Articles

Communicate Business Value to Your Stakeholders

Often project leaders—even Agile project leaders—talk about their projects in terms of features. Yes, and what do features really mean for stakeholders? Features are what your system or process can do. Benefits are why people care. And benefits equal business value. Learn why and how to communicate benefits rather than features—and what it will mean for you, your team and your organization.

Feature Injection: three steps to success

Often Customers provide half baked solutions with no linkage to value. An Agile team needs examples linked to the Business Value they provide. Feature Injection is a process that takes a half baked solution identifies the Business Value it provides and then produces a set of examples driven from that value.

Interview and Book Excerpt: CMMI for Services

CMMI for Services(CMMI-SVC)is a process improvement framework developed by the SEI for service providers. InfoQ spoke to Eileen Forrester, co-author of CMMI for Services: Guidelines for Superior Service and manager of CMMI-SVC. In this interview we cover adoption practices for CMMI-SVC and its relationship with CMMI-DEV, ITIL and Agile accompanied by relevant excerpts from the book.

How ALM Drives Business/IT Alignment, Competitive Advantage

ALM and Business Processes

Going Live: The Role of Development and Operations in Preparing and Deploying Software Packages

A discussion of how Development, Operations and others can collaborate to prepare a good deployment package. minimizing the potential for error, improving clarity, and allowing for customization.

Agile Finance: Story Point Cost

This article ties a rather abstract and developer centered concept (story points) to the real world of business (spreadsheets and ledgers). Making this connection is essential for management.

SOA Strategy and Spline Tactics

In this article, Michael Poulin discusses agility-to-market changes that IT can gain using a strategy oriented onto the services. Using concepts of service-orientation as the major construct of the technical product portfolio, accompanied by a techniques he calls Spline Tactics, he examines how businesses can achieve strategic agility.

Using ITIL V3 as a Foundation for SOA Governance

Those familiar with only ITIL V2 often scoff at the thought that ITIL could serve as a governance framework for SOA. Based on their perspective, they would be correct since V2 focused more heavily on operational processes rather than service lifecycle. With ITIL V3, the focus of the framework shifted toward what can only be accurately described as service-orientation.

The Meme Lifecycle

Julian Everett and Chris Matts describe an IT business case as a meme - one that is competing in the complex ecosystem that constitutes a market sector and show its implications. By taking this view of a business then an organization's short and long term strategies change and we get a completely different view of how and why current development practices exist and persist.

SOA Governance: Achieving and Sustaining Business and IT Agility

The chapter presented in this article, Governing the Service Factory, of the book "SOA Governance: Achieving and Sustaining Business and IT Agility" offers practical advice on governing such a Service Factory including a case study and guidelines for defining, developing, testing, deploying and operating services and business processes.

Book Review: Ladder to SOE

A review of Michael Poulin's book, Ladder to SOE. Michael's book shows how to use the principles of service orientation to align IT with the business, and the business with market dynamics - creating the Service Oriented Enterprise. Becoming an SOE requires new habits of service-oriented thinking and Michael points these out along with techniques for effectively using them.