Waterfall, Agile, now “Sim”?

Dan Woods in Forbes (here) highlights one of the emerging trends in development: user-interface simulation.  This takes agile development a step further, because…
[b]y creating a simulation of the user experience, instead of a full-working version, a team can avoid a large amount of work but still get a full test that can confirm requirements. Simulation [...]

SAP Virtualization and Green IT

There was great interest in last week’s SAP Virtualization event (SAP Virtualization Week 2009 page here, the SAP Virtualization homepage on the SAP Community network is here).   As Courtney Bjorlin notes (post here), Green IT has been an SAP priority for a while::
SAP offered an open invitation to any partners or customers who want to join the Green IT community. [...]

PMI and Agilests?

Greg Balestrero — CEO of the Project Management Institute — recently posted (here) on his experiences at the Scrum Gathering in Orlando.  In my experience, Greg and the PMI staff have been very eager to foster a better relationship among the various methodology camps.  Per Greg’s post,
[t]he intent of the visit was to bridge the [...]

Why get involved w/ industry associations?

One of the reasons I’ve been remiss in my posting is that I’ve been preparing to host the Spring 2009 executive forum of PMI’s Global Corporate Council.  My SAP colleagues did a great job helping me host and this forum was particularly productive.
“Networking” is a pat response when one talks about joining or leading industry [...]

Conditions for “organized emergence”

Emmanuel Gobillot commented on my post on self-organization (here).  I liked his comment so much that I thought it was worth highlighting below:
I have found four conditions which need to be in place for communities to be productive.  I called these
Simplicity (a coherent and simple way to engage),
Narrative (an underpinning story for people to align [...]

Using SCRUM with ASAP

Ron Stanton sent me a mail asking how SCRUM works with our implementation methodology — ASAP for Implementation. While SAP does have a SCRUM methodology that we use — SAPScrum — it is an internal approach used for solution development.  SAPScrum is pretty straight SCRUM, so there’s no mystery to it.
We just started a project [...]

Goals and the limits of self-organization

Thought-provoking post by Jurgen Appelo on the teleology of software projects (post here, check the perceptive comments too).  More properly, he points out that projects do not have a goal in and of themselves.  In his words, they don’t have intrinsic goals (other than self-preservation).
For me, this insight points to the limits of self-organization in initiatives.   [...]

Web 2.0 and PMO functions

We’ve just started digging into a large-scale re-architecture of our various methodologies.  As you might imagine, the consequences of our approach include changes to the processes, people, and technologies behind content production and maintenance.  
In particular, leverage social media to author, publish, and distribute much more content than we do today.  We’re pleased with our technology direction.  However, we are concerned about [...]

SAP PMO Webcast Recording

As a follow up, over 250 people attended last week’s SAP PMO webcast (original post here) hosted by Keith Johnson, the VP for the SAP North America PMO VP and Jim Curry, Program Delivery Director.  It’s always great to have a customer — in this case, Kelly Gear, Senior Program Manager, Johns Manville — confirm [...]

Compendium of Cognitive Biases

I had never seen this Wikipedia entry on cognitive biases (there’s also a good related entry on buyer decision processes here).  I’ve found that keeping these pitfalls in mind really helps one when problem solving.
My personal favorites are Déformation professionnelle, Projection bias, and Self-serving bias.