Project Management

In this whitepaper I argue that the person most affected by the introduction of agile or extreme programming techniques is not the software or quality assurance engineer, but the build manager. And the build manager can no longer make do with home grown tools; software production automation tools are required to make agile development a build reality.

Interview with Ohio State University President Dr. Gordon Gee The Ohio State University President Dr. Gordon Gee discusses his passion and progress on creating a "One University", high-performance culture to take the largest university in the U.S. from excellence to eminence. On the global stage, it is part of his vision to build a new model for the university of the 21st century: more agile, more responsive, less insular and less bureaucratic.

Drive quality earlier in the development process with continuous testing. Large development organizations have increasingly been adopting select agile practices to enable faster development, create more reliable software, and reduce costs. Chief among these practices is providing developers early and frequent feedback from users, from other developers, and especially from the programming, build, and test tools. In the latter category, continuous integration and continuous testing are emerging as valuable techniques for identifying errors early so they can be corrected immediately by the developer who made the code changes.

How can a professional services firm grow profitably while providing clients with the higher-quality service and rock-bottom project pricing they demand? The firm must rely on leading best-practice solutions to gain control over every aspect of its business – from business development to resource planning to client billing.

Mobile access to Salesforce CRM is one of the easiest ways to get the most from your Salesforce CRM investment. To get started right, follow the tips in this document. It's an approach that's yielded great results for hundreds of customers.

Finding the right IT service provider is not as simple as it may seem. Choosing a service provider based exclusively on low price may be good for your bottom line, but may fall short on delivering the right level of IT expertise and resource scalability for long-term advantage.

This white paper explores how project management professionals (PMPs), their technology teams, and other key stakeholders can minimize technology project delays by supplementing best practice processes and popular project management software with digital libraries that provide on-demand access to critical technology information.

There's no "one size fits all" when it comes to telecommuting. This new Forrester white paper explores how implementing best practices to create a telecommuting program and standardized policy significantly reduces operational costs and increases employee productivity - a winning combination in a tough economy.

"Agile" software development is an increasingly popular development process for producing software in a flexible and iterative manner that can deliver value to the enterprise faster, reduce project risk and allow adaptation to changes more quickly.

Dedication to Lean requires a focus on change, the identification of areas of improvement across the enterprise and a commitment to monitor continuously. The real challenge to Lean, however, requires this first change, a shift in the culture.

By 2011, IDC expects mobile workers to make up 73 percent of the total U.S. workforce. Whether mobile employees are out in the field or at home, sitting in a satellite office or constantly on the go within a corporate campus environment, they're going to need an effective way to stay connected and productive.

Limited visibility has tethered CIOs' success in both IT and business. However, using federated CMDB technology, CIOs can view the complete IT infrastructure and the entire lifecycle of a business service.

By 2011, the mobile workforce in the U.S. is expected to reach 120.1 million people. Embracing this trend is more of a question of "how" rather than "if": How will you measure, manage and build relationships with increasingly distributed teams and workers?

IT groups must support many applications and servers across multiple platforms that frequently operate independently of each other. However, coordinating job scheduling across all these applications and networks is often required to optimize resource utilization. The traditional approach of applying more staff, toolkits, and rudimentary scheduling software to cobble together automated batch processing solutions becomes cost-prohibitive, inefficient, and error-prone, as the number of moving parts increases and the environment becomes more heterogeneous.

Staples’ information systems play a critical role in delivering on their brand promise 'that was easy.' As part of a recent strategic imperative, Staples recently embarked on a major modernization of its systems architecture and supporting processes. The goal was to ensure IT’s systems could scale with the company’s continued global expansion without sacrificing the quality of the brand experience. One critical target for modernization was Staples’ enterprise job scheduling processes and systems. After researching the top software providers in this space, Staples selected Tidal Software to support its efforts to centralize and streamline automated batch processing.

With 50+ percent of all business processes leveraging batch operations, it is essential to keep your batch production running smoothly in order to keep your business running smoothly. Whether you are consolidating datacenter operations, moving apps to more cost-effective platforms, or transitioning from customized to packaged applications, learn how you can simplify and lower the cost of batch management with a single interface to all batch processes across platforms and applications and more.

This white paper addresses the issues of choosing a project focus and recognizing when the focus needs to change. Intrinsic to this process is defining what product quality is and choosing the priority most important to the client. Also discussed is the importance of knowing where the product is in its lifecycle and how it has an effect on quality definition.

Written for project managers, this white paper provides suggestions on how to work with a test group and hold the group accountable for their work on the project. The testing effort is an integral part of the overall process of developing an appropriate quality product on time and within budget. To succeed, the project manager must be able to see schedules, receive meaningful deliverables, and recognize genuine problems. A test group is an integral part of the overall process.

This white paper by IDC shows how an investment in training improves the likelihood of an IT project chances for success through enhancement of team skills. The white paper provides an analysis of a comprehensive survey with 144 senior IT managers examining the impact which training and skill level had on the success of 377 IT projects.

The first slip is the initial indication that something is wrong with the project. With an early slip, a project manager can change a combination of factors. By using a peer-review, requirements and constraints can be addressed. It is imperative that the project manager evaluates the first slip to determine the challenges facing the project. As the project proceeds, it becomes increasingly more difficult to recover and stay on schedule. Effective project management skills are the best defense to keeping projects on task and on time.

Projects to implement ERP tend to be difficult, expensive and drawn-out. They are often full of painful surprises and overrun budgets and schedules that were extravagant in the first place. They fail entirely in an alarming number of cases.  Why this should be so is not immediately apparent. If we list, at a fairly high level, the tasks required to implement an ERP system in a company that’s already familiar with ERP practices, what we see is a significant but not daunting amount of work.

ERP system acquisition projects are rarely deemed to fail.  All the well-advertised failures come later, during implementation and afterward.  Nevertheless, the seeds of these failures are invariably planted in the earliest stages of ERP acquisition planning.

ERP implementations fail – when they do – because implementation projects allow a few well-known risks to go unmanaged. These risks go unmanaged because the control of results slips from buyer to seller.  It doesn’t have to work that way.

It is a truism that in any complex activity, the critical, defining decisions should be made as early in the process as possible.  In ERP implementation projects this principle is routinely undermined by the nearly universal practice of separating acquisition and implementation activities into separate projects, performed by separate teams operating under separate control.

This 34 page guide readies you for a Salesforce Mobile rollout. Salesforce Mobile helps your mobile teams succeed by keeping them in touch with the latest data, whenever and wherever they need it, directly from mobile devices. With Salesforce Mobile, field professionals are prompted to log information directly in Salesforce or AppExchange apps immediately after important customer calls, emails, and appointments, so critical information is logged in near real time.