Products

The report begins with a bird's eye view of the RMLC and then gives a description of the project landscape. This allows for a foundation to discuss how the RMLC and the various project management lifecycles integrate and interact.

Published: March 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Robert K. Wysocki

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The report Agile Business: The Final Frontier by Cutter Senior Consultant Rob Thomsett explores the positive and negative aspects of agile as an organizational model. In it, you'll discover an integrated model for business agility based on the following key elements: agile sponsorship, agile development, agile project management, the agile program office, agile support, agile finance, and other agile service groups.

Table of Contents:

• Back to the Future I: Business As Usual
• Three Powerful Change Models
• A Brief History of Agile
• Agile and Organizational Culture
• The Agile Business Proposition
• Agile Business Model
• Back to the Future II: The Power of Teams
• Implementing Agile Business: A Case Study
• The Tipping Point Revisited

This report also includes an agile business case study from a major bank in New Zealand that was built around colocated project teams. You'll discover how this agile business implementation has proven to enable faster change and a more creative and collaborative change environment.

Learn how you can adopt the principles, values, and practices of traditional agile development and agile project management as a catalyst for broader organizational change.

Published: July 2010, 21 pages, PDF format

Author: Rob Thomsett

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CAMS involves such process elements as business management (e.g., Six Sigma), project management (e.g., Prince2), IT governance (e.g., COBIT, ITIL), and formal software processes (e.g., RUP, Process Mentor, OPEN). This Executive Report is based on exploratory interviews with 10 participants in varying consulting and permanent roles combined with the author's own experiences in using agile in practice.

Published: January 2010, 26 pages, PDF format

Author: Bhuvan Unhelkar

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The need for enterprise agility has never been greater, yet the funds for large-scale projects are hard to find. The agile enterprise requires a software development process and supporting infrastructure that is capable of meeting changes in business and technology conditions. Agile development's ability to increase the flexibility of software delivery and SOA's ability to increase the flexibility and usability of software, together provide the best hybrid of current methods for reaching this goal.

The report Agile SOA by Brian Dooley explores the benefits of an agile/SOA strategy and gives you the tools you need to implement an incremental agile/SOA approach, also known as a "meet in the middle strategy," to help your organization achieve better enterprise agility.

This report will help you:

• Understand the requirements to create a merged agile development/SOA environment.
• Overcome the challenges of existing organizational processes and values to start your agile/SOA initiative.
• Utilize a five-step plan to initiate an incremental agile/SOA implementation.
• Achieve greater modularity, efficiency, and alignment with business needs.
• Initiate projects without extreme initial costs.
• Enable greater responsiveness to changes in the business environment.

You'll also benefit from case studies that demonstrate how agile and SOA were used together succesfully to help four organizations achieve their business goals.

If your organization is seeking more efficient development in a constantly changing business environment, then Agile SOA will help you achieve this goal.

Published: June 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Brian J. Dooley

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If the technical debt is not paid up, the system's quality will rapidly deteriorate until it goes "bankrupt"; it then may be decommissioned as the cost of maintaining it will be too high. This Executive Report by Amir Kolsky introduces the concept of technical debt, what practices and attitudes cause it, and what we can do to prevent it or pay it off.

Published: September 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Amir Kolsky

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This report will help you:

• Create an environment in which others will succeed
• Consider how your own leadership behaviors impact the actions of others
• Avoid poor habits, such as fingerpointing, secrecy, poor performance, and weak interpersonal relations
• Assess the organizational culture surrounding your teams' work and the leadership skills of those involved
• Respond appropriately when a leader reverts to old command-and-control habits
• Explore the six qualities of a collaborative leader and how to apply them
• Distinguish between the collaborative leader and the more traditional authoritative or technically expert type of leader

This report compares the behavioral expectations of leaders from three separate studies: 1) an agile leadership study, 2) a research project on the competencies of Certified Professional Facilitators, and 3) a study on top-performing rural community development experts.

Plus, you'll delve into case examples of two people who are differently prepared for the role of being a collaborative leader: Donna the project manager, and Robert the CEO.

Published: May 2011, 17 pages, PDF format

Author: David Spann

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The contrast between the beauty of the small and the requirements of the big generates systemic tension in many software projects, organizations, and companies. Resolving this conflict is the focus of this Cutter IT Journal issue, Big Agile, featuring insight from agile guru Israel Gat and his host of expert authors.

Table of Contents:

What Does It Mean to Be "Big"? The Agile Scaling Model by Scott Ambler. Explore eight scaling factors that individual teams will inevitably face in the course of doing Big Agile and why it is essential to use a disciplined approach that addresses the entire product delivery process to be successful.

Laying the Foundation for Big Agile Transformation by Dave Rooney. Find out how applying a complete rather than incremental approach to a product or system will bear continuous improvements -- starting by educating the team members, as well as the management, at all levels of the development and product management organizations.

To Be or Not to Be: That's the Leadership Question for Going "Big Agile" by David Spann. Based on a case study of the essential need for leadership in an agile transformation, you'll be provided with a blueprint for a large-scale agile rollout that you can apply to your own organization.

Big Anything Depends on the People: An Exploration of the Human Factor in Scaling Agile Methods by Tom Bragg. Explore the possibility that using a more "popular" software method such as agile attracts a more competitive and knowledgeable project team thereby increasing the chances of project success.

Big Agile Isn't "One Big Agile" by John Heintz. Examine some theories of management and technology -- encouraging learning and sharing across the organization -- that will make a big agile initiative much more likely to succeed.

Published: February 2012, 32 pages, PDF format

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Cloud computing and agile development are both currently in a state of evolution, which is creating interesting synergies as the enterprise IT environment continues to advance. This Executive Report examines how cloud computing, in its various forms, interacts with and improves agile development. The report concludes with two case studies that demonstrate the potential in these complementary areas.

Published: May 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Brian J. Dooley

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The report Delivering Business Value Through Collaboration and Teamwork provides the guidance, recommendations and best practices you need to improve team performance, encourage shared ownership of goals, and transform your team into one that delivers consistent, value-added business solutions. You’ll learn -- from the perspective of agile IT leaders -- how to best engage your team using a blend of agile and collaborative practices. And you’ll be provided with tools to help you ensure allegiance and top performance from the new model of ad hoc and virtual teams.

This report will help you:

• Foster a culture of synergy and loyalty among your team members
• Identify the top predictors of team success
• Hire technical people who will successfully integrate with your team
• Avoid the three workplace trends that can sabotage teamwork -- matrixing, multiplexing, and distributing
• Use specific metrics to quantify and predict team performance
• Build a sense of shared values and behaviors to meet common goals
• Transform cowboy coders into teammates
• Employ three proven practices to successfully lead virtual teams
• Understand teamwork differences in agile and plan-based companies
• Make changes at the systems level to support team performance
• Differentiate between high-performing and low-performing knowledge teams

This report also addresses the increased need for specialized technical skills to ensure successful product and system development. You’ll get tools and strategies to help you build more effective and collaborative teams when faced with low organizational loyalty, high turnover, skill specialization, geographically dispersed teams, and increased outsourcing. You’ll also benefit from a quick, step-by-step guide to building a team culture among ad hoc and virtual teams.

Published: November 2005, 162 pages, PDF format

Authors: Steven B. Ambrose, Christopher M. Avery, Steven W. Baker, Michael Begeman, Laurent Bossavit, Martina Ceschi, Tracy C. Gibbons, Jessica Lipnack, Mary Lynn Manns, Robert J. Marshall, Kay Pentecost, Kert Peterson, Linda Rising, Johanna Rothman, Alberto Sillitti, Jeffrey Stamps, Giancarlo Succi, Jean Tabaka, and Rob Thomsett

The Executive Brief Delving into Technical Debt by Chris Sterling and Israel Gat explores the issues your organization should consider when devising a technical debt reduction strategy. You'll gain an excellent "3D" picture of what your technical debt initiative might look like in the context of your own business imperatives and predicaments.

This Executive Brief will help you:

• Identify the three main areas for improvement typically found in technical debt analyses and interviews.
• Discover specific processes and techniques that will aid existing and future development efforts, such as Sonar visibility, and Sonar .NET plug-in implementation.
• See the potential opportunities that arise from a technical debt assessment, such as reuse of existing C++ code and incremental builds of deployment packages.
• Implement strategic techniques that will help your teams take more responsibility for managing the build configurations with automated downstream checks.
• Being creating a sound technical debt strategy

Order your copy of Delving into Technical Debt today!

Published: October 2011, 10 pages, PDF format

Authors: Israel Gat and Chris Sterling

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Table of Contents:

• Opening Statement by Patrick Debois
• Why Enterprises Must Adopt Devops to Enable Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and Joanne Molesky
• Devops at Advance Internet: How We Got in the Door by Eric Shamow
• The Business Case for Devops: A Five-Year Retrospective by Lawrence Fitzpatrick and Michael Dillon
• Next-Generation Process Integration: CMMI and ITIL Do Devops by Bill Phifer
• Devops: So You Say You Want a Revolution? by Dominica DeGrandis

Published: August 2011, 40 pages, PDF format

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The intent of this Executive Report by Amr Elssamadisy is to describe different document categories, how they directly affect the success of software development teams, and how to start using new document types effectively.

Published: February 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Amr Elssamadisy

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Table of Contents:

• Opening Statement
• Devops and the People Who Practice It: Winning Their Hearts and Minds
• Where is IT Operations Within Devops?
• Disciplined Agile Delivery and Collaborative Devops
• Metrics-Driven Devops
• Reducing Software Release Pain by Releasing More Often

Published: December 2011, 36 pages, PDF format

Authors: Patrick Debois, Ernest Mueller, Bill Keyworth, Scott Ambler, Alex LeQuoc, Kief Morris

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Agile methods have had a huge impact on the software industry by evolving the way we think about software development, and the results are hard to ignore. Now business leaders are looking for ways to reap the benefits of agile principles in whole-organization governance and management. This is difficult without a tangible methodology to make agile principles concrete and accessible.

This Executive Report by Brian Robertson examines the governance aspects of holacracy, which provides a complete and practical system for achieving agility in all aspects of organizational steering and management.

Published: July 2006, 21 pages, PDF format

Author: Brian J. Robertson

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In this Executive Report by Phil Simon, a case study is utilized to examine these issues at one organization, along with data quality and data governance.

Published: January 2010, 20 pages, PDF format

Author: Phil Simon

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The Cutter Consortium report How to Align the Project Portfolio to the Strategic Plan defines a simple, integrated process for selecting the initial portfolio and maintaining its alignment to the strategic plan using an agile approach.

In this report, you'll discuss the barriers to maintaining portfolio alignment to the strategic plan, you'll gain a four-level architecture for a strategic plan, and you'll discover how to adjust your project management lifecycle (PMLC) models so that they align to a quarterly portfolio review cycle.

Build project portfolios that align with your organization's strategic plan and a process to maintain that alignment. Order your copy of this report today!

Table of Contents:

• Barriers to Maintaining Portfolio Alignment to the Strategic Plan
• A Robust Architecture for a Strategic Plan
• Agile Project Portfolio Process
• Selecting Projects for the APP
• Performance Review Process
• Putting It All Together

Published: October 2011, 13 pages, PDF format

Author: Robert K. Wysocki

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The new Cutter Consortium report How to Settle Your Technical Debt: A Manager's Guide will help you understand what technical debt is and how it can affect both operational and development costs. This report will help you quantify your technical debt through code analysis, put processes in place that make sure you prevent technical debt from growing (without valid business reasons), and weigh the cost of repaying your technical debt versus maintaining the recurring interest and compounding interest that you are paying on it.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Technical Debt -- A New Paradigm for Software Development by Israel Gat.

Chapter 1: Modernizing the DeLorean System -- Comparing Actual and Predicted Results of a Technical Debt Reduction Project by John Heintz. Examine the validity of technical debt techniques and discover a remarkable correlation between actual effort and assessed effort.

Chapter 2: The Economics of Technical Debt by Stephen Chin, Erik Huddleston, Walter Bodwell, and Israel Gat. Gain a framework and tools for understanding, controlling, and communicating the costs and consequences of technical debt in your projects.

Chapter 3: Technical Debt -- Challenging the Metaphor by David Rooney. Be cautioned about the potential to abuse the technical debt metaphor and why this metaphor can lead to "piling garbage upon garbage."

Chapter 4: Manage Project Portfolios More Effectively by Including Software Debt in the Decision Process by Brent Barton and Chris Sterling. Discover how technical debt techniques can be applied at the portfolio level and how to use the software debt dashboard to enhance the decision-making process.

Chapter 5: The Risks of Acceptance Test Debt by Ken Pugh. Extend the technical debt concept to acceptance tests and explore the potential use of statistical process control techniques not only within respect to Intrinsic Quality, but with respect to Extrinsic Quality.

Chapter 6: Transformation Patterns for Curing the Human Causes of Technical Debt by Jonathon Michael Golden. Examine the root causes of technical debt at two levels -- individual and institutional, and learn why an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Chapter 7: Infrastructure Debt -- Revisiting the Foundation by Andrew Clay Shafer. Differentiate between the manifestation of technical debt in development versus its manifestation in "devops."

Chapter 8: Revolution in Software -- Using Technical Debt Techniques to Govern the Software Development Process by Israel Gat. Learn how to tie software quality to cost and value through a common denominator: the dollar.

Chapter 9: Technical Debt Assessment -- A Case of Simultaneous Improvements at Three Levels by Israel Gat. Gain a first-hand account of what happened when a leading software firm asked Cutter Consortium to conduct a Technical Debt Assessment and Valuation just as this organization was about to release ~200K lines of Java code.

Chapter 10: Avoiding System Bankruptcy -- How to Pay Off Your Technical Debt by Amir Kolsky. Explore the cause of technical debt and the various forms such debt can take, including design-related debt, testing-related debt, defect-related debt, and organizational and administrative-related debt.

Published: November 22, 2010, 146 pages, PDF format

Authors: Brent Barton, Walter Bodwell, Stephen Chin, Israel Gat, Jonathon Michael Golden, John Heintz, Erik Huddleston, Amir Kolsky, Ken Pugh, Dave Rooney, Andrew Clay Shafer, and Chris Sterling

The new Cutter Consortium report How to Settle Your Technical Debt: A Manager's Guide will help you understand what technical debt is and how it can affect both operational and development costs. This report will help you quantify your technical debt through code analysis, put processes in place that make sure you prevent technical debt from growing (without valid business reasons), and weigh the cost of repaying your technical debt versus maintaining the recurring interest and compounding interest that you are paying on it.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Technical Debt -- A New Paradigm for Software Development by Israel Gat.

Chapter 1: Modernizing the DeLorean System -- Comparing Actual and Predicted Results of a Technical Debt Reduction Project by John Heintz. Examine the validity of technical debt techniques and discover a remarkable correlation between actual effort and assessed effort.

Chapter 2: The Economics of Technical Debt by Stephen Chin, Erik Huddleston, Walter Bodwell, and Israel Gat. Gain a framework and tools for understanding, controlling, and communicating the costs and consequences of technical debt in your projects.

Chapter 3: Technical Debt -- Challenging the Metaphor by David Rooney. Be cautioned about the potential to abuse the technical debt metaphor and why this metaphor can lead to "piling garbage upon garbage."

Chapter 4: Manage Project Portfolios More Effectively by Including Software Debt in the Decision Process by Brent Barton and Chris Sterling. Discover how technical debt techniques can be applied at the portfolio level and how to use the software debt dashboard to enhance the decision-making process.

Chapter 5: The Risks of Acceptance Test Debt by Ken Pugh. Extend the technical debt concept to acceptance tests and explore the potential use of statistical process control techniques not only within respect to Intrinsic Quality, but with respect to Extrinsic Quality.

Chapter 6: Transformation Patterns for Curing the Human Causes of Technical Debt by Jonathon Michael Golden. Examine the root causes of technical debt at two levels -- individual and institutional, and learn why an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Chapter 7: Infrastructure Debt -- Revisiting the Foundation by Andrew Clay Shafer. Differentiate between the manifestation of technical debt in development versus its manifestation in "devops."

Chapter 8: Revolution in Software -- Using Technical Debt Techniques to Govern the Software Development Process by Israel Gat. Learn how to tie software quality to cost and value through a common denominator: the dollar.

Chapter 9: Technical Debt Assessment -- A Case of Simultaneous Improvements at Three Levels by Israel Gat. Gain a first-hand account of what happened when a leading software firm asked Cutter Consortium to conduct a Technical Debt Assessment and Valuation just as this organization was about to release ~200K lines of Java code.

Chapter 10: Avoiding System Bankruptcy -- How to Pay Off Your Technical Debt by Amir Kolsky. Explore the cause of technical debt and the various forms such debt can take, including design-related debt, testing-related debt, defect-related debt, and organizational and administrative-related debt.

Published: November 22, 2010, 146 pages delivered in print, by post

Authors: Brent Barton, Walter Bodwell, Stephen Chin, Israel Gat, Jonathon Michael Golden, John Heintz, Erik Huddleston, Amir Kolsky, Ken Pugh, Dave Rooney, Andrew Clay Shafer, and Chris Sterling

In this webinar (live recorded), Dr. Israel Gat introduces the Cutter Technical Debt Framework and demonstrates how it enables an organization to move onward and upward from assessing technical debt to reducing it and preventing its propagation. The framework ties the measurement of technical debt to the fabric of the software process at six levels:

1. Technical Practices
2. Iteration Management
3. Project Management
4. Release Management
5. Product Planning
6. Portfolio Governance

By so doing, the framework ensures sustainability of the technical debt initiative.

Dr. Gat also describes the experiences of real-world organizations that have already applied the framework and the insights they have gained. Special emphasis is put on the critical success factors for making a technical debt initiative work for an organization, its partners, and its customers.

Recorded: June 2011

Presenter: Israel Gat

Online resource center clients: Access this webinar online

The report Implementing Organizational Change for Agile Development by Brian J. Dooley provides advice and guidance on how to leverage existing organizational change processes to help you successfully implement agile practices at the enterprise level. You'll gain tips on how to obtain top-level support, develop your change team, create a vision, motivate change, and revise and sustain the effort.

This report will help you:

• Utilize standard change management practices to assist your agile implementation effort.

• Bring change resistance out into the open and address it immediately.

• Understand the impact that agile methods will have on your development environment, including what it means for development managers, developers, quality assurance and testing personnel, and subject matter experts.

• Benefit from techniques that have already been developed at other firms to address the challenges of their agile implementation.

• Overcome senior management's fear of measuring project success based on satisfactorily delivered code, rather than on reaching established project objectives.

• Consider the advantages and limitations of an incremental approach to agile adoption versus an all-at-once, "big bang" approach

• Use SMART goals to achieve organizational change: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound

This report includes two real-world case studies: a large-scale, all-at-once agile implementation at Salesforce.com; and a large-scale incremental agile initiative at BMC Software.

Plus, you'll receive 7 questions your organization should ask itself to help create a clear vision of the change required for agile adoption. And you'll gain strategies for addressing four different attitudes toward organizational change: 1) opponents 2) promoters 3) hidden opponents, and 4) potential promoters.

Ensure your agile implementation is successful by applying the lessons learned from previous organizational change projects. Order your copy of Implementing Organizational Change for Agile Development today!

Published: November 2009, 14 pages, PDF format (970KB)

Author: Brian J. Dooley

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This Executive Report provides an alternative for improvement that involves three areas: (1) lean-agile thinking, (2) the system of profound knowledge, and (3) systems thinking. Their application results in more effective improvements -- not only in software development or IT but in diverse management practices as well.

Published: March 2011, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Masa K Maeda

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The report Is Agile Shortchanging the Business? by James Robertson and Suzanne Robertson explores why a growing number of organizations are concerned about business value and worry that the software they take delivery of is not fully exploiting the potential value.

Table of Contents:

• The Work
• Ownership
• Agile Techniques
• Business Needs
• Business Value
• Product Owner
• Understanding the Business
• User Stories as Requirements
• Systemic Thinking
• Introducing Business Stories
• Nonfunctional Needs
• Continuous Value Analysis
• Innovation
• Maximizing Business Value
• Recommended Reading

Make sure the connection between your development teams and the business is strong. Order your copy of this report today!

Published: November 2011, 15 pages, PDF format

Authors: James Robertson and Suzanne Robertson

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Will it be an improvement over the processes we currently have in place? Will the time, energy, and resources that we invest now in implementing it prove worthwhile in the long run? These are all questions each of us as IT and business professionals must consider as we make decisions to move our organizations forward. Keeping operations humming along in the face of change and (sometimes) major budget crunches and keeping business practices current and in line with industry practices and technology progress are perhaps the greatest ongoing challenges we face. In this issue of Cutter Benchmark Review, we discuss one of the most recent methodologies to enter the spectrum of possible choices for systems development: Kanban.

Published: September 2010, 28 pages, PDF format

Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Laurie Williams, Masa K. Maeda

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The report Making Agile "Sticky": Strategies for Long-Term Success with Agile Adoption by Amr Elssamadisy addresses the foundations of successful agile projects and provides strategies that will help you create an environment that is conducive to adopting agile practices. You'll discover six attributes that will help you succeed: 1) Allowing visible success and failure 2) Clearly communicating goals 3) Applying learned experience 4) Exhibiting ownership behavior 5) Having trust 6) Suspending disbelief.

This report will help you:

• Create a safe environment where agile teams learn and continue to be effective and deliver value
• Encourage team ownership of problems and discourage relying on experts/gurus for every answer
• Focus on the bottleneck (because you can't slow down to speed up)
• Recognize breakthroughs

This report also explores some of the common human behaviors and people problems that can derail an agile initiative. You'll learn why agile teams are more fragile than others, and you'll explore some of the reasons why many firms quit midstream through an agile adoption, such as unrealistic expectations, a J-curve that is too large, and the inability to take ownership of problems that are uncovered.

Ensure that agile practices take hold and last in your enterprise. Order your copy of Making Agile "Sticky": Strategies for Long-Term Success with Agile Adoption today!

Published: October 2009, 13 pages, PDF format (989KB)

Author: Dave Higgins

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The Cutter Consortium report Modern IT Leadership: Surviving Chaos and Delivering Value provides effective leadership strategies for all those in charge of the IT function and identifies the unique skills and knowledge that will be required of the future CIO. You'll receive numerous case examples of IT leadership initiatives that succeeded and failed -- and why this happened -- and you'll gain specific advice for managing IT in times of economic uncertainty, rapidly advancing technology, and self-organizing teams.

Table of Contents

Part I: The Great Recession Fallout: Will CIOs Be Elevated or Exterminated?

Introduction: The Role of IT in Shaping and Reshaping Corporate Culture by Vince Kellen.

Chapter 1: Who's IT Gonna Be? CIOs Past, Present, and (Poof!) Future by Steve Andriole. Discover why CIOs may become inevitable "roadkill" somewhere after the year 2015.

Chapter 2: The Future CIO and the Evolving Leadership Landscape by Thornton May. Consider what types of CIOs will have difficulty over the next few years, which will go extinct, and which will thrive.

Chapter 3: The Right Way to Recruit CIOs by Bob Gariano. Compare the attributes companies rank highly when hiring CIOs, and whether the right level of attention is given to each.

Chapter 4: Back to the Future -- The Future Role of the CIO by Robert N. Charette. Explore why the CIO role should not be linked to a misguided conception of automation.

Chapter 5: Yielding to Darwin -- The Evolution of the CIO by Patrick E. Moroney. Uncover some of the characteristics today's CIOs must have to succeed in their evolving role.

Chapter 6: The Futureproof CIO by Eric D. Brown and Gene De Libero. Identify some of the tools that future CIOs will use to create competitive advantage for their organizations, such as commodity platforms, open systems, and cloud computing.

Chapter 7: Taking Action During an Economic Decline -- Strategies for the IT Team with Gabriele Piccoli, Dorothy Leidner, and Thomas H. Murphy. Evaluate the optimal strategies for setting the course for IT in a financial and economic storm.

Chapter 8: The 2010s -- Is Your Staff Ready? with Rob Austin, Ron Blitstein, Christine Davis, Lynne Ellyn, Tim Lister, Ken Orr, Robert Scott, and Borys Stokalski. Gain advice and opinion aimed to help IT management prepare for the future, with a focus on people strategy.

Chapter 9: Leadership During Tough Times by Moshe Cohen. Draw lessons from historical examples, share wisdom from successful leaders, and receive guidance on how to get your firm on track for a prosperous future.

Part II: Cultivating Leadership Throughout the IT Organization

Introduction: Leading Inside an IT Organization -- Putting People First by Bob Furniss.

Chapter 10: If It Weren't for People, Being a Leader Would Be Great! by Pam Hager. Explore a three-part process to help leaders connect with people and create an effective plan and process for change.

Chapter 11: How Culture Affects Leadership by Martin Bauer. Consider how company culture affects leadership and gain strategies for overcoming the challenges that culture presents.

Chapter 12: How to Cultivate Leadership in Yourself and Others by Martha J. Lindeman. Gain a psychological view of effective leadership, including four leader types and the response of followers to each type.

Chapter 13: Agile Managers -- The Essence of Leadership by Johanna Rothman. Discover what it takes to be an agile leader and learn how to make the hard decisions.

Chapter 14: In Search of Complexity -- Why Self-Organization Requires Leadership and Governance by Jurgen Appelo. Take a "systems" view of leadership and learn how to manage complexity through self-organization.

Chapter 15: IT Project Leadership -- Feeling Your Way by Mark Woodman and Jason Bates. Learn how to "feel" leadership as it goes on in projects and how to use stories to become an effective leader.

Authors: Steve Andriole, Jurgen Appelo, Rob Austin, Jason Bates, Martin Bauer, Ron Blitstein, Eric D. Brown, Robert N. Charette, Moshe Cohen, Christine Davis, Gene De Libero, Lynne Ellyn, Bob Furniss, Bob Gariano, Pam Hager, Vince Kellen, Dorothy E. Leidner, Martha J. Lindeman, Tim Lister, Thornton May, Patrick E. Moroney, Thomas H. Murphy, Ken Orr, Gabriele Piccoli, Johanna Rothman, Robert Scott, Boris Stokalski, and Mark Woodman

Published: June 2010, 233 pages, PDF

While differences in power do exist in negotiations, power is complex, with some factors acting for you and others against you. You need to be able to understand and exploit these dynamics. Even when you don't have much power, there are tools you can use to influence matters in your favor. Your success in a negotiation is therefore largely based on your ability to identify and use every point of power, skill, and influence to your advantage, so you can negotiate as effectively as possible under any set of circumstances.

Published: January 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Moshe Cohen

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The report Next Practices in Modern Project Management: Supporting Communication, Collaboration and Collective Intelligence provides advice and recommendations on how to get current with the project management field and improve your organization's chances of delivering successful projects. You'll explore the impact that agile methods are having on the practice of project management, identify the Web/Enterprise 2.0 tools that can help make project management more collaborative, and address the continued absence of effective organizational leadership in many firms -- and how to overcome it.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Using Agile, Enterprise 2.0, and Other Modern Methods to Manage Today's Projects by Rob Thomsett.

Chapter 1: My PMO's Midlife Crisis by Bonnie Cooper. Explore how one IT executive is improving the value of IT project management by shifting her focus from project execution and metrics to portfolio oversight and business relationship management.

Chapter 2: What Can We Do About Our Project Managers? by Alistair Cockburn. Learn how your projects can reduce their "Feature-Time-to-Benefit" through a combination of lean, agile, and Toyota Production System (TPS)-inspired techniques.

Chapter 3: Project Management 2.0: It Won't Go Anywhere Without Project Leadership 1.0 by Mark E. Mullaly. Discover why agile project management -- like traditional project management before it -- is a poor substitute for the truly critical element in successful projects: project leadership.

Chapter 4: What Lifecycle? Selecting the Right Model for Your Project by Johanna Rothman. Learn how different projects have adopted elements of both the waterfall and agile methods to adjust for their inherent risk and business environment.

Chapter 5: Beyond Agile Project Management: The Way Forward by Darren Dalcher. Hear a "typical agile failure story" and learn why we need to go beyond agile project management to ensure that the value project teams deliver represents coherent and complete content.

Chapter 6: My Avatar Is Agile -- Is Yours? Using Scrum to Manage Projects in Virtual World Development by Matthew Ganis and David McNeill. Witness a compelling example of how Scrum and Second Life's immersive 3D environment were combined to develop and deploy ibm.com's Virtual Business Center estate in Second Life.

Chapter 7: Discovering the Benefits of Project Management 2.0 by Andrew Filev. Learn why Web/Enterprise 2.0 tools offer better opportunities for communication and collaboration by leveraging collective
intelligence.

Chapter 8: Social Project Management by David Coleman. Discover a new class of emerging project management tools that support more rapid interactions between project team members and cut down on overall task and project duration.

Chapter 9: Moving the Herd: Facilitating Multiparty Project Teams Toward Common Goals by Moshe Cohen. Recognize the importance of developing relationships, a common vision, channeling people based on interests, and managing interpersonal dynamics in achieving project success.

Chapter 10: Managing Projects Through Influence in a Distributed Work Environment by Moshe Cohen. Identify the behaviors of effective project leaders and discover how they inspire and guide their project teams.

This report reviews a list of project management practices every manager should know and actively practice, such as incremental development, creating a "walking skeleton", reflection workshops, "burn-up" charts, project charters, colocation, cross-functional teams, and more. And it discusses some of the mistakes that upper managers make that often lead to project failure.

Finally, this report takes a look at the current project management tools, including LiquidPlanner and Viewpath. And it provides an overview of the various Web 2.0 collaboration technologies that can help make project management more social, giving your organization a competitive edge.

Published: July 2008, 175 pages, PDF
Authors: Alistair Cockburn, Moshe Cohen, David Coleman, Bonnie Cooper, Darren Dalcher, Andrew Filev, Matthew Ganis, David McNeill, Mark Mullaly, Johanna Rothman, and Rob Thomsett

These premium cards are just like those used at the world’s luxury casinos — crisp, sturdy and coated — except each of the decks has four suits, identified by color, containing number cards 0, ½, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, and the face card "?". Packaged in a sturdy clear plastic box, these high-quality cards will stand up to more estimating than we can even estimate!

Price includes shipping within North America. Order decks to be shipped outside of North America here. For pricing on quantities over 10, contact us at service@cutter.com or @cuttertweets or call +1 (781) 648-8700.

Planning Poker® is a registered trademark of Mountain Goat Software, LLC. Sequence of values is ©2007 Mountain Goat Software, LLC.

These premium cards are just like those used at the world’s luxury casinos — crisp, sturdy and coated — except each of the decks has four suits, identified by color, containing number cards 0, ½, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, and the face card "?". Packaged in a sturdy clear plastic box, these high-quality cards will stand up to more estimating than we can even estimate!

Price includes shipping outside of North America. Order decks to be shipped within of North America here. For pricing on quantities over 10, contact us at service@cutter.com or @cuttertweets or call +1 (781) 648-8700.

Planning Poker® is a registered trademark of Mountain Goat Software, LLC. Sequence of values is ©2007 Mountain Goat Software, LLC.

This brief reviews the 9 critical planning principles:

• Fit the plan to the need
• Define the langauge
• Answer the seven essential questions
• Play the right CARDs
• Manage stakeholder expectations
• Delegate responsibilities
• Improve forecast predictability
• Manage by walking around
• Bend the rules (for the right reasons)

You'll get a 10 point planning checklist that will help you ensure your plans will serve as effective tools to guide the work needed to effectively solve the right business challenges. And you'll discover why every plan, once it's finished and approved, is wrong -- and why it's critical to build flexibility into your plans.

The absence of planned, coordinated efforts is the surest path to lengthy schedules, blown cost budgets, and unhappy stakeholders. Order your PDF copy of Principles of Planning by Cutter Senior Consultant David Rasmussen today.

The felt phenomenon of "group coherence" and the ingredients associated with it provide a framework with which to address collective capacity -- directing the attention of the group's participants to create collective performance.

Published: January 2011, 23 pages, PDF format

Authors: Joanna Zweig, Priya Marsonia, and César Idrovo

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

As readers of CBR know, we get our inspiration and ideas for topics from two sources. First, we get inspiration from current events, new trends, new technologies, and generally from being aware and plugged into what is going on in the world of IT. At the same time, we maintain a constant ear to the ground and stick with a reality check by being attentive and responsive to the Cutter Consortium client base. We pay close attention to the kinds of jobs that Cutter Consortium Senior Consultants are bidding for and working on. We also monitor the types of requests that Cutter clients make and we apply firsthand research at Cutter Summits held across the globe.

Published: April 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Authors: Gabriele Piccoli, Jo Ellen Moore, David Spann

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After viewing the Cutter Consortium Reining in Technical Debt webinar presented by Israel Gat and John Heintz (recorded live), you will understand how the combination of recent developments in software engineering and in software governance enable you to tie quality, cost, and value together to form a simple and effective governance framework for software.

The Reining in Technical Debt webinar gives you a preliminary understanding how quality can be assessed through technical debt techniques, familiarizes you with state of the art tools for measuring technical debt and  demonstrates how value delivery is affected when the technical debt is not "paid back" promptly. Israel and John also introduce you to a governance framework that ensures you can rigorously manage your software development process from a business perspective. This governance framework reduces a large number of complex technical considerations to a common denominator that is easily understood by both technical and non-technical people -- dollars.

This tie enables the governing of the software development process with great effectiveness at both the tactical and strategic levels, as we examine in this Executive Report by Israel Gat. Such governance is applicable to any software method/process, enabling "apples to apples" management across a diverse portfolio of projects. It also lends itself to insightful comparisons with industry benchmarks.

Published: April 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Israel Gat

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The report Scaling Agile Technical Practices: Implementing Continuous Integration to Enable Lean by Jonathon Golden examines how the implementation of an enterprise continuous integration system and related organizational and cultural transformation truly enable organizations to apply lean manufacturing principles. The focus is on where the metaphor makes sense. The aim is to get past the fluff and focus on real-world lean software production practices.

Table of Contents:

• “Traditional” Integration
• Continuous Integration
• Continuous Integration Is Testing
• Source Control Management and Test-Driven Development
• Lean Metaphors and Continuous Integration
• Implementation Details
• A Final Metaphor
• Endnotes

Discover which software production practices are right for your organization. Order this report today!

Published: June 2011, 11 pages, PDF format

Author: Jonathon M. Golden

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

In this hour-long recorded webinar, Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant David Coleman show you how some of the Web 2.0 tools -- tools that are easy enough for a non-professional to use -- that can support non-linear projects and help with better estimation. You'll also discover how project communities or networks offer a new way to run projects more successfully.

They argue that you learn professional programming not only from a textbook, but also by collaborating with skilled peers. Of course, there are rules for good code, but building good code requires more than theoretical knowledge of these rules -- it requires tacit knowledge and experience. And this is where craft enters the scene: craftsmanship is the traditional means of teaching and transferring tacit knowledge and experience. So is this a battle cry against software engineering? Some people think so. This issue of Cutter IT Journal aims at providing you with an overview of the different aspects of the current discussion of software craftsmanship.

Published: April 2010, 36 pages, PDF format

Authors: Jens Coldewey, Matthew Stuempfle, J. David Gibson, Ken Orr, Paul Bassett, Gil Broza, Lawrence Fitzpatrick, Stefan Roock and Michael Hughes

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report Software Projects: When to Jump Ship, When to Stay the Course helps you identify projects that are likely to overrun cost, scope or schedule, and those that are beyond recovery. You'll get specific advice on how to de-escalate failing projects, and how to cancel failing projects proficiently and with minimal consequences for you and your organization. You'll also get guidelines to minimize or even eliminate the root causes of project failure.

This report will help you:

• Identify projects signaling eventual and expensive failure
• Implement project management controls to start a project off right
• Determine who in your organization should be responsible and accountable for canceling the project
• Take corrective action to mitigate a failing project
• Use a one-minute test to determine your software project escalation risk
• Increase the likelihood of success with public-sector IT projects
• Learn the failure points for most IT projects

You'll also get insight into why smaller software projects experience more success than larger ones, especially when agile practices are employed. You'll also learn to use engineering and management practices that will lead to success, and avoid those with the potential for failure.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Killing IT Projects
by Lynne Nix

Chapter 1
Software Project Escalation and De-escalation: What Do We Know?
by Mark Keil

• Project Management Factors That Promote Escalation
• Behavioral Factors That Promote Escalation
• A One-Minute Test for Factors That Can Promote Escalation
• Understanding the Dynamics of Escalation and De-Escalation
• Summary

Chapter 2
Why Flawed Software Projects Are Not Cancelled in Time
by Capers Jones

• How Software Projects Go Bad
• Poor Estimation and Schedule Planning
• Inaccurate and Optimistic Status Reporting
• External Schedule Pressures
• Summary and Conclusions

Chapter 3
Project Management, The Movie
by Laurent Bossavit

• Tragedy in Three Acts
• You've Read the Book; Now See the Movie!
• Ignored Omens
• Missed Opportunities for Termination
• The Agony
• It's Not Luck
• Lessons Learned

Chapter 4
Cancelling a Project in Four Not-So-Easy Steps
by Eileen Strider

• Awareness: Breaking the Project Trance
• Accountability: Will Someone Please Step Up?
• Articulation: Delivering the Bad News
• Action: You Can't Walk Away Yet
• Not Easy, But the Right Thing to Do

Chapter 5
A Losing Gamble with Public Funds: Why Large Public-Sector IT Projects Are More Likely to Fail and Are Harder to Cancel
by Payson Hall

• Approach To Risk: "To Err Is Human, to Forgive Is Not the Policy of this Administration"
• Initial Business Case: "Ready, Set, Ready, Ready, Set, Ready, Ready ..."
• The Megaproject: "If Some Is Good, and More Is Better, Then Too Much Must Be Just Right."
• Sponsorship/Stakeholder Complexity: "Everyone with a Nickel Invested Wants a Dollar's Worth of Say-So."
• Procurement: "Lie to Me."
• Vendor Management: "Don't Make Me Pull This Car Over ..."
• Managing Change: "Success Is Unlikely When the Rate of Change Exceeds the Rate of Progress."
• Project Status: "If We Punish the Bearers of Bad News, Bad Things Will Stop Happening."
• Improving Project Outcomes in the Public Sector

Chapter 6
Organizational Factors of Software Project Failure
by Dennis Linscomb

• Case 1
• Case 2
• Case 3

Chapter 7
Finding Success in Small Software Projects
by Khaled El Emam

• Introduction
• Are Small Projects Successful?
• Agile Practices for Small Projects
• Small Project Practices
• Conclusions

Order your copy of Software Projects: When to Jump Ship, When to Stay the Course today!

Published: March 2004, 108 pages, PDF format

Authors: Lynne Nix, Mark Keil, Capers Jones, Laurent Bossavit, Eileen Strider, Payson Hall, Dennis Linscomb, and Khaled El Emam

This report is also available in print format.

The report Strategies and Guidelines for Assessing and Improving IT leadership Skills provides you with expert insight into the characteristics, skills and behaviors that contribute to effective (and ineffectual) IT leadership, viable approaches to selecting and training IT leaders, and recommendations for motivating and empowering your project teams.

Some highlights from this report:

• Learn how to use a methodical approach to select and train IT leaders -- called leadership husbandry -- as well as a leadership model -- to help you motivate and influence your team members to achieve your business objectives.

• Gain insight from 11 UK-based CEOs on what traits were necessary for them to progress through the ranks of IT and beyond to the position of CEO.

• Explore a unique approach to leadership at DTE Energy -- adopting agile best practices as a style of organizational governance -- resulting in a culture of teamwork excellence as well as phenomenal business success.

• Examine the three key ways IT leaders can transform their mindset to develop a true partnership with the business and become an integral part of the leadership team.

• Get real-world confessions from a study of 250 IT executives in corporations worldwide revealing the reasons behind leadership failure, the attributes of effective leaders, why leadership matters, and the differences between leaders across industries and geography.

Improve your IT leadership skills with the timeless insight and recommendations found in this exciting resource. Order your copy today!

Published (Second Edition): January 2012, 85 pages, PDF format

Authors: Christopher Avery, Steven Baker, David Caruso, Robina Chatham, Kerry Gentry, and Richard Hordern

The report Strategy, Governance, and Execution Excellence: Best Practices for Leveraging Business and Technology by Patrick E. Moroney discusses how to use best practices to improve processes for maturing and communicating strategy, for choosing the right projects to invest in to execute that strategy, as well as for organizing, executing, and measuring project investments until return on invested capital can be put in the bank.

The report begins by looking at what is required of the modern business leader. It then details best practices in strategy, governance, and excellence execution, which are the foundational components we must master for the highest chance of success.

Table of Contents:

• The Role of the Modern Leader
• Calling All Real Business Leaders! Discover the Foundations You Need to Master
• Conclusion
• Endnotes
• Appendix: Governance Framework

Step up your game, your competencies, and the practices you employ to strategize the future, govern and make decisions about how to achieve that future, and execute to make sure it happens. Order your copy of this report today!

Published: August 2011, 17 pages, PDF format

Author: Patrick E. Moroney

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report Successful ROI with Agile and Lean Adoption, discusses the financial returns of successful adoption initiatives. You'll read about typical impediments that lead to a lack of results, which will help you diagnose your initiatives. The report will leave you with clearer expectations of your agile and lean initiatives and provide one or more starting points to diagnose and eventually address any roadblocks
your organization may face.

Table of Contents:

• A Catalog of Successful Agile and Lean Adoptions
• A Catalog of Unsuccessful Agile and Lean Adoptions
• Business Values
• Stepping Back: What Does This Mean for Your Current Adoption Efforts?
• Putting It All Together and Making the Right Decisions

This report will help you focus on your business values instead of on an agile method; understand that local changes alone will not last; and discuss, demonstrate, and teach human dynamics skills and relate them to most technical practices and tools they
introduce.

Published: September 2011, 13 pages, PDF format

Author: Amr Elssamadisy

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The seven articles in this issue of Cutter IT Journal explain how not to neglect technical debt, what to do in case neglect has already taken place, and how technical debt techniques could be applied in domains where they have not been used before.

Published: October 2010, 44 pages, PDF format

Authors: Israel Gat, John Heintz, Stephen Chin, Erik Huddleston, Walter Bodwell, Dave Rooney, Brent Barton, Chris Sterling, Ken Pugh, Jonathon Golden, and Andrew Shafer

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Technology is racing ahead at breakneck speed, competition comes from every corner of the planet, and new business ventures are constrained only by the creativity of its promoters. As the need to innovate accelerates, so does project complexity, and the ability to manage effectively in an uncertain business climate becomes even more critical.

The 12 Basic Tenets That Characterize Complex Project Management by Robert Wysocki explores in detail the 12 principles that enable you to successfully manage complex and high-risk projects. You'll discover how your organization can thrive by taking an adaptive approach to complex project management (CPM).

This report will help you:

• Determine your organization's readiness for integrating a CPM approach into your management processes.
• Realize greater business value, project efficiency, and higher team morale by adopting a CPM approach.
• Exploit untapped business opportunities with a better understanding of the project world in which you operate.
• Develop a strong and consistent infrastructure to support your CPM implementation.
• Use "adaptive thinking" rather than "fixed stepwise" approaches to accommodate unexpected changes and keep your projects on schedule and budget.

You'll also learn how to conduct a dynamic risk assessment, allowing you to recalculate and prioritize project risk as your project evolves. A proven template to conduct this assessment is provided in the report.

Get ready for a distinctly different project experience! Order your copy of The 12 Basic Tenets That Characterize Complex Project Management today!

Published: October 2010, 13 pages, PDF format

Author: Robert K. Wysocki

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Such a relationship assures the business sponsor and the client that the probability of delivering acceptable business value will increase as a result of encouraging their relationship. We spend too much energy tossing responsibilities back and forth rather than looking at the benefits to the client from leveraging the PM and BA capabilities to create a synergistic and dynamic partnership. This is a decision that should be made only by the PM and BA once they are assigned to the project. They are in the best position to weigh the alternatives for sharing the requisite management roles and responsibilities.

Published: June 2010, 16 pages, PDF format

Author: Robert K. Wysocki

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Table of Contents:

• Opening Statement
• An Agile Evolution: Why Kanban Is Catching On in Germany and Around the World
• Demystifying Kanban
• Kanban at an Insurance Company in the Netherlands
• Kanban for Help Desks: Managing the Unplannable
• Use of Kanban in Distributed Offshore Environments

Published: March 2011, 33 pages, PDF format

Authors: Masa K. Maeda, David J. Anderson, Arne Roock, Alan Shalloway, Dan Verweij, Olav Maassen, Roland Cuellar, Siddharta Govindaraj and Sreekanth Tadipatr

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report Transitioning to Agile and Complexity at Cisco VTG by Hubert Smits and Kathleen Rilliet summarizes and explains the implementation of agile software development practices in the large and complex Cisco Voice Technology Group (VTG). The chosen solutions as well as the efforts required to implement them are discussed. The report follows John Kotter's 8 Step Process for leading change, listing results, experiences, successes, and failures.

Table of Contents:

• Project Description
• Analysis of the Situation at Hand
• Implementing the Change to Create an Agile Software Development Lifecycle
• The Act of Changing
• Work of the Change Implementation Team
• Conclusion and Final Thoughts

In the case of any major transition, there are steps forward and steps back. Persistence in the face of resistance, patience in the face of mistakes, and an open-minded, solution-oriented attitude are all key human factors in any successful change. Create your own successful transition to agile software development. Order this report today!

Published: July 2011, 15 pages, PDF format

Authors: Hubert Smits and Kathleen Rilliet

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

Companies that have adopted agile methods have realized faster throughput and higher business customer satisfaction on individual projects. Yet despite undeniable wins at the project level, sustained large-scale adoptions of agile methods are fewer and further between. What is preventing more comprehensive adoption of agile within organizations? Many agile experts point to a significant misalignment between the way agile projects are run and the way IT projects are governed in general. IT program and portfolio management, in particular, seem to be at the root of many of these alignment issues.

In this issue we'll explore ways to scale agile methods beyond individual projects so that their associated programs and portfolios can thrive. Hear how one agile consultant saved a failing 100-person company by introducing an agile portfolio planning game - and convincing the company to stop acquiring new customers (a much tougher sell)! Learn effective methods for ranking your projects - and the equally important lesson that "ranking isn't forever."

Published: January 2009, 39 pages, PDF format

Authors: Guest Editor Sanjiv Augustine, with Scott W. Ambler, Johanna Rothman, Jens Coldewey, Jamie Duke & Sam Bayer, Bob Benson & Tom Bugnitz

Online resource center clients: access the report online

This Executive Report by Payson Hall examines the diverse skills and knowledge necessary to manage complex projects effectively and explores essential aspects of the decision-supporting relationship between an organization's PMs and its executives to offer insights into what constitutes a "good" project manager.

Published: August 2010, 13 pages, PDF format

Author: Payson Hall

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report What Is a Complex Project Manager -- Really? by Robert K. Wysocki explores the role of a complex project manager, what disciplines should be present in his or her skills profile, where these unique professionals come from, and, finally, what can be done to develop a cadre of such professionals to meet the ever-growing demand for their services.

Table of Contents:

• What Is a Complex Project?
• What Is the Need for Complex Project Managers?
• Who Is a Complex Project Manager?
• What Are the Disciplines of a Complex Project Manager?
• Where Do Complex Project Managers Come From?
• How Should We Develop Complex Project Managers?
• How Should an Organization Prepare?

Be prepared to support complexity and uncertainty in your organization. Order this report today!

Published: June 2011, 17 pages, PDF format

Author: Robert K. Wysocki

Online resource center clients: Access this report online

The report What Is the Adaptive Project Framework -- Really? by Robert K. Wysocki introduces APF as an umbrella framework that encompasses all project management methodologies. Included in APF is a process for choosing and adapting the best-fit project management approach tailored to a specific project. In addition to providing a model for managing complex projects just as RUP, Scrum, and several others do, APF is a structure that embraces all project management methodologies.

Table of Contents:

• APF Background
• Project Setup
• Project Execution
• Variations and Challenge
• Putting It All Together
• Endnotes

Benefit from a framework for understanding, analyzing, planning, and continuously adapting the best-fit management approach to any project. Order this report today!

Published: February 2011, 15 pages, PDF format

Author: Robert K. Wysocki

Online resource center clients: Access this report online