Project management - beyond the iron triangle

As business analysts we are often up against the project management iron triangle.

Although we often clearly identify important requirements that the project should realize, the scope-time-money mantra has already fixed the deliverable in stone.

Here is an interesting article from Jim Highsmith. In it he collapses the traditional overarching concerns of scope-schedule-cost into constraints, placed at one corner of a new triangle that elevate the role of value and quality. It "alters how we view success."

Requirements prioritization with UserVoice

A day in the life of the business analyst:
We have a set of requirements and are ready to prioritize them. We hope to consult all relevant stakeholders and engage them in a collaborative effort.

Rating scales are often used, for example Mandatory, Important, Desirable etc.. but so often everything ends up mandatory.

UserVoice demonstrates an innovative approach to polling for prioritization. Each user only has a limited number of votes to cast. The UserVoice website speaks of "spending votes". You are forced to spend wisely, so to speak, to focus on what is most important.

Here's an example where i want the BA community to give me topic preferences from an initial list for upcoming OpenTalk meetings; and add their own if they like.

The intranet is dead, long live the intranet!

Working with a client more than a year ago on an information management requirement, i tried hard to avoid usage of the term intranet, because, as implemented at the time, it was little more than a thin wrapper around a set of shared network data drives. There was also a long menu of entry points into various legacy applications that grew as web services proliferated out of control.

More recently i have seen the same thing elsewhere, in this case, a leaky wrapper that is easily bypassed by anyone who knows the share names and how to connect to a network drive...

So i have promoted the use of different terms, or phrases, like "shared information portal" or "internal information services", clumsy stuff i know. The term intranet just carries so much currency, it is difficult to supplant, even though its meaning becomes less distinct by the day.

Today i came across a useful post from Jane McConnell (by way of Step Two) that shows the way forward. It also refers to an earlier post that relates efforts to replace the term intranet with something better.

we do agile...

... yeah right.
Here's a quote from James Shores' blog, The Art of Agile, that sums up the reality.

"At the risk of ending on a downer, the vast majority of shops that say they're doing 'Agile' do nothing of the sort. Instead, they use the terminology without actually following the underlying ideas. For example, teams will plan in 'Sprints' but not actually produce shippable software every month. So don't be surprised if nothing really changes except the terminology. Real change of the sort Agile needs requires willpower and commitment on the part of both managers and team members. That's easier to fake than supply."

That is pessimistic!

I haven't had enough work experience here to make any informed comment about the agile scene in NZ. The buzz is loud, and i've been assured that some of the cultural obstacles i have observed in the RSA are less of a problem here. I can't help thinking though that commonalities of behaviour are more likely. James Shore is probably speaking of the US, it resonates strongly with what i have heard in the RSA, are the Kiwis really that different? Consider for example the tall poppy syndrome which quite a few folk tell me remains prevalent here. That's only sand in the agile machinery.

Let's see what experiences and observations the new year has to offer.

publish subscribe redux...

I remember, around 10 years ago, first reading some of the documents describing Old Mutuals hub-and-spoke architecture including the publish-subscribe pattern. Later i did bits of application programming using the developed infrastructure to collect information from disparate source information repositories. This was MQSI, before it was all rebranded into the Websphere product family.
Fast forward to the 2009 Tech Crunchie award nominees. This slideshow outlines one of the entries, PubSubHubbub.



Here's the project.

More on collaboration

This post from PebbleRoad echoes comments i made in my first post - the technology is the lesser challenge - and also provides a useful model of organizational attributes and how they work for or against the success of intranet initiatives. The comments are also great, especially the observation regarding the semantic tension between the words collaboration and culture. I quote:

"In mixing the terms collaboration and culture, you’ve got something funny going on. Culture is about shared values. Collaboration, as defined by people like Barbara Grey, is about people coming together with different cultures, constructively exploring their differences and seeking a shared solution.
In many ways, collaboration culture is about agreeing to disagree or acknowledging how difference is good—your perspective and my perspective aren’t the same. And that’s what will make us successful"