Agile is hot – and has been so for a while. The multitude of benefits offered by Agile, particularly its ability to bridge the Business – IT divide, has clients naturally gravitating towards it. Sadly, we’re also hearing horror stories, where agile development ended up being ‘fragile’, causing expensive project failures. The perfect storm is usually a combination of one or more factors: an offshore-based outsourcing model, ‘fixed price’ contracts, large engagements and even over-zealous customers and/or vendors with no prior experience with offshore agile. The question is, how do you setup agile projects to succeed under these kinds of complex environments? (more…)

With the world getting more ‘social’, individuals are transforming the way they go about their daily lives. Businesses have recognized the need to rethink their strategies and reevaluate their operating models and have commenced to align them with customer expectations and customers’ perception of value. From focusing only on optimization of supply chains, penetration of new markets and scaled bottom lines, companies are now opening their eyes to the new world – a world which is moving towards a greater impetus on having a more social identity. Today, people across the globe rely on social networks for finding lost friends, making new ones, buying new furniture and selling antiques — interacting with technology for almost every activity in their everyday life. You no longer get a wedding invite delivered by post to your doorstep; you get an event invite via Facebook delivered to your inbox!

BPM has taken cue from this world-wide phenomenon and has been quick to embrace ‘social’ and embed it into its very design. (more…)

Innovation is ingrained in all aspects of business and needs to be promoted, prompted and nurtured as a culture and a conscious activity. Most enterprises are facing the question of how do we bring a discipline around innovation and facilitate the process so that it does not remain as a branding or R&D activity.

As we scan the different industry segments, there are processes that cut across lead-to-order, order -to-cash, and trouble-to-resolve areas in all organizations. Each of these broader areas consists of many individual processes. In each of these processes, there is an opportunity to identify gaps or improvement areas around which innovation can be triggered. What are the innovation drivers? Launch of new products, improving the speed to market, optimizing costs, improving user experience and creating new markets are some of the drivers. Every step in an existing process that touches one of these should be tagged for promoting innovation. (more…)

One of the key constituents of Business Process Management (BPM) initiative is Process Analysis. The exercise usually commences during pre-inception or inception phase of a project (considering RUP). The participants comprise of process analysts (some call them process engineers) working with subject matter experts (SMEs) and senior management executives. The goal (vastly simplified) is to discover and map the AS IS process and then based on certain criteria, design the TO BE process(es).

An advantage of being a process analyst is the concession to pose certain types of questions to the senior management of large organizations – on subjects that few will otherwise discuss.  Allow me to defend my case for asking these seemingly naive questions, by drawing parallel from some common fallacies discussed in economic theory. Through these questions, a process analyst avoids the errors an economist or scientist does, when trying to arrive at conclusions of an experiment. (more…)

Agile is here to stay. With its emphasis on lightweight processes, high-quality deliverables, flexibility in dealing with changing business priorities, short delivery cycles, higher team morale, and a whole host of other benefits, agile development offers a fresh approach to businesses seeking greater agility in their software engineering processes.

Agile over traditional practices brings in significant value; however our experience indicates that it is no silver bullet for the ills of enterprise application development.  Agile practices are developed based on several fundamental assumptions about the environment within which the project is executed.  In the right context, all promises of agile come alive; in the wrong context agile can add significant risks to the successful delivery of an engagement.  Especially in a global delivery environment, careful consideration of risk factors helps you avoid potential significant failures. (more…)

The next generation of IT Services will take a new approach to business process improvement and information technology.  The new approach uses Lean principles to deliver more than cost savings – it drives superior business performance through a relentless focus on waste reduction and continuous improvement. (more…)

No one likes to be told that they produce poor quality. Each one of us believes that the work we do strikes the right balance between customer needs and time to market, between cost/benefit and right quality. We reassure ourselves that the number of defects in our code is lower than industry standard. But the standard IT customer is not happy, even if they have wearily accepted software defects as a fact of life. (more…)