clear understanding. Technological advances have provided new options but also risks of information overload.
The document summarizes a study conducted by IDC on the return on investment of deploying Windows Mobile solutions in large enterprises. Some key findings:
- The average payback period was 12 months and the average 3-year ROI was 309%.
- Annual benefits per 100 users averaged $888,536, while costs averaged $615,922 over 3 years.
- Benefits came from increased user productivity, reduced IT costs, improved business operations, and increased IT staff productivity.
- Two case studies showed improved sales and customer relationship management at a brewing company and more efficient field services at a property management company through the use of Windows Mobile solutions.
Communication Scorecard by Vos & SchoemakerMarita Vos
The slides explain the method of the Communication Scorecard developed by us and refer to our publications for more information. The slides can be used with reference.
This document analyzes the impact of virtual teams on competitive advantage through a case study of research and development departments at Samsung, LG, Nissan, Toyota, and IBM. It finds that virtual teams increase innovation by facilitating knowledge sharing across geographic and organizational boundaries. Through parallel work and faster response times, virtual teams help reduce product development cycles and costs, improving competitiveness. However, virtual teams also face challenges like cultural differences, lack of face-to-face interaction, and difficulty monitoring performance. Overall, the document concludes that virtual teams have become essential for businesses seeking flexibility and responsiveness in a global environment.
The document discusses how the field of technical communication is evolving and being absorbed by other fields like user experience (UX) and content strategy. It argues that technical communicators need to expand their skills to include UX and content strategy in order to remain employable. University programs are updating their curriculums to reflect these changes. While some professional organizations for technical communicators have experienced declining membership as the field broadens, local UX chapters and conferences are growing rapidly. Technical communication jobs are decreasing as companies hire more people with UX and content strategy skills.
Good Practices in Government Resource Planning Vendor SpecializationFreeBalance
The document discusses key considerations for effective specialization in government resource planning (GRP). It notes that traditional approaches to GRP implementation increase risk, and software manufacturers should adopt a customer-intimate solution focus to better enable public financial management reform. This involves directly linking product development, support, and implementation services to smoothly address customer needs and problems. Holistic methods are also needed to provide reform roadmaps tailored to each country context.
Today’s IT investments require bottom-line, quantifiable truths and Unified communications (UC) is no exception. This whitepaper covers best practice tips on building a comprehensive business case for UC systems
The document discusses key aspects of communication including the communication process, perception, communication networks, and skills for effective communication. It covers the encoding and decoding of messages, factors that can interfere with communication like biases and stereotypes, and the importance of selecting the right communication medium based on its information richness. Managers need strong communication skills as both senders and receivers of messages to ensure clear understanding. Technological advances have provided new options but also risks of information overload.
The document summarizes a study conducted by IDC on the return on investment of deploying Windows Mobile solutions in large enterprises. Some key findings:
- The average payback period was 12 months and the average 3-year ROI was 309%.
- Annual benefits per 100 users averaged $888,536, while costs averaged $615,922 over 3 years.
- Benefits came from increased user productivity, reduced IT costs, improved business operations, and increased IT staff productivity.
- Two case studies showed improved sales and customer relationship management at a brewing company and more efficient field services at a property management company through the use of Windows Mobile solutions.
Communication Scorecard by Vos & SchoemakerMarita Vos
The slides explain the method of the Communication Scorecard developed by us and refer to our publications for more information. The slides can be used with reference.
This document analyzes the impact of virtual teams on competitive advantage through a case study of research and development departments at Samsung, LG, Nissan, Toyota, and IBM. It finds that virtual teams increase innovation by facilitating knowledge sharing across geographic and organizational boundaries. Through parallel work and faster response times, virtual teams help reduce product development cycles and costs, improving competitiveness. However, virtual teams also face challenges like cultural differences, lack of face-to-face interaction, and difficulty monitoring performance. Overall, the document concludes that virtual teams have become essential for businesses seeking flexibility and responsiveness in a global environment.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM - XRM Advantage for Solution Builders WhitepaperMicrosoft Private Cloud
- Solution builders face increasing pressure to deliver custom solutions with lower costs while still providing strategic value. Traditional custom development approaches like best-of-breed integration or custom coding present high costs, complexity, and resource demands.
- Application platforms can help by providing unified infrastructure, common elements, and tools to streamline development. However, not all platforms equally support solution builders.
- The Microsoft Dynamics CRM xRM framework enables choice, savings, and strategic partnerships for solution builders through dynamic reusable services, support for diverse applications, and a model-driven approach.
Collaboration involves two or more people working together towards a common goal. While social collaboration platforms provide tools to facilitate collaboration, true collaboration is a human activity that depends on interpersonal skills and behaviors. To maximize the benefits of collaboration platforms, organizations must take a holistic approach that addresses personal development, organizational development, and use of collaboration technologies. A collaboration framework provides a roadmap to identify business benefits, align development interventions with platform deployment, and address common challenges through established best practices.
Assessing business it alignment maturityzeusi9iuto
This document describes a methodology for assessing the alignment between IT and business strategies in an organization. It identifies six categories for evaluation: communications maturity, competency/value measurements maturity, governance maturity, partnership maturity, technology scope maturity, and skills maturity. Each category contains multiple criteria that are rated on a scale of 1 to 5 to determine the organization's level of alignment maturity. The primary objective is to identify specific recommendations for improving how IT supports business goals.
A pivot table allows users to reorganize and summarize spreadsheet or database data to obtain desired reports. It allows users to view data from different perspectives without changing the original data. Pivot tables are especially useful for large amounts of data, allowing users to quickly create summaries. For example, a store owner could use a pivot table to summarize monthly sales totals by merchandise item for a particular quarter.
The document presents a framework for implementing social CRM in the Swiss banking sector to address challenges around losing customer loyalty and trust. It discusses relevant theories around social media, CRM, and social CRM to formulate a research question. The research design section outlines the scope, variables, sample, data collection and analysis methods used to generate a social CRM framework for the banking industry.
Unified communications aims to improve how organizations interact and perform by integrating various communication and collaboration technologies. While increased productivity is often a goal, enterprises should focus on enabling customer-facing processes to fully leverage its value. Contact centers provide inspiration as they have developed disciplines around routing, reporting, queuing, etc. that can be applied across customer-facing employees. This keeps the customer as part of the unified communications strategy and can improve both productivity and customer satisfaction.
I developed this model after lessons learned from a HRIS replacement project for a financial services company. I think it can be applied to packaged solution implementations in general.
The Senior Communicator of Future/ WatsonDaniel Laino
The document discusses the competencies and skills needed for senior communicators in the future. It analyzes responses from senior communicators on the most important skills, which include: having communication strategies tightly linked to business strategy; possessing broad analytical skills to be trusted advisors; and having inter-disciplinary skills to advise at the senior level. Other highly ranked skills include relationship management, demonstrating communication value, interpreting technology changes, and maintaining an organization's reputation. The document provides recommendations to help develop future senior communicators.
The Role of the Community Manager Open Source softwareSelva Orejón
The document discusses the emergence of a new role called the "community manager" at software companies due to their increasing involvement with open-source software. It notes that community managers are needed to understand open-source software communities and ensure company objectives are aligned with those communities. Unlike traditional channel managers, community managers cannot focus on sales and must understand that open-source communities are informal and fluid, with members having varying levels of involvement.
This document discusses the effects of distributed product development (DPD) on the new product development (NPD) process. It defines key terms like outsourcing, offshoring, and lead organization. It then examines how DPD impacts coordination, transformation, and search/selection during NPD. Specifically, it notes that DPD complicates coordination by increasing interruptions across organizations. It also finds communication challenges during transformation, but that proper supplier selection, task partitioning, and information systems can improve coordination. DPD provides benefits like access to new technologies during search/selection, but also risks like hold-up costs and information leakage. The document concludes by summarizing a survey of US electronics manufacturers on their offshore NPD practices.
If you are a senior IT leader, you need to make the same kinds of disciplined choices for your department that the CEO and top leadership team are making about the strategic direction of the enterprise. Here's how to develop a sophisticated, more strategically oriented information technology approach--based on six ways to create value for the enterprise, and five archetypes that resolve the tension among those six value drivers.
Microsoft Software Assurance provides benefits to help organizations improve productivity and reduce IT costs. It allows customers to reduce software management costs, increase user productivity, and see a return on their investment in less than a year. SA training programs can lower costs for both IT staff and user training by 65-75%. The white paper analyzes how SA provides value through new version rights, consulting services, training, exclusive technologies, technical resources, and support.
The document presents a business case for implementing a CRM system for the placements team at IIT Roorkee. It analyzes the need for a CRM to better manage industry contacts and discusses the measurable benefits, including increased productivity, reduced costs, and improved customer service. Various CRM alternatives are considered and SugarCRM is selected for its ease of use, popularity, and support resources. Financial analysis estimates a 375% return on investment over 5 years with payback in under 6 months. Implementation costs and anticipated savings and benefits are outlined.
Digital Fuel- Achieving IT cost visibility-Id gresearch cio_study_1009yisbat
The document discusses the challenges organizations face in achieving visibility into their IT costs. It found that while having detailed cost visibility is important, over half of respondents were less than satisfied with their current level of visibility. The biggest challenges are a lack of an explicitly defined IT cost model and difficulties obtaining detailed cost breakdowns and mapping costs to specific services. Achieving true cost visibility requires new processes and tools to capture both direct and indirect costs associated with delivering various IT services.
IBM offers decision support software like Cognos 8 and Cognos 10 to provide tools for business intelligence, planning, analysis, forecasting and performance management. This software integrates data, provides configurable frameworks for decision making and long term planning, and helps identify business drivers and performance factors. It promotes effortless information dissemination and analysis across organizations.
This white paper from Digité discusses the limitations of project portfolio management (PPM) tools and argues that application lifecycle management (ALM) tools are needed to provide reliable data to PPM systems from operational processes. PPM tools are best suited for executive-level decision making but do not address process and data issues at the operational level. Successful PPM requires clean, automated processes and bottom-up organizational change. Integrating ALM tools with PPM can provide project visibility, reduce data collection overhead, and increase productivity across the organization.
IT In Search Of Integrated Service ManagementFrontRange
Managing IT services has rarely been as challenging as it is today. Complexity increases costs and cuts productivity. While standards-based strategy automates and simplifies service management, only 2 percent of companies in a recent IDG survey have a fully integrated approach to service management. This white paper examines survey results on what's holding IT back and offers a potential way forward.
Ziff Davis Benefits of Next Generation DashboardsSAP
Next generation dashboards provide concise yet comprehensive business intelligence to executives and managers across an organization. They visualize data from multiple sources in an intuitive format, and enable interactive analysis through simple navigation. By aligning business processes with up-to-date information, next generation dashboards help users make faster, more informed decisions to improve operations and seize new opportunities.
This document discusses strategies for modernizing enterprise applications and infrastructure. It identifies key challenges such as poor alignment between IT and business strategies, high application maintenance costs, inflexible aging systems, and lack of collaboration between development teams. The document proposes four strategies to address these challenges: 1) modernizing the application portfolio to improve understanding and flexibility, 2) empowering development teams with new skills and tools, 3) unifying development teams across platforms, and 4) optimizing infrastructure efficiency.
This document provides an introduction to a book that examines how enterprise architecture can be used for the strategic management of information technology solutions. It identifies key challenges organizations face in achieving ROI and aligning IT solutions with business needs. The document discusses how interest in enterprise architecture has increased over three decades but adoption remains slow due to the complexity of conveying its priorities across organizations. It introduces the concepts of information technology solutions, enterprise architecture, data and information architectures, and business analysis and architecture.
Digital transformation is the single most critical issue facing
organizations today. It’s disrupting industries, transforming
businesses, and creating new competitive differentiation that
will last for years. Underscoring the point, Accenture CEO Pierre
Nanterme recently suggested that digital is the main reason
why more than half of the companies on the Fortune 500 have
disappeared.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM - XRM Advantage for Solution Builders WhitepaperMicrosoft Private Cloud
- Solution builders face increasing pressure to deliver custom solutions with lower costs while still providing strategic value. Traditional custom development approaches like best-of-breed integration or custom coding present high costs, complexity, and resource demands.
- Application platforms can help by providing unified infrastructure, common elements, and tools to streamline development. However, not all platforms equally support solution builders.
- The Microsoft Dynamics CRM xRM framework enables choice, savings, and strategic partnerships for solution builders through dynamic reusable services, support for diverse applications, and a model-driven approach.
Collaboration involves two or more people working together towards a common goal. While social collaboration platforms provide tools to facilitate collaboration, true collaboration is a human activity that depends on interpersonal skills and behaviors. To maximize the benefits of collaboration platforms, organizations must take a holistic approach that addresses personal development, organizational development, and use of collaboration technologies. A collaboration framework provides a roadmap to identify business benefits, align development interventions with platform deployment, and address common challenges through established best practices.
Assessing business it alignment maturityzeusi9iuto
This document describes a methodology for assessing the alignment between IT and business strategies in an organization. It identifies six categories for evaluation: communications maturity, competency/value measurements maturity, governance maturity, partnership maturity, technology scope maturity, and skills maturity. Each category contains multiple criteria that are rated on a scale of 1 to 5 to determine the organization's level of alignment maturity. The primary objective is to identify specific recommendations for improving how IT supports business goals.
A pivot table allows users to reorganize and summarize spreadsheet or database data to obtain desired reports. It allows users to view data from different perspectives without changing the original data. Pivot tables are especially useful for large amounts of data, allowing users to quickly create summaries. For example, a store owner could use a pivot table to summarize monthly sales totals by merchandise item for a particular quarter.
The document presents a framework for implementing social CRM in the Swiss banking sector to address challenges around losing customer loyalty and trust. It discusses relevant theories around social media, CRM, and social CRM to formulate a research question. The research design section outlines the scope, variables, sample, data collection and analysis methods used to generate a social CRM framework for the banking industry.
Unified communications aims to improve how organizations interact and perform by integrating various communication and collaboration technologies. While increased productivity is often a goal, enterprises should focus on enabling customer-facing processes to fully leverage its value. Contact centers provide inspiration as they have developed disciplines around routing, reporting, queuing, etc. that can be applied across customer-facing employees. This keeps the customer as part of the unified communications strategy and can improve both productivity and customer satisfaction.
I developed this model after lessons learned from a HRIS replacement project for a financial services company. I think it can be applied to packaged solution implementations in general.
The Senior Communicator of Future/ WatsonDaniel Laino
The document discusses the competencies and skills needed for senior communicators in the future. It analyzes responses from senior communicators on the most important skills, which include: having communication strategies tightly linked to business strategy; possessing broad analytical skills to be trusted advisors; and having inter-disciplinary skills to advise at the senior level. Other highly ranked skills include relationship management, demonstrating communication value, interpreting technology changes, and maintaining an organization's reputation. The document provides recommendations to help develop future senior communicators.
The Role of the Community Manager Open Source softwareSelva Orejón
The document discusses the emergence of a new role called the "community manager" at software companies due to their increasing involvement with open-source software. It notes that community managers are needed to understand open-source software communities and ensure company objectives are aligned with those communities. Unlike traditional channel managers, community managers cannot focus on sales and must understand that open-source communities are informal and fluid, with members having varying levels of involvement.
This document discusses the effects of distributed product development (DPD) on the new product development (NPD) process. It defines key terms like outsourcing, offshoring, and lead organization. It then examines how DPD impacts coordination, transformation, and search/selection during NPD. Specifically, it notes that DPD complicates coordination by increasing interruptions across organizations. It also finds communication challenges during transformation, but that proper supplier selection, task partitioning, and information systems can improve coordination. DPD provides benefits like access to new technologies during search/selection, but also risks like hold-up costs and information leakage. The document concludes by summarizing a survey of US electronics manufacturers on their offshore NPD practices.
If you are a senior IT leader, you need to make the same kinds of disciplined choices for your department that the CEO and top leadership team are making about the strategic direction of the enterprise. Here's how to develop a sophisticated, more strategically oriented information technology approach--based on six ways to create value for the enterprise, and five archetypes that resolve the tension among those six value drivers.
Microsoft Software Assurance provides benefits to help organizations improve productivity and reduce IT costs. It allows customers to reduce software management costs, increase user productivity, and see a return on their investment in less than a year. SA training programs can lower costs for both IT staff and user training by 65-75%. The white paper analyzes how SA provides value through new version rights, consulting services, training, exclusive technologies, technical resources, and support.
The document presents a business case for implementing a CRM system for the placements team at IIT Roorkee. It analyzes the need for a CRM to better manage industry contacts and discusses the measurable benefits, including increased productivity, reduced costs, and improved customer service. Various CRM alternatives are considered and SugarCRM is selected for its ease of use, popularity, and support resources. Financial analysis estimates a 375% return on investment over 5 years with payback in under 6 months. Implementation costs and anticipated savings and benefits are outlined.
Digital Fuel- Achieving IT cost visibility-Id gresearch cio_study_1009yisbat
The document discusses the challenges organizations face in achieving visibility into their IT costs. It found that while having detailed cost visibility is important, over half of respondents were less than satisfied with their current level of visibility. The biggest challenges are a lack of an explicitly defined IT cost model and difficulties obtaining detailed cost breakdowns and mapping costs to specific services. Achieving true cost visibility requires new processes and tools to capture both direct and indirect costs associated with delivering various IT services.
IBM offers decision support software like Cognos 8 and Cognos 10 to provide tools for business intelligence, planning, analysis, forecasting and performance management. This software integrates data, provides configurable frameworks for decision making and long term planning, and helps identify business drivers and performance factors. It promotes effortless information dissemination and analysis across organizations.
This white paper from Digité discusses the limitations of project portfolio management (PPM) tools and argues that application lifecycle management (ALM) tools are needed to provide reliable data to PPM systems from operational processes. PPM tools are best suited for executive-level decision making but do not address process and data issues at the operational level. Successful PPM requires clean, automated processes and bottom-up organizational change. Integrating ALM tools with PPM can provide project visibility, reduce data collection overhead, and increase productivity across the organization.
IT In Search Of Integrated Service ManagementFrontRange
Managing IT services has rarely been as challenging as it is today. Complexity increases costs and cuts productivity. While standards-based strategy automates and simplifies service management, only 2 percent of companies in a recent IDG survey have a fully integrated approach to service management. This white paper examines survey results on what's holding IT back and offers a potential way forward.
Ziff Davis Benefits of Next Generation DashboardsSAP
Next generation dashboards provide concise yet comprehensive business intelligence to executives and managers across an organization. They visualize data from multiple sources in an intuitive format, and enable interactive analysis through simple navigation. By aligning business processes with up-to-date information, next generation dashboards help users make faster, more informed decisions to improve operations and seize new opportunities.
This document discusses strategies for modernizing enterprise applications and infrastructure. It identifies key challenges such as poor alignment between IT and business strategies, high application maintenance costs, inflexible aging systems, and lack of collaboration between development teams. The document proposes four strategies to address these challenges: 1) modernizing the application portfolio to improve understanding and flexibility, 2) empowering development teams with new skills and tools, 3) unifying development teams across platforms, and 4) optimizing infrastructure efficiency.
This document provides an introduction to a book that examines how enterprise architecture can be used for the strategic management of information technology solutions. It identifies key challenges organizations face in achieving ROI and aligning IT solutions with business needs. The document discusses how interest in enterprise architecture has increased over three decades but adoption remains slow due to the complexity of conveying its priorities across organizations. It introduces the concepts of information technology solutions, enterprise architecture, data and information architectures, and business analysis and architecture.
Digital transformation is the single most critical issue facing
organizations today. It’s disrupting industries, transforming
businesses, and creating new competitive differentiation that
will last for years. Underscoring the point, Accenture CEO Pierre
Nanterme recently suggested that digital is the main reason
why more than half of the companies on the Fortune 500 have
disappeared.
CRESUS-T: A COLLABORATIVE REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION SUPPORT TOOLijseajournal
Communicating an organisation's requirements in a semantically consistent and understandable manner
and then reflecting the potential impact of those requirements on the IT infrastructure presents a major
challenge among stakeholders. Initial research findings indicate a desire among business executives for a
tool that allows them to communicate organisational changes using natural language and a model of the IT
infrastructure that supports those changes. Building on a detailed analysis and evaluation of these findings,
the innovative CRESUS-T support tool was designed and implemented. The purpose of this research was to
investigate to what extent CRESUS-T both aids communication in the development of a shared
understanding and supports collaborative requirements elicitation to bring about organisational, and
associated IT infrastructural, change. In order to determine the extent shared understanding was fostered,
the support tool was evaluated in a case study of a business process for the roll out of the IT software
image at a third level educational institution. Statistical analysis showed that the CRESUS-T support tool
fostered shared understanding in the case study, through increased communication. Shared understanding
is also manifested in the creation of two knowledge representation artefacts namely, a requirements model
and the IT infrastructure model. The CRESUS-T support tool will be useful to requirements engineers and
business analysts that have to gather requirements asynchronously.
This document summarizes a case study presentation on how a firm's competitive environment and digital strategic posture influence digital business strategy. It discusses how digital technologies are reshaping traditional business strategies and structures. The summary defines digital business strategy as using digital resources to create value beyond traditional views of IT. It examines how a firm's industry turbulence, concentration, and growth impact its digital investments and outsourcing. The presentation concludes that a firm's digital strategic posture has convergent effects on general IT investment but divergent effects on outsourcing, and that understanding variations in a competitive environment can explain differences in digital strategic posture.
Creating Optimized Business Relationships - Article #1Lawrence Dillon
This document summarizes an article about creating optimized business relationships between IT departments and business units. It discusses how business units currently drive isolated technology development, leading to redundant systems. The document advocates for a partnered approach where shared business processes across units leverage single, standardized technology components maintained centrally. Business units could then customize components for unique needs. This balances centralized efficiencies with flexibility for individual units.
NTT DATA predictable success marketpulse_white paper_finalDyann Calder
The document discusses research from a 2017 IDG study on digital workplace transformation among manufacturing and energy firms. It finds that while most organizations say they are committed to digital transformation, they are struggling to implement initiatives and seeing results. Only a small percentage identify as "trailblazers" in transformation efforts. The research reveals that organizations face challenges like lack of funding and cultural change management strategies. Most companies seem stalled in the planning stages of transformation efforts. The document provides four steps organizations can take to achieve a more dynamic and successful digital workplace transformation, with a focus on understanding the transformation framework, defining business value, aligning the organization, and establishing metrics for continuous improvement.
This document discusses how DevOps is emerging as a new methodology to address challenges in distributed software engineering and global software engineering (GSE). It introduces a new 5-level DevOps maturity model based on CMMI, assessing communication, automation, governance, and quality. The document also proposes a transformation framework to help organizations assess their current state and implement DevOps practices to bridge gaps between development and operations teams.
DevOps shifting software engineering strategy Value based perspectiveiosrjce
IOSR Journal of Computer Engineering (IOSR-JCE) is a double blind peer reviewed International Journal that provides rapid publication (within a month) of articles in all areas of computer engineering and its applications. The journal welcomes publications of high quality papers on theoretical developments and practical applications in computer technology. Original research papers, state-of-the-art reviews, and high quality technical notes are invited for publications.
EXPLORING THE LINK BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND DEVOPS PRACTICE AND PRINCIPLE ADOPTIONacijjournal
The document discusses exploring the link between leadership and DevOps practice and principle adoption. It analyzes data from interviews with 30 practitioners working in software-intensive organizations across different industries and countries. The interviews identified a set of agile, lean, and DevOps practices and principles commonly adopted as part of transitioning to DevOps. It was found that DevOps-oriented organizations can benefit from certain existing ITIL service management practices like change management and release management. Additionally, the research uncovered that DevOps adoption requires leadership, initially in the form of an individual role to guide the team through the transition process.
Why IT Struggles With Digital Transformation and What to Do About Itrun_frictionless
To win the digital transformation race, successful CIOs need to overcome three immense challenges: Massive backlogs, legacy debt and scarce resources. And, at the same time they need to embrace new methods, better suited to fast-paced innovation.
www.runfrictionless.com
EXPLORING THE LINK BETWEEN LEADERSHIP AND DEVOPS PRACTICE AND PRINCIPLE ADOPTIONacijjournal
Our research focuses in software-intensive organizations and highlights the challenges that surface as a result of the transitioning process of highly-structured to DevOps practices and principles adoption. The approach collected data via a series of thirty (30) interviews, with practitioners from the EMEA
region (Czech Republic, Estonia, Italy, Georgia, Greece, The Netherlands, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, UAE, UK), working in nine (9) different industry domains and ten (10) different countries. A set of agile, lean and DevOps practices and principles were identified, which organizations select as part of DevOps-oriented adoption. The most frequently adopted ITIL® service management practices, contributing to DevOps practice and principle adoption success, indicate that DevOps-oriented
organizations benefit from the existence of change management, release and deployment management, service level management, incident management and service catalog management. We also uncover that the DevOps adoption leadership role is required in a DevOps team setting and that it should, initially, be an individual role.
The document provides an overview of the technology/software/telecom industry and how Synergetics, a management consulting firm, has helped companies in this sector identify and achieve strategic business objectives through implementation projects. It discusses major changes in the industry such as the growth of cloud computing and subscription models. It then summarizes three implementation projects Synergetics conducted for established IT companies, helping them optimize processes and achieve significant cost savings and revenue increases.
Aligning business and tech thru capabilities - A capstera thought paperSatyaIluri
Enterprises the world over spend billions of dollars on technology enablement of business functions. A significant portion of those dollars end up creating suboptimal solutions. Most IT project problems are rooted in ambiguous business definition, churn in requirements gathering, scope creep beyond a minimum marketable feature set, wild cost guestimations, not planning for interdependencies, and a lack of strong governance.
This Capstera white paper seeks to address some of these problems and provide a framework to minimize the challenges.
This document discusses how social networking concepts are being applied to enhance enterprise collaboration. It outlines some challenges of implementing collaboration technologies, such as encouraging adoption and integrating systems. The document advocates for maximizing the value of collaboration tools by fully integrating them with enterprise applications and processes using techniques like event stream brokering. This allows organizations to better share information across systems in real-time and get more benefits from their collaboration investments.
The document discusses the role of technology in internal communications. It argues that while internal communications are important, companies are often slow to adopt new communication tools like virtual teams, social media, and intranets. It provides an overview of these tools and their benefits, such as allowing remote collaboration, engaging employees, and sharing important company information. The document also addresses reasons for companies' reluctance to change and argues that adapting new tools can help attract talent, increase investment returns, and improve communication as companies expand globally.
Final Project Report on Information Systems Project ManagementAbbas Ahmed
The document discusses the importance of communication, collaboration, and teamwork for the successful completion of information systems projects. It notes that these factors are crucial for managing complex software projects, especially those that are globally distributed. Effective communication, collaboration, and teamwork help ensure projects are completed on time, within budget, and meet requirements. When these factors are lacking, projects are more likely to fail or run over budget.
The document discusses selecting an enterprise collaboration platform. It provides an overview of key considerations such as defining specific use cases, gathering requirements, evaluating integration needs, and conducting vendor demonstrations and RFPs. Microsoft SharePoint is identified as the market leader due to its comprehensive features and wide adoption, though careful planning is needed for complex implementations. OpenText and EMC also offer robust platforms but are better suited for more specialized use cases.
Similar to Requirements Definition For Distributed Teams (White Paper) (20)
Data at the Core Establishing a Data-Driven CultureJon Hansen
Data at the Core: Establishing a Data-Driven Culture
by Joe Gibson
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Research Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment
of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Business Administration in
Collaborative Leadership
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Canterbury Christchurch University
Christ Church Business School February 2022
PROCUREMENT IN 2021 & BEYOND: PEOPLE, PROCESS, AND TECHNOLOGYJon Hansen
While technology obviously has an important role to play in laying the foundation for procurement’s transformation over the next year and beyond, it is one part of a trifecta for future success that also includes the evolution of talent (people) and
operating models (process).
To explore this further, Jon Hansen caught up with seasoned procurement and supply chain experts Dr. John Gattorna and Peter Woon on Zycus’ Expert Talk Series.
We’ve taken down the best bits from their engaging discussion and created this action-packed eBook for you.
How Digitization Will Change Procurement and the Supply ChainJon Hansen
I posed the following question to thought leaders from the practitioner, provider, and academic communities: "how will digitization change procurement and supply chain?"
In this article (page 4), I share their insights.
CPO ARENA Service Provider Synopsis (Nipendo)Jon Hansen
Nipendo is a procurement technology company that presented to a panel of CPOs on their supplier cloud solution. Their solution enables automation of the procure-to-pay process through integration with existing ERP systems. It allows for rapid supplier onboarding and streamlined processes. The panel found the solution to be impressive and delivering value through automation, but wanted more details on how it works and its positioning for mid-sized companies.
Making The Case: Logitech Repatriates ProcurementJon Hansen
Sure, all service providers provide client references on request. These are nothing new. However, what practitioners really want is for someone to interview the clients directly with a scrutinizing eye of understanding from both a technical as well as a practical standpoint to gain additional insight: a one-to-one, up close and personal perspective.
This "Making The Case" document provides that insight on the relationship between Logitech and Market Dojo.
Forget the stereotypes you may have heard about millennials:
Focus, purpose and commitment are the hallmarks of this critical segment.
A paper by APICS, APQC and Supply Chain Management Review
of the supply chain workforce
Making The Case: ProcurePort Client TakeJon Hansen
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2. Requirements Definition for Distributed Teams | Blueprint Whitepaper
ABSTRACT
Today’s business application software is relied on to automate and empower critical business processes.
There is not an organization in the developed world that can process a sales order, hire an employee, or close
their book at the end of a fiscal year without the help of business software. Software is not an accessory to
the business, it is the business.
In today’s software development landscape, project teams are consistently being stretched to deliver against
increasing business challenges to enable an organization to sharpen their competitive advantage. In a
global market place, this continual pressure on IT is not just stretching team capacity; it is actually stretching
the organizational structure as well. In fact, in 2009, over 70% of business and IT teams are geographically
distributed and globalization is the business driver for the majority of new projects [1].
With geographical distribution becoming the standard operating procedure, collaboration between business
and IT teams around project requirements has become a new focal point to control project team efficiency
and effectiveness. Organizations must improve the fidelity and precision of their software requirements to
ensure that IT delivers the right solutions that the business needs. Communication of project requirements
must evolve to eliminate the cultural, geographic, and time-zone barriers that now exist between these
separated colleagues.
This paper will explore how software projects are improving In 2009, over 70% of business and IT
the collaboration between distributed IT and business teams
teams are geographically distributed and
by focusing on requirements communication. We will explore
how visual requirements simulation plays a critical role to ensure globalization is the business driver for the
understanding and to eliminate barriers to productivity that majority of new projects.
naturally exist within distributed, global teams.
INTRODUCTION
Requirements are the blueprint to the functionality, interoperability, and integration of business software.
As more organizations drive to streamline, consolidate, and modernize existing applications, the complexity
of requirements is increasing. Analysis of requirements has become a job within itself, with an emerging
dedicated stakeholder that services the development and communication of project requirements to
business and IT stakeholders. This stakeholder is commonly referred to as the business analyst or business
systems analyst.
As the world continues to get smaller and businesses expand to reach new markets and lower-cost suppliers,
globalization has become a major driver of IT projects. In 2009, the majority of IT projects are designed
to assist businesses scale to meet the needs of globalization. According to a recent CIO survey by Smart
Enterprise on Globalization and IT, over 50% of IT teams are being asked to build systems for non-US supply
chains, 40% are being asked to deliver software applications that leverage 3rd party technology service
providers, and 60% of new projects are serving customers that sit in a different country [1].
[1] Smart Enterprise CIO Survey on “Globalization and IT”, 2008.
Blueprint Software Systems Inc. 372 Bay Street, Suite 1600. Toronto, Ontario, M5H 2W9
3. Requirements Definition for Distributed Teams | Blueprint Whitepaper
On top of the increasing complexity of IT projects driven by globalization, team distribution has become
a critical operational challenge. According to a recent report from the IEEE, “key risk factors associated
with IT development projects are magnified or multiplied when dealing with distributed project teams” [2].
Distributed teams are largely in place due to business impacts from globalization. Typical drivers include
the increase in mergers and acquisitions, the need for new talent pools, the leveraging of lower-cost
resources, outsourcing, and overall business geographic demand. According to the IT Strategy Center, the
most significant impacts of distributed teams are directly related to communication of business context, the
implementation of language barriers, time zone separation, the lack of physical exchange, and the reliance
on batch oriented communication [3].
CIOs can adopt new requirements definition practices and
CIOs can adopt new requirements techniques to appropriately eliminate the risk associated with
distribution. These practices include shifting away from the
definition practices and techniques to
heavy use of natural language expression and moving toward
appropriately eliminate the risk associated the use of multi-aspect requirements definition with visual
with team distribution. simulation and validation. Multi-aspect requirements definition
enables organizations to standardize on rich requirements that
eliminate ambiguity and imprecision that often exists in the
geographic separation of teams.
LEVELS OF GEOGRAPHIC DISTRIBUTION
Blueprint’s customers range across four distinct levels of team distribution. Each level creates a unique set of
challenges for defining and communicating project requirements. Figure One illustrates these four levels of
distribution.
At level one, business and IT teams are
co-located within the same building and
location. Just ten years ago, this was more
common than any other level, but in 2009
this represents less than 30% of Fortune
500 IT teams. At level two, business and IT
teams are distributed at a department level.
IT is usually centralized and acts as a service
arm to the business. At level three, business
teams themselves, or IT teams themselves,
are geographically separated, which increase
the complexity and challenges of inter
department collaboration. Finally at level Figure One: Four levels of Team Distribution
four, globalization has created the ultimate
geographic challenge, with team separation
and distribution pervasive across the globe. With globalization and the rise of outsourcing, this has become
all too common.
[2] Risk Factors in Disstributed Projects, IEEE.
[3] Realtime Collaboration Solutions for the Global Workforce, ITStrategy Center
Blueprint Software Systems Inc. 372 Bay Street, Suite 1600. Toronto, Ontario, M5H 2W9
4. Requirements Definition for Distributed Teams | Blueprint Whitepaper
As organizations evolve to embrace more distribution, the challenges to understand the context of
application requirements increase significantly. These challenges include intra-teams functional capabilities,
task understanding, gaining organizational consensus, and the cultural challenges to understanding.
In Figure Two, we overlay how these challenges (and risks associated with them) increase significantly as
teams become more distributed.
As organizations evolve to embrace more
distribution, the challenges to understand
the context of application requirements
increase significantly.
Figure Two: Challenges to Alignment of Distributed Teams
CHALLENGES OF REQUIREMENTS COMMUNICATION WITH DISTRIBUTED TEAMS
As we discussed in the previous section, geographic distribution injects new challenges to IT productivity
and alignment. Requirements communication fits squarely into the center of the challenges of distributed
teams. Traditional methods of communicating requirements, which include enumerated lists of features,
functional and non-functional requirements, business process diagrams, data-rules, etc., generally are
documented in large word-processing or spreadsheet documents. When applied to distributed teams,
this method of communicating requirements creates significant waste and opportunities for failure, as the
barrier to understanding can become too great to overcome.
Incorrect interpretation and the lack of requirements validation
Requirements communication fits squarely can create artificial (or false) goals which consume valuable
team resources. Due to the nature of software development,
into the center of the challenges of
these false goals usually manifest themselves into incorrectly
distributed teams. implemented code, resulting in costly waste and rework.
Outsource providers often treat such rework as change,
resulting in costly charge-backs to the business.
MULTI-ASPECT REQUIREMENTS DEFINITION FOR DISTRIBUTED TEAMS
To significantly reduce the probability of ineffective requirements communication through natural language
documentation, IT organizations are transitioning to more precise vehicles to communicate requirements.
One of these vehicles is the adoption of the multi-aspect definition approach to communicate requirements
in a highly visual way. Multi-aspect definition provides detailed context capture through highly precise data
structures. These definition elements used in these holistic representations include use-cases for role (or
Blueprint Software Systems Inc. 372 Bay Street, Suite 1600. Toronto, Ontario, M5H 2W9
5. Requirements Definition for Distributed Teams | Blueprint Whitepaper
actor) based flows, user-interface screen mockups, data lists, and the linkage of decision-points to business
process definitions. These structures augment enumerated lists of functional and nonfunctional requirements.
The benefits of this approach include the use of simulation to ensure requirements understanding. Simulation
is a communication mechanism that walks requirements stakeholders through process, data, and UI flows
in linear order to represent how the system should function. Stakeholders have the ability to witness the
functionality in rich detail, consuming the information in a structured way that eliminates miscommunication
entirely.
Multi-aspect definition and simulation also provide context for validation. Validation is the process in
which stakeholders review each and every requirement in the appropriate sequence, make appropriate
comments, and then sign-off to ensure the requirements are accurate, clear, understood, and are feasible to
be implemented. Requirements validation can be considered one of the most cost-effective quality control
cycles to ensure team understanding.
Since requirements are the “blueprint” of the system, distributed stakeholders can make use of multi-
aspect definition and simulation during implementation to gain understanding of the goals of the project.
Simulation eliminates ambiguity by providing visual representation of goals which, in turn, eliminates
interpretation.
Rich requirements documentation often is a specified
deliverable for most IT projects for various reasons that Since requirements are the “blueprint” of
include regulatory compliance (Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA,
the system, distributed stakeholders can
etc.), internal procedural specifications, and other internal
review cycles. Multi-aspect definition can serve as the basis make use of multi-aspect definition and
of this documentation and next generation requirements simulation during implementation to gain
workbench solutions (such as Blueprint Requirements
understanding of the goals of the project.
Center) can transform models into rich, custom Microsoft
Word documentation. Since these documents are auto-
generated, the amount of effort required to build and
maintain these documents is minimized.
THE SOLUTION: A CASE STUDY
PAREXEL is a world-leader in biopharmaceutical research. Some of the world’s largest drug, biotech, and
medical device firms make use of their clinical research, consulting and medical communications services.
PAREXEL was in the early stages of a major $1.2M upgrade to their revenue forecasting system. This project
involved project staff distributed across many countries. They were already using HP Quality Center for
requirements management test planning & management. At this early stage in the project they were already
noticing issues with the requirements they had defined. General observations were that the requirements
were too ‘wordy’ and abstract. Clarity had been lost in the translation of original business need into system
functional requirements, and there were numerous instances of misunderstanding and misinterpretation of
the requirements which, to that point, had been expressed using flat-file documents. During this early phase
they took the opportunity to evaluate tools that might help with these requirements issues. Blueprint was
Blueprint Software Systems Inc. 372 Bay Street, Suite 1600. Toronto, Ontario, M5H 2W9
6. Requirements Definition for Distributed Teams | Blueprint Whitepaper
one of the products considered and was ultimately chosen partly due to its capabilities to support distributed
requirements definition teams.
The development results of the very first module defined using Blueprint Requirements Center was enough
to extend its use to all enhancements of PAREXEL’s financial applications. The first module defined using
Blueprint Requirements Center saved three months of rework effort.
The full extent of Requirements Center’s feature set is now leveraged to span the complete requirements
lifecycle including requirements lists, use case models, user interface mockups, simulations, and the
generation of assets automatically, such as tests and documents.
PAREXEL has established a corporate Blueprint forum and knowledge base and is currently in the process of
expanding use of Blueprint Requirements Center to other departments throughout the organization.
ABOUT BLUEPRINT
Named a “Cool Vendor” in Application Development by leading analyst firm Gartner, and the winner of
the Jolt Excellence Award in Design and Modeling, Blueprint aligns business and IT teams by delivering
the industry’s leading requirements suite designed specifically for the business analyst. Blueprint solutions
empower analyst teams to eliminate requirements misunderstanding by capturing, validating, and delivering
precise business requirements to local or distributed IT application project teams. Blueprint’s product
line functions as a collaborative system for the requirements lifecycle, including requirements elicitation,
elaboration, validation, and acceptance. Blueprint is a global provider, with presence in the United States,
Canada, and Europe. For more information on Blueprint, visit http://www.blueprintsys.com.
Blueprint Software Systems Inc. 372 Bay Street, Suite 1600. Toronto, Ontario, M5H 2W9