Skip to main content

IT Metrics - The IT Development Life Cycle decision


One of the most complex decisions any IT department has to take is to decide which is the model that fits the best into our organization regarding the IT Development Life Cycle methodology

This decision is a key innovation element when confronted with the need to increase E2E development efficiency regarding business needs and time to market. Most business are recently changing the paradigm of how they manage IT requirements as they need a significant change on the way they deliver to their own customers. This is mainly due to the fact that to the light of the current economic downturn the final consumers are challenging our companies to improve the services provided to them, whether those are financial services, consumer services or any other added value product we have been offering to the market.

There are tons of documentation and support information regarding this matter, which will help us on the decision making process. As you all know this is not a new debate for the IT communities, but now to the contrary to what has happened in the past decade, we are confronted with a complete different challenges, most of them resulting from the new business trends and related IT requirements.

As such to decide whether a Traditional Sequential development method is more aligned with your new IT requirements than the Agile one is something will require some deep thought from you and your development team leads as it is not an easy move, neither for your teams nor for the business key users in charge of the final application deployment.

Lately we have seen different technical articles and debates proposing the Agile methodology based on collaborative nature approach for the organisations where there is a substantial number of complex business requests changing along the way due to their own business nature and market conditions.

 















Scrum has been referred as a preferred agile project management for software development, basically because is based in two main added value premises; first is because its simplicity (process, practices, artifacts and rules) and second due to the fact that it allow multiple incremental functionalities starting from a process skeleton, although requiring a close and multiple team interactions all along the way. This feature make necessary that the different teams become managers and final responsible for their own deliverables, deciding by their own which is the best solution to be applied for each and every development piece of the project.

This method compared with the heavy weigh one based on the Sequential development cycle such Waterfall require a different mindset and team organization. For example many organizations are currently using the V-Model which is considered as an extension of the Waterfall model by itself. These companies have understood that this model is more secure and reliable than any other, specially because it conceptually requires that before you can start one specific SDLC phase you have first to close the previous one (in agreement between the different process stakeholders).   




Not going more deep on this debate I believe that is becoming clear for everyone that this decision has to be taken not only to the light of the IT reality we have in our own organizations, but also after a thorough analysis about which are the new business challenges we have to fulfill. In my opinion and based on more than 20 years of professional experiences, this decision will be more dependent on the level of business model maturity, business time to market, type of products/services, etc. than on a pure IT related matter.

Having said that it is also important to remember that there is always the possibility to implement a combined SDLC model, taking the best from each of these two groups of methodologies and refining them along the way within our organizations. The same way that we all know that there are not two identical business companies in the market, it is also true that there is not a single solution for the IT dilemma managing business requirements. It is our call to find the one that fits the best and then fine-tune it through innovation and process improvement to the point we reach the best possible results.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IT Metrics - Project and Risk Management

Project Management is undoubtedly one of the key IT activities any CIO has to properly address if he wants to appropriately run the overall IT agenda. During my professional career many people has approached me asking which are in my opinion the more important aspects of running a successful project, and why? I always come back to them with two main building block recommendations ; the first one is to focus on project communication during the entire project time frame. This is a essential element of a well manage project because doing a proper job on communicating progress, risks, mitigation activities, achievements, etc. we will increase the level of people engagement, both internally within our teams and externally through the entire business organisation. Some times under the pressure to deliver critical operational milestones we tend to focus on project operations and IT deliverables without having in place a proper communication agenda. This is a clear m...
Post a Comment
Read more

IT Metrics - What about Outsourcing

The relationship model to be establish between IT and the rest of the business is one of the first governance key decisions that has to be defined by the CIO once there is a clear IT strategy agreed with the rest of the Management Board members.  The CIO has to work in a close collaboration with the other C-members in order to agree on the best IT relationship strategy model we want for the company. Whether we go for a more internal one (full partnership) or for an external one (Outsourcing) we have to make clear that this position in the model regarding the preferred relationship might change along the way as a result of the maturity degree you can establish with the rest of the business, foreseen opportunities, business challenges, etc. As a result of that decision, a full Outsourcing model for some of the IT processes and services or for the whole portfolio can be explored and implemented in order to fulfil both, business and the IT strategy. There is however somet...
Post a Comment
Read more

IT Metrics - IT positioning at business level

An IT department has to be technology or management driven organization? This is a key question mark for many CEOs when confronted with the need to bring their own IT organizations to a different level of maturity. If he decides in favor of a technology driven organization then the IT department and its responsible person will be normally subordinated to someone at the Company Board level. In Europe the Finance Director is one of the first and common choices that many companies are following, as historically the Finance Director – CFO has been in charge of large company projects having high financial impact. If on the contrary the CEO decides that there is a clear need for the business organization to improve the overall IT performance then he will take the decision to bring his Head of IT to the Board level position. This dilemma differs between regions when comparing the number of companies in Europe having the IT responsible at the Company board level with oth...
Post a Comment
Read more