Quantifying Business Benefit of Collaboration Tools (or, What Is This Meeting Costing Me?)

This post started off as an excuse to experiment with Google Docs, and this really neat feature I discovered - embedding a spreadsheet in a web page as a sharing method. However, it struck me as a potential way to cost justify the time, effort, and expense of implementing collaboration systems with the Most Cynical Among Us. We've all been in large meetings, with tens of people from the project team, along with the expensive consultants, sitting around a table…

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Do you want it good or fast? Prioritizing Time-to-Value over Requirements

I have a background in software product development, iterative "methodologies", and the sort of fast-twitch life cycle that characterizes entrepreneurial startups, high-growing businesses, and "lean" process improvement projects. Unfortunately, this style is also favored by departmental developer wannabes, sloppy coders, and impatient Gen-Y newbies that want to apply a consumer products mentality to corporate IT. <aside>Yes, I'm throwing a bit of a challenge out with that last statement. I understand that as the demographics of my IT team changes, management…

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